business plan for social media marketing company

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template

Written by Dave Lavinsky

Social Media Marketing Business Plan

You’ve come to the right place to create your Social Media Marketing business plan.

We have helped over 1,000 entrepreneurs and business owners create business plans and many have used them to start or grow their Social Media Marketing businesses.

Below is a template to help you create each section of your Social Media Marketing business plan.

Executive Summary

Business overview.

The Blizzard Social Media Marketing business is a startup social media marketing company located in Stamford, Connecticut. The company is founded by Trace Parker, who has a history of a decade within the social media marketing industry Now, with the expertise of knowledge and business acumen, Trace has determined he can confidently start and effectively grow a successful social media marketing company. Trace believes his experience of strategic growth, marketing skills, financial capabilities, and wide and deep knowledge of social media marketing practices will provide everything needed for long-term growth and profitability.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will provide a comprehensive array of services for a wide variety of clients. Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be the premier social media marketing company, providing unique services to each client while supporting the strategic goals of the company. Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be the ultimate choice in social media marketing for clients by ensuring that every need of the customer is fully and completely met.

Product Offering

The following are the services that Blizzard Social Media Marketing will provide:

• Creative social media marketing strategies, customized for each client
• Content management and on-going management
• Social media community engagement with daily/weekly management options
• Paid social advertising opportunities
• Performance reports and analytics: weekly reports to clients
• Unique, digitally-designed program that scans 24-hours daily, monitoring positive and negative customer feedback.

Customer Focus

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will primarily target the small to medium-sized social media marketing companies in Stamford. The company will secondarily target the large-sized social media companies in the greater region around Stamford, including the outer areas of New York City. Blizzard Social Media Marketing will target marketing companies that are emerging into the social media category, as well.

Management Team

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be owned and operated by Trace Parker, who graduated from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He has been working at a local social media marketing company for over a decade as an account executive. As he considered starting his own company, Trace began successfully securing former clients who will follow him to Blizzard Social Media Marketing when the company fully launches. Trace believes his experience of strategic growth, marketing skills, financial capabilities, and wide and deep knowledge of social media marketing practices will provide everything needed for long-term growth and profitability.

Trace Parker recruited Angela Turner, a former business associate, to be the Administrative Manager in the new company. In this role, Angela Turner will oversee and direct staff members in the execution of the company vision, as well as run the operational portion of the technical department.

Trace Parker also recruited Anthony Collins to be the Financial Manager, overseeing the bookkeeping and accounting duties on a regular basis. Anthony Collins formerly served as the accountant for their former employer and was exemplary in handling complicated portions of this role.

Maryann Critcher has been recruited to manage the office clerks and serve as the Personnel Manager, overseeing all personnel with human resource responsibilities and management included in her role.

Success Factors

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be able to achieve success by offering the following competitive advantages:

• Friendly, knowledgeable, and highly-qualified team of Blizzard Social Media Marketing
• Comprehensive menu of services and an accurate and complete social media management report offered to the client every month.
• Short and long-term growth forecasts via various social media programs best suited to the clients
• Experienced understanding of client-positioning within social media markets
• Unique, digitally-designed program that scans 24-hours daily, monitoring positive and negative client feedback.
• Blizzard Social Media Marketing offers the best pricing in town. Their pricing structure is the most cost effective compared to the competition.

Financial Highlights

Blizzard Social Media Marketing is seeking $200,000 in debt financing to launch its Blizzard Social Media Marketing. The funding will be dedicated toward securing the office space and purchasing office equipment and supplies. Funding will also be dedicated toward three months of overhead costs to include payroll of the staff, rent, and marketing costs for the print ads and marketing costs. The breakout of the funding is below:

• Office space build-out: $20,000
• Office equipment, supplies, and materials: $10,000
• Three months of overhead expenses (payroll, rent, utilities): $150,000
• Marketing costs: $10,000
• Working capital: $10,000

The following graph outlines the financial projections for Blizzard Social Media Marketing.

Company Overview

Who is blizzard social media marketing.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing is a newly established, full-service social media marketing company in Stamford, Connecticut. Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be the most reliable, cost-effective, and efficient choice for social media clients in the city and the surrounding communities. Blizzard Social Media Marketing will provide a comprehensive menu of services backed by extensive experience for any client to fully utilize. Their full-service approach includes a comprehensive coverage package of social media advertising, platform management and new vision development.

  Trace Parker will be able to manage each of his team members, who are highly qualified and experienced in the most important aspects of social media marketing. Blizzard Social Media Marketing removes all headaches and issues of building a long-term growth perspective for social media companies and ensures all issues are taken care of expeditiously while delivering the best customer service.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing History

Blizzard Social Media Marketing is owned and operated by Trace Parker. As a former social media marketing executive for several years, he developed a unique capability to design and implement social media marketing successes that clearly reflect his skills and abilities. He has managed over one hundred successful projects for fifty nine clients and has now determined he is ready to take his professional skills and knowledge to venture out on his own by starting his own company. Trace Parker has gained the trust and commitment of several clients in advance of opening his business and will sign contracts with each when the company launches.

Since incorporation, Blizzard Social Media Marketing has achieved the following milestones:

• Registered Blizzard Social Media Marketing, LLC to transact business in the state of Connecticut.
• Has a contract in place for a 10,000 square foot office at one of the midtown buildings
• Reached out to numerous contacts to include Blizzard Social Media Marketing in upcoming advertising and marketing programs.
• Began recruiting a staff of five and six office personnel to work at Blizzard Social Media Marketing

Blizzard Social Media Marketing Services

The following will be the services Blizzard Social Media Marketing will provide:

• Unique, digitally-designed program that scans 24-hours daily, monitoring positive and negative customer feedback
• Superior day to day client management

Industry Analysis

The social media marketing industry is expected to grow over the next five years to over $14 billion.

The growth of the social marketing industry will be driven by very robust activity in acquisition and growth of companies that focus solely on social media marketing. As companies are formed in today’s marketplace, the demand has moved more and more toward the need for social media marketing versus traditional marketing forms, such as print advertising and radio spots. This increase in the use of social media marketing demands companies that specialize in formulating the brand identity and customer approach that brings the performance desired by the client base.

Costs will likely be reduced as more social media marketing companies enter the field of the profession. The positive result will be seen in a greater use of social media, indicating a continual evolution of how social media is utilized in marketing. It will also require new digital techniques, new methods of social media delivery and other yet-to-be-determined equipment to stay on top of the social media marketing curve.

Customer Analysis

Demographic profile of target market.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will target companies that currently utilize social media marketing and those that have a need for social media marketing in Stamford, Connecticut and, in the greater region, New York City. They will target small-to-medium sized companies who have not yet acquired social media marketing and they will target large corporations without an effective social media marketing vision or presence.

Customer Segmentation

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will primarily target the following customer profiles:

• Companies that currently use social media marketing
• Companies that have a need for social media marketing in Stamford, Connecticut
• Potential clients in the greater region of New York City
• Small-to-medium sized companies who have not yet acquired social media marketing
• Large corporations without an effective social media marketing presence

Competitive Analysis

Direct and indirect competitors.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will face competition from other companies with similar business profiles. A description of each competitor company is below.

Cutting Edge Social Media

The Cutting Edge Social Media Company was founded by Tina Lockland in 2020. Tina holds a master’s degree in social media design from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and has five years of experience as a social media manager. Cutting Edge Social Media concentrates on paid social advertising, with the creation and management of advertising campaigns. Clients include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The singular purpose of marketing paid social media advertising indicates that Cutting Edge Social Media has backburnered other forms of social media marketing, such as social media promotions and other advertising methods. The company currently has four management staff and five employees. Contract self-employed individuals are also hired to create content.

Marketing Bites

The Marketing Bites business was formed by Alicia Dunstreet in 2022 and currently has three employees. The concept of Marketing Bites is a simple one: social media marketing messages that are extremely brief are developed and sold to a variety of clients. Clients may include those who want a 30-second clip, a 1-minute promotion, or a cartoon caricature as a marketing message. The emphasis of Marketing Bites is on short-fire marketing that captures attention and builds customer loyalty. This is accomplished by humor, shock-and-awe value, or a clip that makes a definitive statement. The company has secured three major clients in the food and beverage industry, with more development in that sector promised in the future.

Executive Marketing, Inc.

Executive Marketing, Inc. has been in business since 1988 and was established by Floyd Wilson and his wife, Sherry Wilson. In its inception, it was a traditional marketing firm that focused on high-profile individuals who represented major manufacturers. The marketing tools used were print advertising, radio spots, news articles related to the clients, select marketing offers, and other personality-related marketing efforts.

As the decades have created the demand for new forms of sales and marketing, the Executive Marketing business has evolved under the leadership of Nan Wilson, the daughter of the founders. She took the company from traditional marketing to marketing that focused on the high-profile clients and the glamorous lives they led, which induced positional purchases by customers in response. In 2019, the granddaughter of the original owners, Mae Townsend, brought the company into social media marketing, where the emphasis remains on individual profiles and the marketing incentives those individuals represent to buyers.

Competitive Advantage

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be able to offer the following advantages over their competition:

Marketing Plan

Brand & value proposition.

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will offer a unique value proposition to its clientele:

• Highly-qualified team of skilled employees who are able to provide a comprehensive social media marketing program that brings revenue and long-term profitability to their clients
• Unbeatable pricing for its clients; they will offer the lowest pricing in the city.

Promotions Strategy

The promotions strategy for Blizzard Social Media Marketing is as follows:

Word of Mouth/Referrals

The executive team at Blizzard Social Media Marketing have built up an extensive list of contacts over the years by providing exceptional service and expertise to their clients. The contacts and clients will follow them to their new company and help spread the word of Blizzard Social Media Marketing.

Professional Associations and Networking

Industry associations and local networking will become a top priority for the team at Blizzard Social Media Marketing. In addition to potentially becoming gold standard clients, the contacts and networking prospects invite the attention of those at Blizzard. Active leadership roles will be attained and the increase in industry contacts will help strengthen the marketing sector overall.

Social Media Marketing

Blizzard will focus primarily on marketing their services and relationship opportunities via social media efforts. There will be a concentrated effort on showcasing the skills, capabilities and creative force in the management team at Blizzard. Further, there will be a demonstrable survey of former and current clients indicating the superior results obtained by using Blizzard social media marketing techniques.

Website/SEO Marketing

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will fully utilize their website. The website will be well organized, informative, and list all the services that Blizzard Social Media Marketing provides. The website will also list their contact information. The website will engage in SEO marketing tactics so that anytime someone types in the Google or Bing search engine “social media marketing company” or “social media marketing company near me,” Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be listed at the top of the search results.

The pricing of Blizzard Social Media Marketing will be moderate and on par with competitors so customers feel they receive excellent value when purchasing their services.

Operations Plan

The following will be the operations plan for Blizzard Social Media Marketing. Operation Functions:

• Trace Parker will be the owner and President of the company. He will manage client relations. Trace Parker has spent the past year recruiting the following staff:
• Angela Turner will be the Administrative Manager, who will oversee and direct staff members in the execution of the company vision, as well as run the operational portion of the technical department.
• Anthony Collins will be the Financial Manager, overseeing the bookkeeping and accounting duties on a regular basis.
• Maryann Critcher has been recruited to manage the office clerks and serve as the Personnel Manager, handling human resource responsibilities and management in her role.

Milestones:

Blizzard Social Media Marketing will have the following milestones completed in the next six months.

• 5/1/202X – Finalize contract to lease office space
• 5/15/202X – Finalize personnel and staff employment contracts for Blizzard Social Media Marketing
• 6/1/202X – Finalize contracts for Blizzard Social Media Marketing clients
• 6/15/202X – Begin networking at industry events
• 6/22/202X – Begin moving into Blizzard Social Media Marketing office
• 7/1/202X – Blizzard Social Media Marketing opens its doors for business

Financial Plan

Key revenue & costs.

The revenue drivers for Blizzard Social Media Marketing are the fees they will charge to clients for their services.

The cost drivers will be the overhead costs required in order to staff Blizzard Social Media Marketing. The expenses will be the payroll cost, rent, utilities, office supplies, and marketing materials.

Funding Requirements and Use of Funds

Key assumptions.

The following outlines the key assumptions required in order to achieve the revenue and cost numbers in the financials and in order to pay off the startup business loan.

• Number of clients Per Month: 20
• Average revenue per Month: $200,000
• Office Lease per Year: $100,000

Financial Projections

Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow statement, social media marketing business plan faqs, what is a social media marketing business plan.

A social media marketing business plan is a plan to start and/or grow your social media marketing business. Among other things, it outlines your business concept, identifies your target customers, presents your marketing plan and details your financial projections. You can easily complete your Social Media Marketing business plan using our Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template here .

What are the Main Types of Social Media Marketing Businesses?

There are a number of different kinds of social media marketing businesses, some examples include: Paid Ads, Content, and Strategy.

How Do You Get Funding for Your Social Media Marketing Business Plan?

Social Media Marketing businesses are often funded through small business loans. Personal savings, credit card financing and angel investors are also popular forms of funding.

What are the Steps To Start a Social Media Marketing Business?

Starting a social media marketing business can be an exciting endeavor. Having a clear roadmap of the steps to start a business will help you stay focused on your goals and get started faster. 1. Develop A Social Media Marketing Business Plan - The first step in starting a business is to create a detailed social media marketing business plan that outlines all aspects of the venture. This should include potential market size and target customers, the services or products you will offer, pricing strategies and a detailed financial forecast. 2. Choose Your Legal Structure - It's important to select an appropriate legal entity for your social media marketing business. This could be a limited liability company (LLC), corporation, partnership, or sole proprietorship. Each type has its own benefits and drawbacks so it’s important to do research and choose wisely so that your social media marketing business is in compliance with local laws. 3. Register Your Social Media Marketing Business - Once you have chosen a legal structure, the next step is to register your social media marketing business with the government or state where you’re operating from. This includes obtaining licenses and permits as required by federal, state, and local laws. 4. Identify Financing Options - It’s likely that you’ll need some capital to start your social media marketing business, so take some time to identify what financing options are available such as bank loans, investor funding, grants, or crowdfunding platforms. 5. Choose a Location - Whether you plan on operating out of a physical location or not, you should always have an idea of where you’ll be based should it become necessary in the future as well as what kind of space would be suitable for your operations. 6. Hire Employees - There are several ways to find qualified employees including job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed as well as hiring agencies if needed – depending on what type of employees you need it might also be more effective to reach out directly through networking events. 7. Acquire Necessary Social Media Marketing Equipment & Supplies - In order to start your social media marketing business, you'll need to purchase all of the necessary equipment and supplies to run a successful operation. 8. Market & Promote Your Business - Once you have all the necessary pieces in place, it’s time to start promoting and marketing your social media marketing business. This includes creating a website, utilizing social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, and having an effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. You should also consider traditional marketing techniques such as radio or print advertising.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 9 Easy Steps [Free Template]

Creating your social media marketing strategy doesn’t need to be painful. Create an effective plan for your business in 9 simple steps.

A social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media. It guides your actions and lets you know whether you’re succeeding or failing.

The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be. Keep it concise. Don’t make it so lofty and broad that it’s unattainable or impossible to measure.

In this post, we’ll walk you through a nine-step plan to create a winning social media strategy of your own. We’ve even got expert insights from Amanda Wood, Hootsuite’s Senior Manager of Social Marketing.

How to create a social media strategy:

Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template   to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media strategy is a document outlining your social media goals, the tactics you will use to achieve them and the metrics you will track to measure your progress.

Your social media marketing strategy should also list all of your existing and planned social media accounts along with goals specific to each platform you’re active on. These goals should align with your business’s larger digital marketing strategy.

Finally, a good social media plan should define the roles and responsibilities within your team and outline your reporting cadence.

Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.

Creating your own social media marketing strategy (video guide)

No time to read the whole article? Let Amanda, Hootsuite’s own Senior Manager of Social Media Marketing, guide you through our free social media marketing strategy template in less than 10 minutes:

How to create a social media marketing strategy in 9 steps

Step 1. choose goals that align to business objectives, set s.m.a.r.t. goals.

The first step to creating a winning social media strategy is to establish clear objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI) .

Each of your social media marketing goals should be SMART : s pecific, m easurable, a ttainable, r elevant and t ime-bound.

Psst: Need help getting started? We’ve got social strategy guides for small businesses , financial services , government , higher education , healthcare , real estate , law firms , and non-profits .

Oh, and if you need examples of smart social media goals , we’ve got you covered there too.

Once you’ve decided on your goals, track them in a social media strategy doc — grab our free template if you don’t have one already.

Track meaningful metrics

Vanity metrics like number of followers and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus on things like engagement, click-through, and conversion rates.

For inspiration, take a look at these 19 essential social media metrics .

You may want to track different goals for different social media networks, or even different uses for each network.

For example, if you use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website, you would measure click-throughs. If Instagram is for brand awareness, you might track the number of Instagram Story views. And if you advertise on Facebook, cost-per-click (CPC) is a common success metric.

Social media goals should align with your overall marketing objectives. This makes it easier to show the value of your work and secure buy-in from your boss.

Start developing a successful social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.

“ It’s easy to get overwhelmed by deciding what to post and which metrics to track, but you need to focus on what you want to get out of social media to begin with,” says Amanda Wood, Hootsuite’s Senior Manager of Social Marketing. “Don’t just start posting and tracking everything: match your goals to your business, and your metrics to your goals.”

Step 2. Learn everything you can about your audience

Get to know your fans, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs, and you will know how to target and engage them on social media.

When it comes to your ideal customer, you should know things like:

• Average income
• Typical job title or industry

Here’s a simple guide and template for creating audience/buyer personas .

Don’t forget to document this information in your strategy doc!

Social media analytics can also provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.

Jugnoo, an Uber-like service for auto-rickshaws in India, used Facebook Analytics to learn that 90% of their users who referred other customers were between 18- and 34-years-old, and 65% of that group was using Android. They used that information to target their ads, resulting in a 40% lower cost per referral.

Check out our guide to using social media analytics and the tools you need to track them .

Step 3. Get to know your competition

Odds are your competitors are already using social media, and that means you can learn from what they’re doing.

Conduct a competitive analysis

A competitive analysis allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.

It will also help you spot opportunities and weaknesses you can document in your social strategy doc.

Maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Facebook, for example, but has put little effort into X (Twitter) or Instagram. You might want to focus on the social media platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant player.

Use social media listening

Social listening is another way to keep an eye on your competitors.

Do searches of the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them. If they’re using influencer marketing, how much engagement do those campaigns earn them?

Pro tip : Use Hootsuite Streams to monitor relevant keywords, hashtags and accounts in real-time.

Try Hootsuite for free. You can cancel anytime.

As you track, you may notice shifts in how your competitors and industry leaders are using social media. You may come across new, exciting trends. You might even spot specific social content or a campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs.

Use this kind of intel to optimize and inform your own social media marketing strategy.

Just don’t go overboard on the spy tactics, Amanda advises. “ Make sure you aren’t ALWAYS comparing yourself to the competition — it can be a distraction. I’d say checking in on a monthly basis is healthy. Otherwise, focus on your own strategy and results.”

Step 4. Do a social media audit

If you’re already using social media, take stock of your efforts so far. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s working, and what’s not?
• Who is engaging with you?
• What are your most valuable partnerships?
• Which networks does your target audience use?
• How does your social media presence compare to the competition?

Once you collect that information, you’ll be ready to start thinking about ways to improve.

We’ve created an easy-to-follow social media audit guide and template to walk you through each step of this process.

Your audit should give you a clear picture of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping.

To help you decide, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my audience here?
• If so, how are they using this platform?
• Can I use this account to help achieve my goals?

Asking these tough questions will keep your social media strategy focused.

Look for impostor accounts

During the audit, you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.

These imposters can be harmful to your brand—never mind that they’re capturing followers that should be yours.

You may want to get your accounts verified too to ensure your fans know they are dealing with the real you.

Here’s how to get verified on:

• X (Twitter)

Step 5. Set up accounts and improve profiles

Decide which networks to use.

As you decide which social networks to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each.

Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, Angela Purcaro, told eMarketer : “For our makeup tutorials … we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. [X], on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”

Hootsuite’s own social team even designates different purposes for formats within networks. On Instagram, for example, they use the feed to post high-quality educational infographics and product announcements and Stories to cover live events or quick social media updates.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite)

Pro tip : Write out a mission statement for each network. A one-sentence declaration to keep you focused on a specific goal.

Example: “We will use X for customer support to keep email and call volumes down.”

Or: “We will use LinkedIn for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee advocacy.”

One more: “We will use Instagram to highlight new products and repost quality content from influencers.”

If you can’t create a solid mission statement for a particular social media channel, you may want to ask yourself if it’s worth it.

Note : While larger businesses can and do tackle every platform, small businesses may not be able to — and that’s ok! Prioritize social platforms that will have the most impact on your business and make sure your marketing team has the resources to handle content for those networks. If you need help focusing your efforts, check out our 18-minute social media plan .

Set up your profiles

Once you’ve decided which networks to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles. Or improve existing ones so they align with your strategy.

• Make sure you fill out all profile fields
• Include keywords people would use to search for your business
• Use consistent branding (logos, images, etc.) across networks so your profiles are easily recognizable

Pro tip : Use high-quality images that follow the recommended dimensions for each network. Check out our always-up-to-date social media image size cheat sheet for quick reference.

We’ve also got step-by-step guides for each network to walk you through the process:

• Create a Facebook business page
• Create an Instagram business account
• Create a TikTok account
• Create a X (Twitter) business account
• Create a Snapchat account
• Create a LinkedIn Company Page
• Create a Pinterest business account
• Create a YouTube channel

Don’t let this list overwhelm you. Remember, it’s better to use fewer channels well than to stretch yourself thin trying to maintain a presence on every network.

Optimize your profiles (and content) for search

Never heard of social SEO ? It’s time to learn.

44% of Gen Z consumers use social platforms to research their purchase decisions, which means it’s extra critical that your channels are optimized for social search.

That means making sure your profile names are clear and descriptive, you’re including relevant hashtags and keywords in your bio and on every post, and you’re using features like alt text and captions to include your target keywords as naturally as possible.

Step 6. Find inspiration

While it’s important that your brand be unique, you can still draw inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.

“ I consider it my job to stay active on social: to know what’s trending, which campaigns are winning, what’s new with the platforms, who’s going above and beyond,” says Amanda. “This might be the most fun step for you, or the hardest one, but it’s just as crucial as the rest of them.”

Social media success stories

You can usually find these on the business section of the social network’s website. ( Here’s Facebook’s , for example.)

Case studies can offer valuable insights that you can apply to your own social media plan.

Award-winning accounts and campaigns

You could also check out the winners of The Facebook Awards or The Shorty Awards for examples of brands that are at the top of their social media game.

For learning and a laugh, check out Fridge-Worthy, Hootsuite’s bi-weekly awards show highlighting brands doing smart and clever things on social media.

Your favorite brands on social media

Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?

National Geographic, for example, is one of the best on Instagram, combining stunning visuals with compelling captions.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo)

Then there’s Shopify. The ecommerce brand uses Facebook to sell themselves by showcasing customer stories and case studies.

And Lush Cosmetics is a great example of superior customer service on X. They use their 280 characters to answer questions and solve problems in an extremely charming and on-brand way.

Source: lushcosmetics on X

Notice that each of these accounts has a consistent voice, tone, and style. That’s key to letting people know what to expect from your feed. That is, why should they follow you? What’s in it for them?

Consistency also helps keep your content on-brand even if you have multiple people on your social media team.

For more on this, read our guide on establishing a compelling brand voice on social media .

Ask your followers

Consumers can also offer social media inspiration.

What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs?

If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.

Step 7. Create a social media content calendar

Sharing great content is essential, of course, but it’s equally important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact.

Your social media content calendar also needs to account for the time you spend interacting with the audience (although you need to allow for some spontaneous engagement as well).

Set your posting schedule

Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images, link sharing, and re-shares of user-generated content to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns.

Your calendar also ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the best times to post .

Pro tip: You can plan your whole content calendar and get recommended best times to post on every network based on your past engagement rate, impressions, or link click data in Hootsuite.

Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature

Determine the right content mix

Make sure your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, so that everything you post is working to support your business goals.

(We know, it’s tempting to jump on every meme, but there should always be a strategy behind your social media marketing efforts!)

You might decide that:

• 50% of content will drive traffic back to your website
• 25% of content will be curated from other sources
• 20% of content will support lead-generation goals (newsletter sign-ups, ebook downloads, etc.)
• 5% of content will be about your company culture

Placing these different post types in your content calendar will ensure you maintain the right mix.

If you’re starting from scratch and you’re not sure what types of content to post, try the 80-20 rule :

• 80% of your posts should inform, educate, or entertain your audience
• 20% can directly promote your brand.

You could also try the social media content marketing rule of thirds :

• One-third of your content promotes your business, converts readers, and generates profit.
• One-third of your content shares ideas and stories from thought leaders in your industry or like-minded businesses.
• One-third of your content is personal interactions with your audience

Whatever you decide on, be sure to document it in your strategy doc.

Don’t post too much or too little

If you’re starting a social media marketing strategy from scratch, you may not have figured out how often to post to each network for maximum engagement yet.

Post too frequently and you risk annoying your audience. But, if you post too little, you risk looking like you’re not worth following.

Start with these posting frequency recommendations:

• Instagram (feed): 3-7 times per week
• TikTok: 3-5 times per week
• Facebook: 1-2 times per day
• X (Twitter): 1-5 times per day
• LinkedIn: 1-5 times per day

Pro tip : Once you have your social media content calendar planned out, use a scheduling tool to prepare messages in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day.

We might be biased, but we think Hootsuite is the best social media management tool. You can schedule social media posts to every network and the intuitive calendar view gives you a full picture of all your social activity each week.

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Step 8. Create compelling content

Remember those mission statements you created for each channel in Step 5? Well, it’s time to go a bit deeper, a.k.a. provide some examples of the type of content you’ll post to fulfill your mission on each network.

If you’re not sure what to post, here’s a long list of social media content ideas to get you started. Or (to make it even easier) you can use an AI tool like OwlyWriter to generate on-brand content in a flash.

The idea here is to:

• Keep your content aligned with the purpose of each network;
• Show other stakeholders (if applicable) what kind of content they can expect to see on each network.

This last point especially will help you avoid any tension when your colleagues want to know why you haven’t posted their case study/whitepaper/blog post to TikTok yet. It’s not in the strategy, Linda!

Ideally, you will generate content types that are both suited to the network and the purpose you’ve set out for that network.

For example, you wouldn’t want to waste time posting brand awareness tweets if you’ve designated X/Twitter for primarily customer support. And you wouldn’t want to post super polished corporate video ads to TikTok, as users expect to see short, unpolished videos on that platform.

It might take some testing over time to figure out which type of content works best on which type of network, so prepare to update this section frequently.

We won’t lie: content creation isn’t as easy as everyone not on the social team seems to think. But if you’re struggling, Amanda suggests going back to basics.

The first question to ask is: is there cohesion between your content types? Is your content providing value? Do you have a good mix of entertaining, or educational content? What does it offer that makes a person stop and spend time? Creating a few different content pillars or categories that encompass different aspects of storytelling for your brand, and what you can offer your audience is a good start.

This brings us to Step 9.

Step 9. Track performance and make adjustments

Your social media marketing strategy is a hugely important document for your business, and you can’t assume you’ll get it exactly right on the first try.

As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d anticipated, while others are working even better than expected.

That’s why it’s important to document your progress along the way.

Look at performance metrics

In addition to the analytics within each social network (see Step 2), you can use UTM parameters to track social visitors as they move through your website, so you can see exactly which social posts drive the most traffic to your website.

Benchmark your results

You’ve got your numbers, but how do they stack up to the competition in your industry? Industry benchmarks are a great way to evaluate your performance against other businesses in your category.

If you’ve got Hootsuite Analytics , you can use our built-in social media benchmarking tool to compare the performance of your social accounts against the average of brands in your industry with just a couple of clicks.

You can set up custom timeframes, switch between networks — Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and TikTok — and look up benchmarks for metrics like followers, audience growth rate, engagement rate, clicks, shares, and much more.

You’ll also find resources to improve your performance  right in the summary section:

Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again

Once this data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, social marketing campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your social media marketing strategy in real time.

You’ll want to check the performance of all your channels at least once a week and get to know the basics of social media reporting so you can track your growth over time.

Pro tip: If you use Hootsuite, you can review the performance of all your posts on every network in one place. Once you get the hang of checking your analytics, you may even want to customize different reports to show specific metrics over a variety of different time periods.

Surveys can also be a great way to find out how well your social media strategy is working. Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.

Finalizing your social media strategy

Spoiler alert: nothing is final.

Social media moves fast. New networks emerge, others go through demographic shifts.

Your business will go through periods of change as well.

All of this means that your social media marketing strategy should be a living document that you review and adjust as needed. Refer to it often to stay on track, but don’t be afraid to make changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.

When you update your social strategy, make sure to watch our 5-step video on how to updating your social media strategy for 2024:

Social media strategy template

Ready to start documenting? Grab your free social media strategy template below!

What’s next? When you’re ready to put your plan into action, we’re here to help…

Save time managing your social media marketing strategy with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can easily:

• Plan, create, and schedule posts to every network
• Track relevant keywords, topics, and accounts
• Stay on top of engagement with a universal inbox
• Get easy-to-understand performance reports and improve your strategy as needed

Try Hootsuite for Free

With files from Shannon Tien .

Do it better with Hootsuite , the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.

Become a better social marketer.

Get expert social media advice delivered straight to your inbox.

Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Amanda Wood is a senior social marketing professional who combines analytical and creative thinking to build brands.

As head of social at Hootsuite, Amanda oversees the global social strategy encompassing organic and paid social on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn, a social engagement and listening strategy, and an employee advocacy program.

As the leader of a high-performing social team, she has extensive experience collaborating with creatives to bring campaigns to life on social and drive business results.

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Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing: What it is and how to build your strategy

Reading time  22 minutes

Published on  September 20, 2023

Table of Contents

Looking to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy? Good! Now’s the perfect time to make it happen. In a landscape with more competition, content and networks than ever, a succinct strategy gives you the focus needed to say “no” to efforts that don’t serve your goals.

That’s why we put together a comprehensive guide to creating a social media marketing plan from scratch. Whether you’re totally new to social or want to double-check your priorities in 2024, this guide has you covered.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing means using social media platforms like Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook to promote your brand and sell your product or service.

If your business comes out with a new item and you plan to promote the launch on social media, that’s social media marketing. If you interact with your customers via comments, that’s social media marketing. And if you create engaging content that showcases your brand’s values and story, that’s social media marketing too.

This form of marketing requires you to use social media management skills and tools. Just as you prepare other aspects of your marketing strategy, you need to have a plan for your social media marketing.

Now that we’ve defined social media marketing, let’s walk through how to create a plan. Check out our video below to watch how you can use the tips in this article to build a strategy in seven steps.

Set goals that make sense for your business

Social media strategy planning starts with your goals. Whether you want to expand your team, build a larger following or a more active community, taking the time to define your social goals is the first step to reaching them.

Either way, your goals will define your social media marketing strategy and how much time and energy you’ll need to dedicate to your campaigns.

Example social media goals for 2024 and beyond

What really matters is that you set realistic social media goals . We recommend tackling smaller objectives that allow you to scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable.

Below are some example social media marketing goals that businesses of all shapes and sizes can pursue.

Goal example 1: Increase brand awareness

Brand awareness means getting your name out there. Some 68% of consumers say the primary reason they follow a brand on social media is to stay informed about new products or services, according to The Sprout Social Index™ .

Try to avoid solely publishing promotional messages and strike a good balance with authentic content that emphasizes your brand’s voice and story. The Sprout Social Index™ found that consumers don’t see enough authentic, non-promotional content from brands on social.

For example, in this TikTok video, Sani, a family-owned apparel company features a day in the life of the brand’s founders while visiting India for business:

Goal example 2: Generate leads and sales

Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers? Social media gives you an avenue to generate revenue.

Goal example 3: Grow your brand’s audience

Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before. Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.

Goal example 4: Provide holistic customer care

The Index shows over half of consumers believe the most memorable thing a brand can do on social media is respond to customers.

Although 76% of consumers value quick responses, providing quality customer care isn’t just responding rapidly. Consumer expectations have evolved. Some 70% of consumers expect brands to provide a holistic experience with personalized responses that fit their unique customer service needs.

This means companies need to experiment with messaging and content when approaching customer care . For example, does your team have a protocol for handling @-mentions and comments? Do you have templated responses to FAQs? Does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags? Your customers can be your best cheerleaders, but only if you give them a reason to grab the megaphone.

Goal example 5: Drive traffic to your site to illustrate ROI of social efforts

The Sprout Social Index™ shows 46% of marketers plan to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of advertising spend to connect the value of social to business goals in 2024.

Simple enough. If you’re laser-focused on generating leads or traffic to your website, social media can make it happen. Whether through organic promotional posts or social ads, keeping an eye on conversions and URL clicks can help you better determine your ROI from social media .

Any combination of these goals is fair game and can help you better understand which networks to tackle, too. When in doubt, keep your social media marketing strategy simple rather than complicating it with too many objectives that might distract you. Pick one or two and rally your team around them.

Research your target audience and select your networks

Making assumptions is bad news for marketers. Both leaders and practitioners can disprove assumptions from the valuable insights social data provides. With the right tool, marketers can quickly research their audience . No formal market research or data science chops necessary.

What you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already available. You just have to know where to look.

Remember: different platforms attract different audiences

Here are some key numbers for your 2024 social media marketing strategy that speak directly to which networks your brand should approach and what types of content to publish:

• According to The Sprout Social Index™, 53% of consumers say their social media usage has been higher over the last two years than the previous two.
• Instagram has 2 billion active users worldwide in 2023 and continues to be one of the most popular networks among teens between 13-17 years old.
• Women make up more than 60% of Pinterest’s global audience . Gen Z and Millennials use the platform the most.
• X has over half a billion monthly monetizable active users. And people spend an average of 31 minutes on the platform.
• LinkedIn is the hub for in-depth, industry-specific content that might be more niche than what you see on Facebook or X.
• LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B lead generation, rated by marketers. Some 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions.
• Some 78% of TikTok users have purchased a product after watching TikTok creator content about the product.
• And some 73% of users feel a deeper connection to brands they interact with on TikTok vs other platforms.
• YouTube is one of the most popular search engines in the world with billions of monthly users across 80 languages and 100+ countries.

Social media demographics and stats like the ones above are great for understanding where your target audience lives, but it's also important to understand the nuances of each social network so you can decide where your business needs to be.

Bigger brands with large customer bases tend to have presences across multiple platforms. Giants like McDonald’s and Starbucks are more likely to have the resources to be everywhere at once, but what if you’re a mid-size or small business? And just because there are so many social platforms, doesn’t mean all of them are right for your brand. For the sake of narrowing down where you should spend your time, below is a quick overview of each of the major social platforms:

Simple and straightforward, X is a solid starting point for most businesses. Requiring minimal setup and providing a place to go back and forth with followers directly, there's a reason why X remains one of the go-to platforms for customer service . If you’re trying to master the social media marketing basics of hashtags, tagging, brand voice and social media etiquette, look no further.

Facebook is a must-have for brick-and-mortar businesses looking to target local customers. Allowing check-ins and reviews, it’s a prime place to grow a dedicated local following. Plus, they have an incredible chatbot functionality that can take your customer service and marketing campaigns to the next level.

Like many social algorithm changes, the platform’s algorithm change in late 2022 posed a challenge to some businesses looking to grow their Pages and stay in touch with fans consistently. The earliest algorithm prioritized Likes, but today’s is much more sophisticated and focuses on showing users the most relevant, meaningful content based on inventory, signals, relevancy scoring and other factors. That said, Facebook’s ad platform is the gold standard for social media ads because it can help businesses cut through the noise and lessen the impact of algorithm changes.

At its core, Instagram is a network centered around visual content. A major hub for brick-and-mortar businesses, e-commerce shops and influencers alike, the platform encourages brands to get creative. From eye-popping photos to clever captions, it’s all about finding unique ways to show off what you’re selling.

When Meta released Threads on July 5, 2023, the social network received over 100 million registrations less than a week after its launch, making it the most rapidly downloaded app ever. The launch of Threads sparked conversations about its role in the fediverse, or decentralized social media .

But, for now, Threads is a text-based social network that users can sign up for through their current Instagram account. Users can post on mobile, but Threads is also available on desktop. Threads are great for brands who already have Instagram accounts because the sign up process is pretty seamless.

LinkedIn is a network laser-focused on business trends and networking. LinkedIn is a goldmine, especially for anyone networking in the B2B space. Looking to get in touch with an influencer, marketing manager or CEO? Chances are you can find them here.

There are so many benefits of using LinkedIn marketing beyond networking, including content distribution and lead generation. We also have a guide for LinkedIn best practices so you can get full advantage of those benefits.

Pinterest marketing is insanely popular, especially among Gen Z and Millennials. Over 465 million people use this visual pinning platform every month to find inspiration and their next purchase. Pinterest is noted to be one of the best networks for social selling. Like Instagram, Pinterest thrives on imagery and inspirational content where products serve as the proverbial centerpiece.

Although some might not regard YouTube as a traditional social network, the platform’s active and engaged community speaks for itself. Considering that video represents the top-performing type of content across nearly every social network, YouTube is a great place to house your videos if you’re already producing them.

TikTok reached 1 billion users in September 2021 and remains one of the most popular apps in the world. Along with its viral trends and niche communities, the short-form video app is known for its hyper-personalized algorithm that keeps users scrolling for hours. TikTok marketing has changed the game for brands, allowing them to connect with customers in an entirely new way.

Picking networks for your social media marketing strategy

There are more than 15 social media platforms your brand can use , but don’t spread yourself too thin. Rather than try to dominate them all, you should consider which platforms make the most sense based on your industry and target audience.

Do your homework on your existing social media audience and focus on networks where your core audience is already active. You need to do further analysis before you can determine what your real-world social customers actually look like.

That’s why many brands use a social media dashboard that provides an overview of who’s following you and how they interact with you on each channel.

For example, Sprout’s analytics dashboard puts your audience demographics front and center. It highlights which social networks see the most activity, helping you ensure you spend your time on the right networks. You can also use analytics to determine if you should create a new social media account . With Sprout, you can view X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest data side-by-side in a customizable format that’s exportable by date range and profile.

There are plenty of other sources of valuable audience data to supplement your social media insights. This includes your Google and email analytics, your CRM, your customer service platform or even your best-selling products.

All of the above will ultimately influence everything from your marketing messaging to how you’ll approach customer service or social commerce .

Establish your most important metrics and KPIs

No matter your goals or industry, your social media strategy should be data-driven. Rather than focus on vanity metrics, dig into data that aligns directly with your goals.

So, what metrics are we talking about? Below you’ll find a quick overview, but our full guide breaks down the social media metrics that matter (and why) in more detail.

• Reach . Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
• Clicks . This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement . The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance . What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
• Organic and paid likes . Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget both your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
• Sentiment . This is the measurement of how users react to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find out how people talk or feel about your brand.

• Video views. This varies by platform, but refers to the number of views you receive on a video. Some channels treat video views as impressions–like TikTok–and others get super detailed with views. For example, Instagram offers views metrics for Stories, Reels and Live. Facebook and LinkedIn count a view when a user watches a video for at least three seconds. From the popularity of TikTok to live streaming, video is taking the internet by storm, so familiarize yourself with social video engagement metrics if you plan to use it in your strategy.
• Follower growth. Follower growth measures the net new followers you earned within a set time frame. Follower count on its own doesn’t tell the whole story: knowing how many followers you gained can help you prove the value and return on investment for campaigns, content types and social media experiments.
• Follower growth rate. This percentage shows how quickly your audience is growing or declining over time.
• Reply time. This refers to how long it takes for your team to reply to a customer message or @-mention on social.
• Total response volume. The sum of responses your team sends to customers.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). A CSAT shows how satisfied customers are with your product, service or brand as a whole. You can use social messaging to measure CSAT by DMing customers and asking them how likely they are to refer your business. Or by working with your customer care team to formalize a survey for after interactions.
• Impressions. The number of times a piece of content was displayed to users. Impressions can indicate how well you’re promoting your account, content, campaigns, ads, etc.
• Brand mentions. This number tracks how many times a brand is mentioned in posts/comments, whether the brand is directly tagged or not.
• Share of voice (SOV). This indicates where your brand ranks in the market compared to competitors. SOV can help you understand how much of the industry conversation your brand dominates.
• Conversation rate. This metric measures how many people you convert to take a desired action on social, such as making a purchase, downloading gated content, or signing up for a free trial, webinar, newletter, etc.

An effective social media marketing strategy is rooted in numbers. That said, those numbers need to be put into context that aligns with your original goals. Conduct analytics reports regularly to convey the story behind the metrics and see if your efforts match up to your vision.

Create (and curate) engaging social content

No surprises here. Your social media marketing strategy hinges on your content. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goals, audience and brand identity. You probably feel confident in which networks to cover, too.

But what about your content strategy? Below are some tips, ideas and inspiration that can help.

Defining your content strategy

Coming up with a content strategy might seem like a lot of legwork, but it all really boils down to your goals.

• Looking to educate your audience in the B2B space? Publish blogs, news and opinions relevant to your industry.
• Trying to push e-commerce products? Post action shots of your products and photos of others showing off your swag.
• Focused on customer service? Tips, shout-outs and company updates are fair game.

Regardless of what you might post, coming up with a hashtag to couple with your content is a brilliant branding move.

Hashtags can be used to get your attention and encourage people to share their photos interacting with your brand.

Find your brand voice

One of the best ways to stand out on social media is to define your distinct brand voice. Chances are you’ve seen a post from a particular brand that just feels like, well, theirs.

The quippy, casual tone that makes Discord’s X presence beloved by casual users and moderators alike is a great example.

Of course, not every company will benefit from the same sort of tone. The key is to present yourself as a human rather than a robot. Adopt a consistent brand voice and style that’s appropriate for your business.

The importance of sticking to content themes

From graphics to Reels and beyond, many brands rely on the same content formats and creative touches time and again. These themes can help you become more consistent and zero in on a content strategy that makes sense.

For example, you might cycle between memes, product photos and user-generated content while sticking to a defined color scheme. If you’re struggling to keep up with all these sources of social content, consider social media management tools that help you organize your media library and schedule your posts in advance.

Content ideas for social media marketing in 2024

The Sprout Social Index™ reveals an interesting trend around the type of content consumers want to see on social. When asked what makes brands memorable on social, 38% of consumers said the most memorable brands prioritize original content over following trending topics. Some 37% said engaging directly with their audience rather than publishing a lot of content makes a brand more memorable, followed by 33% who remember brands that publish timely, on-trend posts.

The takeaway? There’s not one sure-fire way to approach content, but consumers generally want a good quality mix of original and timely, trending content.

That’s why businesses should focus on what their audience wants so they can know which content mix is best for their brand. Here are some social media trends to consider to help narrow down the specifics of what you should publish and inspire innovative content.

Stories and time-sensitive posts

Stories aren’t going anywhere. Tapping into your followers’ FOMO (fear of missing out), Stories-style content is both interactive and can’t-miss. Popping up first in your followers’ feeds by default, this content can help your brand’s account “skip the line” and stay fresh in your audience’s minds.

Stories are especially valuable for taking your followers behind-the-scenes and making your social feed feel more personal. For example, consider how you can use Stories to cover an event or take your followers on a journey without them having to leave the comfort of the ‘gram.

Short-form video

Thanks to the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels , social video is booming. Short-form productions continue to dominate the social space across all platforms due to their high engagement rate.

Sprout Social’s 2022 Index data shows that consumers find short-form videos 2.5x more engaging than long-form ones. Some 66% of consumers report paying the most attention to short-form content as well.

Thanks to advancements in DIY and remote video production , you don’t need massive budgets to be successful. All you need is a laptop or smartphone and a few tricks of the trade, like video length best practices and editing tools .

Posts that show off your brand’s uniqueness and human side

Both personal and personable content should be a cornerstone of your social media marketing strategy. Don’t be afraid to remind followers of the humans behind your posts. Remember that over a third of consumers are looking for authentic, original content from brands.

For example, Zoom has excellent original content on their Instagram and TikTok accounts, like this Reel that explores the different signs in the workplace:

Collaborate with creators

If you haven’t already, it’s time to tap into the creator economy . The Sprout Social Index™ shows that 25% of consumers remember brands that collaborate with content creators and influencers. Social partnerships are very effective when executed correctly: they can help drive traffic to your website, produce compelling content and inspire purchase decisions.

But consumers care about creators’ qualifications, so choose wisely. The two most important qualifications of content creators working with brands is their experience with the product/service and their authenticity.

Identify creators who align with your brand and consider how they can help you craft stand-out content for your audience.

Pro-tip: conduct a competitive analysis to help your content stand out

Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to.

While some brands might want to look into third-party competitor analysis tools to dig deeper into their competitors’ numbers, you can learn a lot from a simple review of your competitors’ social presence.

The simplest way to find competitors is through a Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

Then, see how their social channels compare to your own. The goal here isn’t to copycat or steal your competitors’ ideas. No two companies’ social media marketing strategies can be (or should be) the same. Instead, determine what’s working for them and what conclusions you can draw to adapt your own campaigns accordingly.

After identifying some of your industry rivals, you can use competitive analysis tools such as those found in Sprout to quickly compare competitor performance to your own.

See what they’re posting on Facebook. Contrast your X engagement with theirs. Find out how they’re tagging their content on Instagram. Optimize your own strategy. Rinse and repeat.

You can also go a step further using Sprout’s Advanced Listening . Using social listening, you can spotlight unfiltered consumer feedback regarding competitors, as well as their products and services. You get the added bonus of discovering honest conversations about your brand you may have otherwise missed.

Make your social presence as timely as possible

Timeliness is arguably more important than ever for marketers. Not only are you expected to put out fresh content regularly, but also to always be “on” for your followers. But you can’t always expect customers to operate on your clock. And timeliness is a tall order when you’re strapped for resources or are part of a small team.

Let’s look at some ways to maximize your schedule and your time spent on social media.

Assemble your content calendar

Use a content calendar to plan out your posts and stay organized. Knowing in advance what you’re going to post will save you a lot of time and keeps you from posting the same pieces of content too frequently.

With the help of Sprout’s scheduling and publishing , you can house your social posts, captions and creative in one place.

Post at the best times to engage

As evidenced by our best times to post on social , brands have a lot of ground to cover in terms of frequency and how much content to push. It’s important to pay attention to the optimal times for engagement so you can automate the most tedious aspects of your social presence without having to worry about posting in real time.

Sprout also offers a cool interactive tool that populates best times by industry and network. You can check it out here .

But, quick question: When is your brand available to engage and interact with customers?

You might see some recommended times to post late in the evening, for example. But if your team isn’t there to communicate, what’s the point of posting at the “preferred” time?

When you’re able to do so, ensure your social media or community managers are available and ready to answer any product questions or concerns when you post. Take time to review the best times to post on social media, but remember that it’s just as critical to engage after posting.

You should also consider taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and automation so you can serve and engage with customers when your team is offline, which leads us to our next point.

Respond to your customer questions and shout-outs ASAP

Your customers want speedy responses, but it’s likely impossible to respond to every message across multiple channels manually. Lean into AI to help execute faster. For example, you can use chatbots or automated replies to connect with customers when your team is offline.

The 2023 Index shows 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work. But marketers aren’t just using AI to increase efficiency–they’re using it to scale their entire customer care strategies.

Over half of marketers plan to use customer self-service resources like FAQs, forums and chatbots to grow their social customer care strategy. Nearly half of brands say they will use AI and automation to handle basic customer inquiries and tasks.

Your brand can’t forget these core elements of community building. It takes effort to ensure conversations or engagement opportunities aren’t left unattended. On social media, you gain respect as a brand by being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness—word travels fast about great service.

This is why you should designate teams to respond to specific customer cases. It can help your staff run like a well-oiled social media team, whether you’re a group of one or 100.

As social algorithms evolve, organic content has an increasingly tough time reaching the majority of your audience. The last thing you want to do is ignore those who do engage and lose out on sending more people down your marketing funnel.

Evaluate and improve your social media strategy

By now you should have a big-picture understanding of your social media strategy. However, it’s important to adapt your strategy throughout the year.

Without continuously analyzing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s eye view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective. This means looking at your top-performing content and adjusting your campaigns when your content stalls .

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes.

Doing social media marketing right starts by being diligent about your data. You can be reactive in the short term to get the most out of your running campaigns, and then proactively use these takeaways to inform your next strategy overhaul.

To guarantee that you get in front of as many customers as possible, monitoring your growth is a major must-do. With Sprout, social reports can clue you in on everything from your top-performing content to how engaged your audience is. These reports are crucial for accountability and guaranteeing your numbers continue to tick upward.

Reporting on data is also important for the sake of sharing valuable insights from social with your coworkers and colleagues. Remember that 60% of organizations use social data daily—be one of the brands that embrace it.

Sharing this information in regular reports not only holds you accountable for your efforts but also highlights the impact and bottom-line results your social strategy produces.

Based on your data, you can better assess whether your KPIs truly ladder up to your overarching company goals or whether they need to change.

Bring other departments into the mix

Social media teams have a unique advantage when it comes to understanding customer sentiment. You’re the eyes and ears for your brand online. Those insights can do more than just inform marketing strategy. They can transform your business. Stand-out social media teams will approach cross-department collaboration with enthusiasm and intention.

Which departments can benefit from social data?

The short answer? All of them. Index data shows 76% of social marketers say their team’s insights inform other departments.

However, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Instead, start where you think you can make the most impact. Here are a few ideas to jumpstart your strategy.

Human Resources

Collaborating with human resources on social-first employer brand initiatives can do more than just fill open roles quickly. It can attract stronger, more qualified candidates as well. Many companies have embraced social recruiting strategies, such as publishing creative “we’re hiring” posts on LinkedIn to attract top talent.

Data from The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ notes marketers plan to track conversations and sales directly resulting from social efforts in 2024 to better connect the value of social to business goals. Sharing social insights with your sales organization can empower reps to work smarter in the context of increasingly digital customer journeys. Consider learning more about social selling to leverage the power of online networks even further.

Product and merchandising

You’ve probably received quite a few feature or product requests while managing your brand’s social inbox. With a social media management tool , you can distill those messages into actionable insights for your product or merchandising teams. These insights can complement existing roadmap research, creating a customer-focused plan that delights.

Customer care

Monitoring customer service metrics like average reply time, average wait time and response volume can help your social customer care team identify what is working well and spot opportunities for improvement. Marketers are using social media customer service software to elevate their support strategies and get the most out of their tech stack.

And with that, we wrap up your social media strategy guide for 2024 and beyond!

Is your social media marketing strategy future proof?

This guide highlights plenty of moving pieces to maintain a modern social presence. That said, putting together yours doesn’t have to be a drag.

If you set actionable goals and address each of the steps above, you’ll already be way ahead of the curve when it comes to your social media marketing strategy.

And if you need more inspiration for actionable ways to build out your strategies, make sure to download The Sprout Social Index™ to learn more.

Featured in Social Media Marketing

• Read more about 11 Tips To Boost Your Social Media Marketing Productivity
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Additional resources for Social Media Marketing

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Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Discover how social media marketing can help you generate leads, boost conversions, and increase brand awareness.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT CALENDAR TEMPLATE

Manage and plan your social media content with this free template

Updated: 01/24/24

Published: 01/24/24

Marketers’ top goal with social media marketing is increasing engagement. However, their top challenge is creating content that inspires the engagement they look for.

Since social media plays such an essential top-of-the-funnel role, it’s important to understand how to use the platform to meet your goals.

In this post, we'll dive into all things social media marketing — what it is, its benefits, and how to build a social media marketing strategy that drives the results you want.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Marketing Resources

What is social media marketing.

Social media marketing is the process of creating content for social media platforms to promote your products and/or services, build community with your target audience, and drive traffic to your business. With new features and platforms emerging every day, social media marketing is constantly evolving.

Social media marketing is all about meeting your target audience and customers where they are and as they socially interact with each other and your brand.

While social media marketing is incredibly valuable and beneficial to your business growth (as you'll see in the following section), your strategy will differ based on which social networks your audience spends their time on.

Before we dig deeper into social media marketing, let's segment the strategy by platform .

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The State of Social Media in 2024

Explore the top trends in social media for brands to know and optimize your social strategy.

• AI Content Creation
• Community Building
• Social Media Shopping
• Social Vs. Search Engine

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

To illustrate the benefits of social media marketing, let's take a look at the experience from the user's perspective. Well, my perspective, to be exact.

As I scroll through my Instagram feed every day (cough, cough...multiple times a day), I consistently notice new posts and stories by The Frye Company . I’ve always been a fan of their boots, clothing, and accessories, but I also love the content they share on their Instagram profile.

All of their photos have the same filter to ensure they match — this makes their profile look professional, artistic, and organized when visitors, like myself, browse their page.

Frye’s account also encourages interaction between the company and its followers by providing them with a specific hashtag to use so they can be featured on the page when they post photos with Frye products.

Frye’s Instagram account is a great example of successful social media marketing — it’s attractive, distinctly Frye, engages their ~200K followers, and promotes their products.

But why is social media marketing so important? And how do you build a social media marketing strategy that’ll work for your business?

There are a variety of reasons why your company should use social media marketing. We've created a list of the most beneficial reasons to consider.

Let's dive in.

1. Increase your brand awareness.

Due to the sheer number of people on social media, you're missing out on the potential to reach thousands, and even millions, if you don't have a presence.

In fact, social media has proven to boost brand awareness by driving up engagement, including things like comments, likes, shares, reposts, and saves.

It also helps you increase brand awareness by directing traffic straight to your site. You can do this by including links to your website and other offers in your profile, bio, and posts.

Featured Resource

• How to Build a Brand for Your Company

2. Generate leads and boost conversions.

Promoting and sharing your products on social media is a simple way to improve lead generation, boost conversions, and increase sales because you're advertising to people who have opted to engage with you by following your account.

Here are some examples of ways to use social media to generate more leads.

• Create contests for your visitors and followers to participate in on your social media profiles.
• Include links to your website and offers in the bio sections of your profiles.
• Host live videos to announce new products and provide updates or details about exciting news at your company.
• Implement a social media marketing campaign on one of your channels.

If you don't already have a Facebook page for your site, here's how to make one. 

3. Foster relationships with your customers.

Connecting and engaging with your social media followers can build lasting relationships between them and your business. You can do this by interacting with them on your posts, responding to their questions and comments, and providing them with any help they may need.

You can also ask your followers questions about your products and their pain points or create giveaways to help you build trust and show them how much you value their input and support.

4. Learn from your competitors.

Social media is a great way to keep tabs on your competitors — whether it's their social media tactics, the products they're promoting, the campaigns they're implementing, or their level of interaction with followers.

Social media allows you to look at what is and isn't working for your competition and, therefore, helps you decide what should or shouldn't change regarding your company's approach.

Lastly, reviewing your competitors' social accounts can help you make sure your marketing stands out and is unique to your brand.

Learn how to conduct a competitive analysis to discover how you can beat the competition.

Now, let's talk strategy. I'll walk you through the steps below, but if you're a visual learner, check out this helpful video that dives into everything you need to know.

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

• Set clear goals.
• Research your buyer personas and audience.
• Determine which social platforms you’ll market on.
• Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.
• Get to know your competition.
• Create unique and engaging content.
• Organize a schedule for your posts.
• Review and adjust your strategy.

Although social media constantly evolves, most foundational steps to succeed stay the same. Essentially, you're following the same steps you would take to create a marketing strategy and narrowing it to a specific channel.

I'll cover these steps in more detail so you can begin applying them to your business.

Step 1: Set clear goals.

The first step to creating a social media marketing strategy is to define your social media goals and ensure that they align with your overall business objectives.

Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve through your social media efforts? Examples could be increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, boosting customer engagement, or improving customer satisfaction.

Once you've set your high-level goals, break them down into smaller, actionable steps. This helps you identify the specific actions and strategies needed to achieve your goals.

For example, if my goal is to increase website traffic through social media, helpful, actionable steps could include increasing posting frequency, optimizing content for sharing, or running targeted ad campaigns.

Recommended Resources:

• How to Write a SMART Goal

Step 2: Research your buyer personas and audience.

Whatever Thoreau once said about building castles and setting foundations under them is absolutely true.

Okay, yes , he was definitely not talking about social media marketing, but bear with me — you’ve set your goals (built castles), and now you need to define how you’ll meet them (the foundation). Your goals will mean nothing without the foundation that helps you meet them.

That’s why, after establishing your goals, the next step is to outline how you’ll meet them, and one of the best ways to start is to determine who your buyer personas and audience are so you can target their needs and interests appropriately.

Without knowing who they are, you won’t be able to share the content they’re looking for to entice a response from them that helps you meet your goal.

To do this, consider the people you're trying to reach, why, and how you would classify them as a group. For example, if your company sells trendy leggings and joggers, you might classify your target audience as millennials who like to wear stylish athletic apparel regularly — a style known as athleisure .

By considering your buyer personas and audience, you'll then be able to determine what content will attract the type of followers and customers you hope to gain. Plus, learn how to create engaging content to keep your followers interested.

Pro Tip : I recommend gathering feedback from your followers to get insights into their preferences, pain points, and satisfaction levels. This data can help you identify areas for improvement and refine your buyer personas.

Recommended Tools

• Buyer Persona Templates
• Make My Persona Tool

Step 3: Determine which social platforms you'll market on.

As a social media marketer, it’s important to determine which platforms you’ll use.

I can’t give you a yes or no list regarding which social channels your business should use — it's more about the needs of your target audience, where they spend their time, and the kind of content you want to create.

"It's important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow," said Andrew Delaney, former social media marketing manager at HubSpot. "It's better to be ahead of the curve than behind."

For example, Gen Z is all about TikTok . If that’s your primary audience, I would consider it a best practice to use that platform and meet them where they already are.

If you're going for that target audience of athleisure-loving millennials, you may want to focus most of your social media efforts on Instagram — millennials are the largest user base on the platform.

Stephanie Morgan , founder and CEO of Social Lock , a top social media agency , echoes this sentiment.

"Think about their behaviors and where they hang out online. If that's Pinterest, use that platform for your brand. If that's TikTok, use that platform for your brand," Morgan adds. "Don't waste time on a platform that your ideal client avatar is not very active on."

When it comes to the content you want to create, consider what each platform specializes in. For example, if you want to share video-forward content, a platform that favors that, like YouTube, is your best bet.

All of this to say, you aren’t restricted to best-fit channels. Having a presence on multiple platforms is important, and I always encourage experimentation on emerging platforms or platforms that don’t entirely align with your social media marketing needs. Not only does it diversify your strategy, but it also helps you interact with the unique audiences and requirements of each platform.

However, I can only recommend this type of experimentation for businesses with established marketing strategies on platforms that work and deliver your desired results. Placing all of your stake in something new if you’re just getting started can do more harm than good.

Recommended Tools and Resources

• A Marketer's Guide to Snapchat for Business
• 50 Facebook Ad Examples We Actually Clicked
• YouTube for Business: A 30-Day Roadmap for Growth
• How to Use Twitter for Business (+ Follower Tracking Template)
• 12 Pinterest Templates for Business

Step 4: Establish your most important metrics and KPIs.

Your social media strategy should be data-driven, regardless of your goals or industry.

That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter . Rather than focus on vanity metrics, dig into data that aligns directly with your goals.

What metrics am I talking about? Check out the breakdown below:

• Reach . Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How much of your content actually reaches users’ feeds?
• Clicks . This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understanding what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement . The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This shows how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance . What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
• Organic and paid likes . Beyond a standard “Like” count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. Given how much harder organic engagement is to gain, many brands turn to ads. Knowing these differences can help you budget your ad spend and the time you invest in different formats.
• Sentiment . This measures how users react to your content, brand, or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment do people associate with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and discover how people talk or feel about your brand.

Recommended Resources

• Which Social Media Metrics Are Marketers Tracking?
• The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics

Step 5: Get to know your competition.

Whether you’re just starting with social media marketing or have years under your belt, it’s always important to understand the current state of your industry, especially when it comes to your competitors.

This is where I call your attention to a trusty competitive analysis: it allows you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set your own social media targets.

It will also help you spot opportunities. Say, for example, my main competitor is dominant on Facebook but puts little effort into Twitter or Instagram. Rather than solely focusing on winning fans away from a dominant player, I can also look to networks where my audience is underserved. I’m not abandoning Facebook (because I know it works), but I’m diversifying my strategy and building a presence where an untapped audience is ready to hear from me.

Pro Tip: I recommend monitoring your competitors’ customer reviews to gain insights into what their customers like and dislike about them. Pay attention to common complaints or recurring themes to understand their pain points, and aim to solve those pains in your own strategy.

• What's a Competitive Analysis & How Do You Conduct One?
• A Marketer's Guide To Competitive Intelligence
• How to Monitor Your Competitors' Every Move in Social Within HubSpot

Step 6: Create unique and engaging content.

With billions of social media users around the globe, there's no question that at least some of your followers — or the people browsing your profile — have also seen your competitor's content or that of other businesses in your industry.

This is why it’s important to have engaging social media content that stands out and provides viewers with a reason to click that "Follow" button and interact with your brand. If your content keeps them engaged, social media algorithms will also work in your favor and prioritize showing them your content because they’ve demonstrated an interest in it.

This is entirely true of my social media experience. I follow quite a few brands on Instagram, but I only regularly see content from 3 or 4 because they have the most engaging content that inspires me to interact. The algorithm learns what I like and prioritizes their posts over others, so I only get to their Stories when I’ve relentlessly tapped through every other story (doesn’t happen that often) or scrolled to the bottom of my feed (happens even less).

Not sure what's considered engaging? Morgan has a recommendation.

"My number one tip to brands for creating engaging content on social media is to do market research first because what will be engaging depends on the audience," Morgan said. "When you know what your audience likes and needs to know, you can create content that engages those interests."

Want some hard facts about what content to create? Here’s some insights directly from consumers, thanks to my teammate Max Iskiev's research into consumer trends:

• Consumers spend the most time engaging with visual content, specifically images/photos/infographics (53%) and short-form video content (44%)
• Millennials spend the most time engaging with short-form video content
• Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X enjoy video content the most, and Boomers enjoy images/photos/infographics.
• Relatable content is the most memorable content overall among consumers. For Gen Z and Millennials, funny content is the most memorable.

Another tip to help you get creative is to consider the content your competitors are sharing and how you can uniquely promote your products.

Also, take advantage of the features offered by the platforms you use. For example, you can create live videos on Facebook to share the latest details about a product launch or conduct a giveaway.

You can also use your current customers' and promoters’ content (user-generated content) and re-post their content or encourage them to use a hashtag to share their experiences and pictures with your products.

Lastly, leverage trends. Social media trends are always coming up, especially on short-form video platforms like TikTok. Don't be afraid to join in but you still have to be intentional about how you do it.

"If the trend started happening three weeks ago, you've probably missed the boat," Morgan said. "Catching the trends early is the best way to capitalize on it without coming across as inauthentic or like you're trying too hard, or worse [as] 'chuegy' – see Gen Z for that one."

• The Social Media Trends Report

Step 7: Organize a schedule for your posts.

Using a social media management solution is one of the easiest ways to ensure your content is shared as planned. These tools let you write captions, prepare pictures and videos, and schedule posts in advance. Some even automatically share your content on schedule and monitor post interactions and engagement.

I recently tested a few social media content calendar tools ( you can check out my tests here ), and I can’t recommend them enough. They were all extremely easy to use, and the time-saving benefits are a worthwhile investment for any social media marketer looking to optimize their process and save time.

Here are a few examples of some of your options.

HubSpot offers a social media tool — as part of the marketing software — to help you publish and monitor your content and create real connections with your followers. You can schedule and publish your content in advance and compare in-depth reports on your posts’ engagement to understand the performance of various platforms, types of content, and posting times.

Sprout Social

Image Source

Sprout Social is a social media marketing and management solution designed to help your team organize and plan content creation, manage campaigns, understand engagement, and review content reports and analysis.

Hootsuite is a social media management platform for finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on your content. You can schedule posts in advance on all of your channels at once and measure your ROI with comprehensive content analysis.

How often should you post on social media?

As a rule of thumb, you should only post on social media when you have quality content to share (meaning that there’s a reason you’re posting it). This can help you strike the right balance when it comes to posting frequency.

Morgan says the top mistake she sees brands make regarding social media marketing is focusing on quantity of content instead of the quality of content.

"They think they need to post every day, so they force themselves to create posts to fill up the calendar," she said. "Odds are, every single one of those posts isn't going to be very valuable to the ideal customer, I've coined this 'clutter content.'"

Instead, she recommends downsizing in quantity and upping the quality.

"It's better to post two or three times a week with super valuable content, versus posting seven times a week with only one or two valuable posts," said Morgan.

There are plenty of studies and resources available explaining social media post frequency standards by industry and platform for you to follow. Every business is different, so find what works for your audience.

I do have a cheat code for you, though. Iskiev, who I mentioned above, asked marketers how often they post on social media, and they most commonly said multiple times per week. This can be a guiding metric but, as always, make final decisions based on your audience.

Look at your analytics to see when you get the most engagement, and create a posting schedule that speaks to those times. Then, you can begin experimenting with more or fewer posts – as well as other factors such as the time of day you're posting on social – to determine what provides the highest level of engagement.

• Social Media Content Calendar Template
• Social Media Content Calendar Template for Startups

Step 8: Review and adjust your strategy.

Social media is always evolving, so it’s important to periodically check in and make sure your strategy is still effective.

I recommend setting a regular cadence for reviewing your social media strategy. This could be monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on your business needs and resources. Use these reviews to determine what's working, what needs improvement, and what new opportunities to explore.

When conducting these reviews, take the time to assess whether you're making progress toward your social media goals and objectives. Compare your actual performance against the benchmarks and KPIs you established. Then, identify any gaps or areas that need improvement.

It’s also important to keep up with the latest trends. Be sure to monitor changes in social media algorithms, user behavior, or new features, as well as emerging platforms and technologies.

For instance, if you heavily use Twitter as part of your social media strategy, consider the implications of the platform's rebrand to X and the new competitors since Elon Musk purchased it.

Before we dive into analyzing your social media marketing efforts, lets take a look at key social media platforms to give you a sense of how social media strategies look on different platforms.

Social Media Marketing Platforms

• Users : 2.8 billion daily active users worldwide
• Audience : Cusp of Gen Z and Millennials ( most users aged 24-35 )
• Industry impact : B2C
• Best for : Brand awareness, advertising, community building

Facebook is the largest and most established social media platform. Since its launch in 2004, it has become an invaluable tool for B2C businesses, offering advanced advertising tools and organic opportunities.

Featured Resources:

• Facebook Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
• How to Run Facebook Ads: Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Facebook

• Users : 1 billion active monthly global users
• Audience : Primarily Gen Z followed by Millennials
• Industry impact : B2C, then B2B
• Best for : Short-form, creative video content, user-generated content, building brand awareness

When you think of short-form video , you probably think of TikTok. The platform rose in popularity in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing down. It's one of the best platforms for community building, with marketers ranking it in third place behind YouTube .

• How to Use TikTok: A Step-by-Step Guide
• How Does the TikTok Algorithm Work?
• 13 Best TikTok Tips & Tricks, According to HubSpot’s Social Team + Marketer Data

• Users : 1 billion monthly active users
• Audience : Nearly even distribution of Gen Z and Millennials
• Best for : High-quality images and videos; user-generated content; advertising

Instagram launched 13 years ago and has taken the world by storm. When it comes to sharing visually compelling content, Instagram is where brands go. Another thing that sets the platform apart is its advanced eCommerce tools.

Today, users can discover brands, browse their products and/or services, and complete a purchase without leaving the app – making Instagram a hard platform to beat. In fact, consumers say Instagram offers the best in-app shopping experience , and Instagram Shops is the most popular social selling feature among social media marketers.

• Instagram Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
• How to Gain Your First (or Next) 1,000 Instagram Followers - 31 Tips
• 41 Instagram Features, Hacks, & Tips Everyone Should Know About

X (formerly Twitter)

• Users : 550 million daily active users worldwide
• Audience : Primarily Millennials
• Industry impact : B2B and B2C
• Best for : Public relations, customer service, community building

While Instagram focuses on visuals, X (formerly Twitter) focuses on words. Since the early days of 140-character Tweets (the limit is now 280), the platform has now expanded to include an audio tool called X Spaces , a community-building tool for creators called Twitter Subscriptions, and Twitter Blue for those interested in an elevated Twitter experience.

Featured Resource:

• Twitter Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

• User s : 770 million active users worldwide
• Audience : Older Gen Z (24+), Millennials (largest user base), and Gen X
• Industry impact : B2B
• Best for : B2B relationships, business development, and social selling

LinkedIn is Facebook's professional cousin. It's perhaps the only platform where its audience is clearly defined: Working professionals looking to network and seek out new opportunities.

That makes it the ideal platform for B2B companies looking to identify key decision-makers and build an industry-specific community.

• The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Marketing
• Social Selling on LinkedIn: The Ultimate Guide
• How to Craft the Perfect LinkedIn Profile

• Users : Over 2.4 billion users worldwide
• Audience : Primarily Millennials but has a strong audience across gender and age demographics
• Industry impact : B2C and B2B
• Best for : Brand awareness, long-form entertainment, how-to and explainer videos, SEO, advertising

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world . In addition, marketers name it the second-best platform to build community.

In addition to being an incredibly popular platform, its users tend to stay longer because it features mostly long-form content – making it an ideal platform to share educational content.

• YouTube Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
• YouTube Ads for Beginners: How to Launch & Optimize a YouTube Video Advertising Campaign
• YouTube Demographics & Data to Know

• Users : 4 06 million daily active users worldwide
• Audience : Primarily Generation Z
• Best for : Brand awareness, advertising, location-based marketing

When Snapchat came out in 2011, leading the charge in ephemeral content. It introduced content that you could share with your friends and that would expire after 24 hours.

Many thought the brand would disappear once Instagram introduced Stories, the same feature with a different name, but it continues to be popular among young adults.

• Snapchat Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

• Users : 482 million monthly active users worldwide
• Audience : Primarily Millennials with a solid audience in Gen Z
• Best for : Visual advertising; inspiration

Think of Pinterest as a visual storyboard that allows users to get inspiration for everything from fashion to home decor.

85% of Pinners say Pinterest is where they go to start a new project. In addition, 80% of weekly Pinners say they've discovered a new brand or product on the platform. So, not only is it a great discovery tool, but it's also a way for brands to build their narrative through visual stories.

• The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest Marketing
• How to Use Pinterest to Promote Your Business or Blog

• Users : 10 million weekly active users worldwide ( according to latest data from 2022 )
• Best for : Visu

Clubhouse made a strong impression as soon as it entered the social media world in 2020. The audio-only platform allows people to start interesting conversations with followers as well as strangers and build community.

The platform also gained some buzz for its invitation-only set up when it was in beta testing. Today, the platform is open to everyone globally and on both IOS and Android devices. Another big selling point to this platform is that it works well for both B2B and B2C businesses and leverages audio, which has made a huge comeback in recent years.

Now that we've detailed the fundamentals of each social media network, how to analyze your results once you use them.

How to Analyze Your Social Media Marketing Impact and Results

One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is ensuring your efforts are successful in helping you meet your goals. To determine this, you'll need to keep track of your posts on every channel. You can do this by reviewing and managing your social media metrics.

Social Media Metrics

Social media metrics are data related to the success of your posts and your impact on your audience and customers on various platforms. These metrics may include data about levels of engagement, likes, follows, shares, and all other interactions on each platform.

These are the ten most important metrics I recommend tracking:

• Engagement: This includes clicks, comments, likes, and replies on your social media posts. There are also platform-specific types of engagement, such as " Saved " posts on Instagram and " Pinned " posts on Pinterest.
• Reach: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your page or profile is your reach.
• Followers: This is the number of people who have clicked your "Follow" button and regularly see your content in their feeds.
• Impressions: This is the number of times a post is seen, regardless of interaction. Impressions usually come from someone scrolling through their feed.
• Video views: On Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or any other social channel with video capabilities, this is the number of views each gets.
• Profile visits: The number of people who have visited your profile is the number of profile visits.
• Mentions and tags: This is when someone mentions your brand, business, or profile in their own post. Someone might add your profile’s hand to a piece of their content with a direct tag, usually using the “@” symbol. For example, “loving these new shoes from @nike.”
• Reposts: This is when a member of your audience posts a piece of your content on their profile.
• Shares: This is the number of times people have shared content from your profile to their own or with their network.

You can influence all of these metrics, increase your social following, and improve overall engagement on your profile by using the same tactics you use to generate leads and boost conversions.

Morgan adds that the metrics you focus on will depend on your business’ level of maturity:

• If you're new, focus on building an audience and awareness. Key metrics: reach, impressions, audience growth.
• If you're growing, focus on building trust. Key metrics: Likes, saves, comments, DMs.
• If you're established, focus on retaining and nurturing. Key metrics: Likes, saves, comments, DMs.
• If you're launching something, focus on selling. Key metrics: DMs and clickthrough rate

How to Measure Social Media Metrics

There are multiple ways to monitor your social media metrics. Some platforms even have built-in analytics tools for you to use:

• X Analytics
• Facebook Analytics
• Instagram Insights

You might also choose to use an analytics and tracking tool such as Google Analytics . I view it as a great option if you want to track your social media and website metrics. Lastly, many social media scheduling solutions — as we reviewed earlier — have built-in monitoring and analytics tools.

Any metrics tracking tool you use will give you a better understanding of what your followers and audience respond well to and what you should consider modifying to improve engagement.

Now that we've reviewed the benefits of social media marketing and how to build your strategy, let's go over additional resources available to help you along the way.

There are a plethora of social media marketing resources out there that can help you build a social strategy for your company. Let’s go over some high-quality options.

Social Media Marketing Courses and Training

Here are two ways to earn an education in the field of social media marketing if you feel it's necessary for your specific business situation.

1. Earn a certificate administered by a company.

A certificate is a quick and simple way to gain a deep understanding of social media marketing courses.

HubSpot offers a free social media certification course, which teaches you how to engage with your customers and improve conversions. You'll also get a better understanding of how to develop your strategy, extend your reach, and measure your social media ROI.

LinkedIn Learning is another platform where you can earn a certification and share it on your profile.

2. Leverage YouTube university.

YouTube is a goldmine of educational content.

With a quick search, you'll find hundreds of long-form videos offering in-depth courses on social media marketing. Granted, you can't connect with a live educator. However, it's free and can be a great starting point before you dive into a paid course.

Social Media Marketing Books

Reading relevant content about social media marketing is another great way to learn more about the field. Here are a few examples of some highly-regarded books on the topic.

1. Likable Social Media, Third Edition: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on All Social Networks That Matter by Dave Kerpen

This New York Times Bestseller covers the reasons why being likable and engaging with followers on social media is one of the most powerful ways to grow your base of customers and promoters.

The book teaches you how to make impactful content for your followers to interact with and share with their networks. Author Dave Kerpen also describes why you need to ensure you're consistently delighting your followers to avoid losing them at any point in time.

2. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World by Gary Vaynerchuk

According to author Gary Vaynerchuk, the key to social media marketing success isn't about pushing out a lot of content — it's about pushing out specific content tailored towards your target audience and using the right platform to do so.

In his book, Vaynerchuk covers how to do this as well as connect with your followers and customers on a deeper level through social media. You'll learn how to create memorable and unique content that stands out in comparison to the competition's content.

3. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More by Kipp Bodnar

HubSpot's CMO, Kipp Bodnar, writes about the ways B2B businesses can generate more leads and conversions through social media marketing.

There are actionable methods you can take to increase your base of followers and drive leads as well as understand the ROI of various B2B social media marketing strategies.

Emerging Social Media Platforms

Recent HubSpot Blog Research found that marketers are constantly on the lookout for new or emerging platforms.

Though it can take a while for platforms to take off, once they do, you’ll want to have a plan of attack.

Chipotle, for example, was one of the first brands to try sharing short-form video content on TikTok, and it now has a strong presence on the platform. Other brands haven’t been so lucky and still struggle to find their place. (TikTokers don’t shy away from telling brands when they don’t like something and won’t mince their words).

Emerging platforms can offer a new avenue to reach your target audience in a way that may be more effective than what you're doing now. In 2024, Threads and Lemon8 are among some of the most popular emerging platforms, and Bereal is also working to make its mark.

Want to learn more about what's out there? Check out this article on social media platforms to keep an eye on this year.

Start Marketing on Social Media

Considering there are billions of people on social media today, it's easy to see why so many businesses and marketers use the channel to promote their products and engage with customers.

Although determining your company's social media course of action may seem daunting, you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by understanding how social media marketing works and leveraging the resources available about the topic (like this piece!)

Start working on your business’s social media marketing strategy today to increase your followers, improve engagement, and boost conversions.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template & Guidebook

Social media has become an integral part of how businesses market themselves in the 21st century. From creating a strong online presence to generating leads and sales, social media can create amazing opportunities for businesses of all sizes—but only when it’s done right. That’s why it’s essential for businesses to have a comprehensive social media marketing plan in place. The #1 Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template & Guidebook provides a comprehensive, easy-to-follow template and guidebook combination to create a powerful social media marketing plan that helps businesses succeed.

Get worry-free services and support to launch your business starting at $0 plus state fees.

• How to Start a Profitable Social Media Marketing Business [11 Steps]
• 10+ Best & Profitable Social Media Marketing Business Ideas [2023]

How to Write a Social Media Marketing Business Plan in 7 Steps:

1. describe the purpose of your social media marketing business..

The first step to writing your business plan is to describe the purpose of your social media marketing business. This includes describing why you are starting this type of business, and what problems it will solve for customers. This is a quick way to get your mind thinking about the customers’ problems. It also helps you identify what makes your business different from others in its industry.

It also helps to include a vision statement so that readers can understand what type of company you want to build.

Here is an example of a purpose mission statement for a social media marketing business:

Our purpose at Social Media Marketing is to serve our clients and partners in the development, implementation and optimization of social media campaigns that are effective, cost-efficient and respectful of the customers we are targeting. We strive to open up new channels of communication, build brand awareness, engage customers, and grow our client's businesses.

2. Products & Services Offered by Your Social Media Marketing Business.

The next step is to outline your products and services for your social media marketing business. 

When you think about the products and services that you offer, it's helpful to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my business?
• What are the products and/or services that I offer?
• Why am I offering these particular products and/or services?
• How do I differentiate myself from competitors with similar offerings?
• How will I market my products and services?

You may want to do a comparison of your business plan against those of other competitors in the area, or even with online reviews. This way, you can find out what people like about them and what they don’t like, so that you can either improve upon their offerings or avoid doing so altogether.

3. Build a Creative Marketing Stratgey.

If you don't have a marketing plan for your social media marketing business, it's time to write one. Your marketing plan should be part of your business plan and be a roadmap to your goals. 

A good marketing plan for your social media marketing business includes the following elements:

Target market

• Who is your target market?
• What do these customers have in common?
• How many of them are there?
• How can you best reach them with your message or product?

Customer base 

• Who are your current customers? 
• Where did they come from (i.e., referrals)?
• How can their experience with your social media marketing business help make them repeat customers, consumers, visitors, subscribers, or advocates for other people in their network or industry who might also benefit from using this service, product, or brand?

Product or service description

• How does it work, what features does it have, and what are its benefits?
• Can anyone use this product or service regardless of age or gender?
• Can anyone visually see themselves using this product or service?
• How will they feel when they do so? If so, how long will the feeling last after purchasing (or trying) the product/service for the first time?

Competitive analysis

• Which companies are competing with yours today (and why)? 
• Which ones may enter into competition with yours tomorrow if they find out about it now through word-of-mouth advertising; social media networks; friends' recommendations; etc.)
• What specific advantages does each competitor offer over yours currently?

Marketing channels

• Which marketing channel do you intend to leverage to attract new customers?
• What is your estimated marketing budget needed?
• What is the projected cost to acquire a new customer?
• How many of your customers do you instead will return?

Form an LLC in your state!

4. Write Your Operational Plan.

Next, you'll need to build your operational plan. This section describes the type of business you'll be running, and includes the steps involved in your operations. 

In it, you should list:

• The equipment and facilities needed
• Who will be involved in the business (employees, contractors)
• Financial requirements for each step
• Milestones & KPIs
• Location of your business
• Zoning & permits required for the business

What equipment, supplies, or permits are needed to run a social media marketing business?

• Internet connection
• Social media accounts or access to create accounts
• Knowledge of social media trends, platforms, and content creation
• Advertising budget, if applicable
• Graphic design tools (e.g. Adobe Photoshop)
• Content management system (e.g. WordPress)
• Analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics)
• Permit for soliciting services in certain states or countries

5. Management & Organization of Your Social Media Marketing Business.

The second part of your social media marketing business plan is to develop a management and organization section.

This section will cover all of the following:

• How many employees you need in order to run your social media marketing business. This should include the roles they will play (for example, one person may be responsible for managing administrative duties while another might be in charge of customer service).
• The structure of your management team. The higher-ups like yourself should be able to delegate tasks through lower-level managers who are directly responsible for their given department (inventory and sales, etc.).
• How you’re going to make sure that everyone on board is doing their job well. You’ll want check-ins with employees regularly so they have time to ask questions or voice concerns if needed; this also gives you time to offer support where necessary while staying informed on how things are going within individual departments too!

6. Social Media Marketing Business Startup Expenses & Captial Needed.

This section should be broken down by month and year. If you are still in the planning stage of your business, it may be helpful to estimate how much money will be needed each month until you reach profitability.

Typically, expenses for your business can be broken into a few basic categories:

Startup Costs

Startup costs are typically the first expenses you will incur when beginning an enterprise. These include legal fees, accounting expenses, and other costs associated with getting your business off the ground. The amount of money needed to start a social media marketing business varies based on many different variables, but below are a few different types of startup costs for a social media marketing business.

Running & Operating Costs

Running costs refer to ongoing expenses related directly with operating your business over time like electricity bills or salaries paid out each month. These types of expenses will vary greatly depending on multiple variables such as location, team size, utility costs, etc.

Marketing & Sales Expenses

You should include any costs associated with marketing and sales, such as advertising and promotions, website design or maintenance. Also, consider any additional expenses that may be incurred if you decide to launch a new product or service line. For example, if your social media marketing business has an existing website that needs an upgrade in order to sell more products or services, then this should be listed here.

7. Financial Plan & Projections

A financial plan is an important part of any business plan, as it outlines how the business will generate revenue and profit, and how it will use that profit to grow and sustain itself. To devise a financial plan for your social media marketing business, you will need to consider a number of factors, including your start-up costs, operating costs, projected revenue, and expenses. 

Here are some steps you can follow to devise a financial plan for your social media marketing business plan:

• Determine your start-up costs: This will include the cost of purchasing or leasing the space where you will operate your business, as well as the cost of buying or leasing any equipment or supplies that you need to start the business.
• Estimate your operating costs: Operating costs will include utilities, such as electricity, gas, and water, as well as labor costs for employees, if any, and the cost of purchasing any materials or supplies that you will need to run your business.
• Project your revenue: To project your revenue, you will need to consider the number of customers you expect to have and the average amount they will spend on each visit. You can use this information to estimate how much money you will make from selling your products or services.
• Estimate your expenses: In addition to your operating costs, you will need to consider other expenses, such as insurance, marketing, and maintenance. You will also need to set aside money for taxes and other fees.
• Create a budget: Once you have estimated your start-up costs, operating costs, revenue, and expenses, you can use this information to create a budget for your business. This will help you to see how much money you will need to start the business, and how much profit you can expect to make.
• Develop a plan for using your profit: Finally, you will need to decide how you will use your profit to grow and sustain your business. This might include investing in new equipment, expanding the business, or saving for a rainy day.

Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Marketing Business Plans:

Why do you need a business plan for a social media marketing business.

A business plan for a social media marketing business is essential in order to organize thoughts and ideas, set goals, create strategies, and define roles and tasks. It also serves as a starting point for forecasting the financial needs of the business, and allows you to map out the steps necessary to achieve success. By clearly outlining objectives, the business plan can provide a roadmap on how to best use resources to grow and sustain your business.

Who should you ask for help with your social media marketing business plan?

You should ask a professional business consultant or social media marketing expert for help with your social media marketing business plan. They will have the knowledge and expertise necessary to help you create a comprehensive and effective plan.

Can you write a social media marketing business plan yourself?

Yes, it is possible to write a social media marketing business plan yourself. A business plan is an essential part of any successful business, and a social media marketing business plan should include details on your target market, the services you will offer, the goals you want to achieve, how you will measure success and how you will finance your venture.

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I'm Nick, co-founder of newfoundr.com, dedicated to helping aspiring entrepreneurs succeed. As a small business owner with over five years of experience, I have garnered valuable knowledge and insights across a diverse range of industries. My passion for entrepreneurship drives me to share my expertise with aspiring entrepreneurs, empowering them to turn their business dreams into reality.

Through meticulous research and firsthand experience, I uncover the essential steps, software, tools, and costs associated with launching and maintaining a successful business. By demystifying the complexities of entrepreneurship, I provide the guidance and support needed for others to embark on their journey with confidence.

From assessing market viability and formulating business plans to selecting the right technology and navigating the financial landscape, I am dedicated to helping fellow entrepreneurs overcome challenges and unlock their full potential. As a steadfast advocate for small business success, my mission is to pave the way for a new generation of innovative and driven entrepreneurs who are ready to make their mark on the world.

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How to Write a Social Media Marketing Business Plan for Your Social Media Business: A Step-by-Step Guide

Are you looking to start a social media marketing business? If so, you need to create a business plan! Creating a social media marketing business plan is essential for any social media business. Without a business plan, it will be very difficult to make your social media marketing business successful. In this article, we will walk you through each step of creating a social media marketing business plan.

Let’s get started!

What is a Social Media Marketing Business Plan?

A social media marketing business plan is a document that outlines your social media marketing business goals, strategies, and tactics. It also includes a budget and timeline.

Why Do You Need a Social Media Marketing Business Plan?

A social media marketing business plan is important because it helps you to define your social media marketing business, research the competition, set objectives and goals, develop strategies and tactics, and create a budget.

Without a social media marketing business plan, it will be very difficult to make your social media marketing business successful.

Now that we know why you need a social media marketing business plan, let’s take a look at how to create one.

Related: How to Become a Freelance Social Media Manager

How to Write a Social Media Marketing Business Plan

I recommend starting with a very basic business plan that’s only a few pages long and is at a high level so you can describe your target market and establish sales and marketing methods for obtaining new customers.

So, let’s get this party started with what you’ll need to create a basic business plan.

Step 1: Define Your Business

The first step in creating a social media marketing business plan is to define your business.

• What services or products will you offer?

A social media manager can offer many different services. You may specialize in Instagram , Facebook , Pinterest , or any other platform.

You may assist your customers on every existing platform out there. However, to sell yourself and really attract clients to buy from you, you’ll need to persuade them that investing in social media marketing for their company is worthwhile.

But how do you go about doing that?

You must communicate the problems you solve for your clients. You also need to explain why you are the ideal person to hire rather than another social media manager.

This is why you in your business plan must establish your social media marketing business’ identity and be specific about exactly what you do and how it would benefit your clients.

Here are some examples:

-I help small businesses increase their social media following with video content

-I help e-commerce businesses drive traffic and sales through Instagram marketing

-I manage social media accounts for busy entrepreneurs who don’t have time to do it themselves so they can get a steady stream of new clients.

Related: 13 Services to Offer as a Social Media Manager

• Who is your target market?

Defining your ideal client is one of the most important steps in social media marketing because it’s hard to sell to everyone. When you know who your target market is, it becomes much easier to create content that resonates with them and attracts them to your business.

Your target market is the specific group of people who are most likely to buy from you. To find your target market, ask yourself these questions:

-Who are your ideal customers?

-What social media platforms do they use?

-What interests them?

-What problems do they need to be solved?

By answering these questions, you’ll be able to better understand who your target market is and how to reach them.

• What are the unique benefits of using your social media marketing services compared to those of your competitors’?

You’ll also need to state what sets your social media marketing business apart from all the other social media marketing businesses out there.

Be sure to include a brief overview of your social media marketing business, including what it does and how it plans to make money.

Step 2: Research the Competition

In order to create an effective social media marketing business plan, you need to know what your competition is doing. You’ll need to research hh not only your direct competitors but also those companies that offer similar services.

What are their marketing strategies? What social media platforms do they use? How effective have these strategies been for them?

By understanding what your competition is doing, you can develop social media marketing strategies that are more likely to be successful.

Step 3: Create Objectives and Goals

Once you’ve defined your social media marketing business and researched the competition, it’s time to establish some objectives and goals.

Objectives are specific, measurable goals that you want to achieve within a certain timeframe.

For example, “I want to increase my social media following by 500% in the next six months.”

Goals, on the other hand, are long-term aspirations that may not be easily measured.

For example, “I want to become the top social media expert in my field.”

By setting objectives and goals, you’ll be able to track your progress and see whether or not your social media marketing business is on track and your social media marketing strategies are effective.

Related: The Ultimate Social Media Manager Checklist: Your Daily To-Do List

Step 4: Develop Strategies and Tactics

Now that you have defined your social media marketing business, researched the competition, and set some objectives and goals, it’s time to develop strategies and tactics.

Your social media marketing business plan should outline specific strategies for each social media platform you use as well as how you plan to reach your target market.

If you’re not sure what tactics to use, there are plenty of resources available online that can help you get started.

• How Will You Find Your Clients?

One of the most important aspects of social media marketing is finding clients. There are a number of ways to do this, but some of the most common is through social media advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing.

Social media advertising is the process of using social media platforms to promote your business. This can be done through paid ads or by creating engaging content that will reach your target market.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website and social media profiles for Google search. This can be done by using keywords and phrases that your target market is searching for.

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable content that will attract your target market. This can be done in the form of blog posts, social media posts, ebooks, or whitepapers.

By using a combination of these methods, you’ll be able to reach more potential clients and convert them into customers.

Related: How to Get Clients as a Social Media Manager – Tips and Strategy

• Pricing your services

You’ll need to decide what pricing model you will use and how you plan to compete with other social media marketing businesses.

There are a number of different pricing models that you can choose from, but the most common are hourly, project-based, and retainer.

Hourly pricing is where you charge your clients for each hour you work on their social media marketing.

Project-based pricing is where you charge your clients for each project you complete.

Retainer pricing is where you have a monthly fee that gives your client access to your social media marketing services for a set number of hours each month.

Once you’ve decided on a pricing model, you’ll need to set your rates.

You can do this by considering your overhead costs, the time it will take you to complete each project, and the value you will be providing to your clients.

List out the price of every service in your business plan.

Step 5: Create a Budget

One of the most important aspects of any business is creating a budget. This applies to social media marketing businesses just as much as it does to any other type of business.

Your social media marketing business plan should include a budget for both short-term and long-term expenses. Short-term expenses might include things like website hosting, social media advertising, and content marketing. Long-term expenses might include things like employee salaries, office space, and equipment.

By creating a budget, you’ll be able to track your spending and make sure that you’re staying within your limits.

• How Much Will You Spend on Marketing?

One important factor to consider when creating your social media marketing business plan is how much you’ll be spending on marketing.

Your social media marketing budget should include the cost of paid ads, SEO services, and content marketing. It’s also important to factor in the cost of employee salaries if you have any.

Make sure that your social media marketing budget aligns with your objectives and goals. If you’re not able to allocate enough money to your marketing efforts, your social media marketing business will likely fail.

Steps to Take When Your Social Media Marketing Business Plan is in Place

Now that you’ve completed all of the steps above, it’s time to put it all together

Once you have a social media marketing business plan in place, there are a few things you need to do in order to make sure it’s successful. Revisit your plan often and make changes as needed.

Make sure that you’re always implementing new strategies and tactics to reach your target market.

And finally, track your results! Use analytics tools to track how many leads you’re generating, what kind of traffic you’re getting, and how much revenue you’re generating from social media marketing.

By following these steps, you’ll be able to create a social media marketing business that is successful and profitable.

By following the steps above, you will have a social media marketing business plan that is tailored to your social media marketing business. This plan will help you to reach your objectives and goals, and stay within your budget. Use it as a guide to keep your business on track and achieve success.

Want to learn more about how to build and grow a successful and profitable social media business? Join the Social Media Manager Academy! Waitlist open now HERE with early bird discounts and bonuses!

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Creating a Winning Business Plan for Your Social Media Marketing Agency

Are you looking to start a digital marketing agency? A successful business plan is essential for any business to succeed. In this blog post, we will discuss how to write a business plan for a digital marketing agency. We will cover topics such as understanding your target audience, creating a marketing strategy, and setting financial goals. With this information, you can create a winning business plan for your social media marketing agency.

In this blog post, you will learn how to:

• Set objectives and goals to guide your business plan
• Identify and create a plan for your target market
• Develop a business model that works for your company
• Estimate your operating costs and create a budget
• Craft a marketing plan to reach your goals
• Create a financial plan to plan for success
• Assess potential risks and create a plan to address them
• Put all the pieces of your plan together
• Re-evaluate and update your plan as needed
• Leverage your plan to secure funding for your business

Establishing Objectives and Goals

When it comes to writing a business plan for digital marketing, the first step is to establish objectives and goals. This should include an understanding of where you want your business to be in the short and long-term. Consider what milestones you would like to reach and what type of growth you would like to see. This will help you create a roadmap for the future of your business.

Defining Your Target Market

The next step in writing a business plan for digital marketing is to define your target market. Identify who your customers are and what their needs are. Do some research to understand the demographics, behaviors, and motivations of your target market to make sure that you're creating content that will resonate with them.

Developing Your Business Model

Once you have identified your target market, you need to develop a business model that will enable you to reach them. Consider how you'll package and sell your services and products, how you'll market them, and what channels you'll use to reach your customers.

Estimating Your Operating Costs

Before you start your digital marketing business, you need to determine how much it will cost to operate. Estimate your expenses, such as salaries, rent, and marketing costs, and make sure you have enough capital to cover them.

Crafting Your Marketing Plan

Now that you know your operating costs, you can start crafting your marketing plan. This should include a strategy for how you'll reach your target market, what message you'll use, and which channels you'll use.

Creating Your Financial Plan

Once you've developed your marketing plan, you need to create a financial plan that includes a budget and projections for your income and expenses. This will help you determine how much funding you need and how much profit you can expect to make.

Assessing Potential Risks

No business plan is complete without an assessment of potential risks. Consider what could go wrong and how you would mitigate any potential losses.

Putting It All Together

Now that you have all the pieces, it's time to put it all together. This includes reviewing your objectives and goals, target market, business model, operating costs, marketing plan, financial plan, and potential risks. Make sure that everything is in alignment with your vision for the business.

Re-Evaluating and Updating Your Plan

Your business plan should be a living document that you revisit and update regularly. Monitor your progress and make adjustments as needed to keep your business on track.

Leveraging Your Plan to Secure Funding

Finally, you can use your business plan to secure funding from investors or lenders. Make sure it's thorough and well-written to demonstrate your commitment to success.

Writing a business plan for digital marketing can seem daunting, but with the right approach, it's an achievable task. Use this guide to help you create a comprehensive plan that will set your business up for success. Below we answer common questions entrepreneurs have about these topics.

1. Establishing Objectives and Goals

What are the desired outcomes you hope to achieve through this project.

This is a very broad question and an entrepreneur can easily get lost in their response. The key to answering this question is to understand exactly what the interviewer is looking for and how to best communicate your desired outcomes. The interviewer is looking for an understanding of your goals and how you plan to achieve them. You need to be prepared to answer this question and be able to communicate your plans clearly.

You also need to be prepared to explain why you chose these goals and how you plan to achieve them. Be prepared to discuss your plans in detail, including milestones and timelines. This will help the interviewer understand your goals and how you plan to achieve them. Be sure to also be prepared to discuss why you chose these goals and how they align with the company's overall mission. This will help the interviewer understand your goals and how they will benefit the company.

What metrics will you use to measure success?

While the question per se is about metrics, the real intent is to find out if you're a visionary entrepreneur or a numbers-driven manager. Founders who answer with a strong vision and a plan to achieve the vision are always preferred by investors and other stakeholders.

However, it's also important to understand what numbers to track. If your core product is an online service, for example, you need to track users and revenue to measure success. If you're an offline service, you may want to track the number of clients you acquire.

2. Defining Your Target Market

What geographic area or locations do you want to target with your product or service.

The answer to the question of which geographic area you want to target should be based on your target audience. You want to know who your ideal customer is and then figure out where they live and work. If you're selling something online and you're not picking a geographic area, you can sell to anyone in the world. But if you're trying to reach a local audience, you need to know where they live and where they like to shop. So it's important to know where your ideal customers are and where they like to hang out.

Who are the primary demographic groups you want to target with your product or service?

Entrepreneurs should avoid generalizations when answering this question, as they may limit their reach. While it may be tempting to answer this question by mentioning your target demographic groups as young professionals or mothers, it's better to be more specific when naming them.

For example, instead of mentioning young professionals as your target demographic, you can mention young professionals who are interested in traveling, or young professionals who are interested in fitness. This way, you can focus on their specific needs, instead of generalizing them.

3. Developing Your Business Model

What type of business model will you use to ensure long-term sustainability.

As a small business owner, one of the best ways you can ensure long-term sustainability is by embracing the art of delegation. You may be the one with the vision, but you can't do it all alone. Learning to effectively communicate and collaborate with your team will not only make the day-to-day more manageable, but it will also keep your business poised for growth and success.

How will you ensure that your business model meets the needs of your target audience?

Entrepreneurs should ensure that their business model meets the needs of their target audience by conducting market research and talking to their target audience. This will help them understand their target audience's needs and how their business model will meet those needs. Talking to their target audience will also help them develop a relationship with their customers and create a sense of loyalty and trust between them and the business.

4. Estimating Your Operating Costs

What will be your estimated monthly rent or mortgage payment.

It's important to note that the question is asking about your estimated monthly rent or mortgage payment, not someone else's. You need to think about your own ability to pay rent or a mortgage as it relates to your personal income. It's always a good idea to have a buffer of funds available to you so that you don't wind up short on rent or a mortgage, especially if you're starting a business with a lower income.

What are your estimated monthly utilities costs?

When you're looking for a job, you probably want to give the impression that your business is growing. A company with a lot of expenses, like utilities, can make that case. If your business is a small operation, though, you might want to tone down those numbers to avoid scaring off potential employers. It's not unusual for an entrepreneur to have a large utility bill, if they have an office with a lot of technology. Or, they're running projects that require a lot of resources. Still, try not to make it sound like it's going to be a regular occurrence.

5. Crafting Your Marketing Plan

What strategies will you use to reach your target market.

An entrepreneur needs to understand who their target market is, so they can reach and sell to them in a way that they will appreciate. For instance, while it's great to have a large consumer base, it's not going to help you as much if you don't know how to sell to your audience and get them to buy from you.

How will you measure the success of your marketing plan?

The most important thing to remember is to think holistically. How will you measure the success of your marketing plan as a whole? It's not just about the clickthrough rates for your social media posts or the number of people who sign up for your email list. You need to think about brand awareness, customer retention, and customer satisfaction, too.

6. Creating Your Financial Plan

What are your financial goals in the short-term and long-term.

Short-term, you'll want to express your business goals (i.e. sales goals, marketing goals, or any other objectives you have). Then, you'll want to express your personal goals, which are typically tied to your business goals. For instance, if you have a goal to have $100,000 in sales by the end of 2020, that could be tied to your goal to be able to quit your day job, or to buy a new car, or to pay off debt.

What resources do you need to reach your financial goals?

Entrepreneurs should think about their own financial goals and what resources they need to reach them. These goals can vary from entrepreneurs wanting to have a financially secure future for their family, to wanting to have the freedom to travel and live a life of luxury. Once the goals have been established, the next step is to determine the resources needed to reach those goals. These resources may include things like money, time, education, or even connections. By thinking about these things, entrepreneurs can better determine what resources they need to reach their financial goals.

7. Assessing Potential Risks

What potential risks should be taken into account when considering this project.

Innovation is a powerful force, but it is not without risk. The more innovative a product or service is, the more potential there is for it to fail. This is true for everything from electric cars to artificial intelligence. It is crucial to remember that innovation is not always successful and that failure is an inherent part of the process. While it is important to be optimistic about the future and to embrace progress, it is also critical to be realistic about the risks involved.

How can these risks be addressed or mitigated?

The key to answering the question, "how can these risks be addressed or mitigated" is to focus on limiting factors. Identify what will prevent you from achieving your business goals and address those limiting factors. For example, if you are launching a new product, you may be concerned about the demand for your product. You can mitigate this risk by creating a marketing plan and conducting market research to determine if there is a demand for your product. By addressing the limiting factor of insufficient demand, you can mitigate the risk of failure.

8. Putting It All Together

How can you apply the concepts and techniques you have learned to your own projects or tasks.

Being a business owner, I'm always looking for opportunities to grow my business and maximize my profits. One of the concepts and techniques I learned in my MBA program was how to evaluate the ROI of a project. I use this knowledge frequently as I weigh the potential benefits of new business ventures. I can apply this concept when answering the question, "How can you apply the concepts and techniques you have learned to your own projects or tasks?" by describing how I use the ROI formula to measure the potential success of a particular project.

What strategies can you use to ensure that you are able to effectively integrate the new knowledge into your work?

As a serial tech entrepreneur, I've learned how to adapt to new knowledge very quickly. Here's how I do it: I'm always working to increase my knowledge through reading articles and books related to my field. I use Evernote to keep all my information organized and easy to access. I also set goals for what I want to learn, and I make sure to stay on track to meet those goals.

9. Re-Evaluating and Updating Your Plan

What changes have occurred in the past year that require an update to your plan.

With hiring a new team member, updating your website with new products or services, or adding new products to your inventory, these are all actions that you can use to update your business plan. They show growth and progress for your company and can help you gain more customers or clients.

Are there any new objectives or goals that need to be added to the plan?

Entrepreneurs should approach this question by analyzing the current environment. Things are always changing, and an entrepreneur needs to realize that the path that got them to where they are now may not be the path that will get them to where they want to go in the future. Entrepreneurs should also be in touch with the environment around them. They should know who their competitors are, and they should be aware of what new technologies are emerging that could help or hinder their business.

10. Leveraging Your Plan to Secure Funding

How can you effectively use your business plan to secure funding.

Entrepreneurs should always be ready to show how the business plan will help secure funding. The best way to do this is to explain how your product or service solves a problem in the market.

By highlighting the problem, your company solves, you will be able to demonstrate how your business plan will help secure funding. All businesses start as an idea, and the entrepreneur's job is to show how their idea can be turned into reality, and how it will benefit the market.

Are there specific strategies you can use to increase the likelihood of obtaining funding?

Entrepreneurs should look for funding sources that are aligned with their values. For example, if you are passionate about sustainability, you should look for investors who share these values. This will help ensure that your business remains true to its mission.

Key Takeaways:

• Establish clear objectives and goals for your business.
• Identify and research your target market.
• Develop a business model and estimate operating costs.
• Create a marketing plan to reach your target market.
• Prepare a financial plan and assess potential risks.

These ten steps provide an effective and thorough approach to creating a business plan. By taking the time to research and develop a plan that specifies your objectives, target market, business model, operating costs, marketing plan, financial plan and potential risks, you can set your business up for success. Of course, business plans are not static and should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure that they remain relevant and effective. The effort you put in to creating and maintaining your business plan will be worth it when it helps you secure the funding you need to turn your dreams into reality.

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Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template [Updated 2024]

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Template

If you want to start a Social Media Marketing business or expand your current Social Media Marketing business, you need a business plan.

The following Social Media business plan template gives you the key elements to include in a winning Social Media Marketing Agency business plan (also known as an SMMA business plan).

You can download our business plan template (including a full, customizable financial model) to your computer here.

Below are links to each of the key sections of a successful social media marketing business plan. Once you create your plan, download it to PDF to show banks and investors.

Social Media Marketing Business Plan Home I. Executive Summary II. Company Overview III. Industry Analysis IV. Customer Analysis V. Competitive Analysis VI. Marketing Plan VII. Operations Plan VIII. Management Team IX. Financial Plan

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How to Start a Digital Media Company

Starting a digital media company can be very profitable. With proper planning, execution and hard work, you can enjoy great success. Below you will learn the keys to launching a successful digital media company.

Importantly, a critical step in starting a digital media company is to complete your business plan. To help you out, you should download Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template here .

Download our Ultimate Business Plan Template here

14 Steps To Start a Digital Media Company :

• Choose the Name for Your Digital Media Company
• Develop Your Digital Media Company Business Plan
• Choose the Legal Structure for Your Digital Media Company
• Secure Startup Funding for Your Digital Media Company (If Needed)
• Secure a Location for Your Business
• Register Your Digital Media Company with the IRS
• Open a Business Bank Account
• Get a Business Credit Card
• Get the Required Business Licenses and Permits
• Get Business Insurance for Your Digital Media Company
• Buy or Lease the Right Digital Media Company Equipment
• Develop Your Digital Media Company Marketing Materials
• Purchase and Setup the Software Needed to Run Your Digital Media Company
• Open for Business

1. Choose the Name for Your Digital Media Company

The first step to starting a digital media company is to choose your business’ name.  

This is a very important choice since your company name is your brand and will last for the lifetime of your business. Ideally you choose a name that is meaningful and memorable. Here are some tips for choosing a name for your digital media company:

• Make sure the name is available . Check your desired name against trademark databases and your state’s list of registered business names to see if it’s available. Also check to see if a suitable domain name is available.
• Keep it simple . The best names are usually ones that are easy to remember, pronounce and spell.
• Think about marketing . Come up with a name that reflects the desired brand and/or focus of your digital media company.

2. Develop Your Digital Media Company Business Plan

One of the most important steps in starting a digital media company is to develop your business plan. The process of creating your plan ensures that you fully understand your market and your business model. The plan also provides you with a roadmap to follow and if needed, to present to funding sources to raise capital for your business.

Your business plan should include the following sections:

• Executive Summary – this section should summarize your entire business plan so readers can quickly understand the key details of your digital media company.
• Company Overview – this section tells the reader about the history of your digital media company and what type of digital media company you operate. For example, are you a social media company, content publisher, or an advertising company?
• Industry Analysis – here you will document key information about the digital marketing industry. Conduct market research and document how big the industry is and what trends are affecting it.
• Customer Analysis – in this section, you will document who your ideal or target audience are and their demographics. For example, how old are they? Where do they live? What do they find important when purchasing services like the ones you will offer?
• Competitive Analysis – here you will document the key direct and indirect competitors you will face and how you will build competitive advantage.
• Marketing Plan – your marketing plan should address the 4Ps: Product, Price, Promotions and Place.
• Product : Determine and document what products/services you will offer 
• Prices : Document the prices of your products/services
• Place : Where will your business be located and how will that location help you increase sales?
• Promotions : What promotional methods will you use to attract customers to your digital media company? For example, you might decide to use pay-per-click advertising, public relations, search engine optimization and/or social media marketing.
• Operations Plan – here you will determine the key processes you will need to run your day-to-day operations. You will also determine your staffing needs. Finally, in this section of your plan, you will create a projected growth timeline showing the milestones you hope to achieve in the coming years.
• Management Team – this section details the background of your company’s management team.
• Financial Plan – finally, the financial plan answers questions including the following:
• What startup costs will you incur?
• How will your digital media company make money?
• What are your projected sales and expenses for the next five years?
• Do you need to raise funding to launch your business?

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3. choose the legal structure for your digital media company.

Next you need to choose a legal structure for your own digital marketing agency business and register it and your business name with the Secretary of State in each state where you operate your business.

Below are the five most common legal structures:

1) Sole proprietorship

A sole proprietorship is a business entity in which the owner of the digital marketing company and the business are the same legal person. The owner of a sole proprietorship is responsible for all debts and obligations of the business. There are no formalities required to establish a sole proprietorship, and it is easy to set up and operate. The main advantage of a sole proprietorship is that it is simple and inexpensive to establish. The main disadvantage is that the owner is liable for all debts and obligations of the business.

2) Partnerships

A partnership is a legal structure that is popular among small businesses. It is an agreement between two or more people who want to start a digital media company together. The partners share in the profits and losses of the business. 

The advantages of a partnership are that it is easy to set up, and the partners share in the profits and losses of the business. The disadvantages of a partnership are that the partners are jointly liable for the debts of the business, and disagreements between partners can be difficult to resolve.

3) Limited Liability Company (LLC)

A limited liability company, or LLC, is a type of business entity that provides limited liability to its owners. This means that the owners of an LLC are not personally responsible for the debts and liabilities of the business. The advantages of an LLC for a digital media company include flexibility in management, pass-through taxation (avoids double taxation as explained below), and limited personal liability. The disadvantages of an LLC include lack of availability in some states and self-employment taxes.

4) C Corporation

A C Corporation is a business entity that is separate from its owners. It has its own tax ID and can have shareholders. The main advantage of a C Corporation for a digital media company is that it offers limited liability to its owners. This means that the owners are not personally responsible for the debts and liabilities of the business. The disadvantage is that C Corporations are subject to double taxation. This means that the corporation pays taxes on its profits, and the shareholders also pay taxes on their dividends.

5) S Corporation

An S Corporation is a type of corporation that provides its owners with limited liability protection and allows them to pass their business income through to their personal income tax returns, thus avoiding double taxation. There are several limitations on S Corporations including the number of shareholders they can have among others.

Once you register your digital media company, your state will send you your official “Articles of Incorporation.” You will need this among other documentation when establishing your banking account (see below). We recommend that you consult an attorney in determining which legal structure is best suited for your company.

4. Secure Startup Funding for Your Digital Media Company (If Needed)

In developing your digital media company business plan, you might have determined that you need to raise funding to launch your business. 

If so, the main sources of funding for a digital media company to consider are personal savings, family and friends, credit card financing, bank loans, crowdfunding and angel investors. Angel investors are individuals who provide capital to early-stage businesses. Angel investors typically will invest in a digital media company that they believe has high potential for growth.

5. Secure a Location for Your Business

There are a few things you’ll want to take into account when looking for a location for your digital media company. You’ll need a space that is large enough to accommodate your team and all of your equipment. Additionally, you’ll want to find a location that is accessible and has good internet connectivity. You’ll also want to consider the cost of living in the area, as well as the availability of talent.

The best way to find a suitable location for your digital media company is to consult with a real estate professional. They will be able to help you identify locations that meet your specific needs. Additionally, they can provide you with information on the local market, as well as the current rental rates.

6. Register Your Digital Media Company with the IRS

Next, you need to register your business with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which will result in the IRS issuing you an Employer Identification Number (EIN).

Most banks will require you to have an EIN in order to open up an account. In addition, in order to hire employees, you will need an EIN since that is how the IRS tracks your payroll tax payments.

Note that if you are a sole proprietor without employees, you generally do not need to get an EIN. Rather, you would use your social security number (instead of your EIN) as your taxpayer identification number.

7. Open a Business Bank Account

It is important to establish a bank account in your digital media company’ name. This process is fairly simple and involves the following steps:

• Identify and contact the bank you want to use
• Gather and present the required documents (generally include your company’s Articles of Incorporation, driver’s license or passport, and proof of address)
• Complete the bank’s application form and provide all relevant information
• Meet with a banker to discuss your business needs and establish a relationship with them

8. Get a Business Credit Card

You should get a business credit card for your digital media company to help you separate personal and business expenses.

You can either apply for a business credit card through your bank or apply for one through a credit card company.

When you’re applying for a business credit card, you’ll need to provide some information about your business. This includes the name of your business, the address of your business, and the type of business you’re running. You’ll also need to provide some information about yourself, including your name, Social Security number, and date of birth.

Once you’ve been approved for a business credit card, you’ll be able to use it to make purchases for your business. You can also use it to build your credit history which could be very important in securing loans and getting credit lines for your business in the future.

9. Get the Required Business Licenses and Permits

The licenses and permits you need to start a digital media company depend on the specific business you plan to operate. For example, if you plan to sell advertising or make copyrighted content, you may need a license from the government. You should speak with an attorney or business licensing agency in your area to find out what specific licenses and permits you need for your business.

10. Get Business Insurance for Your Digital Media Company

There are various types of insurance necessary to operate a digital media company.

Some business insurance policies you should consider for your digital media company include:

• General liability insurance : This covers accidents and injuries that occur on your property. It also covers damages caused by your employees or products.
• Auto insurance : If a vehicle is used in your business, this type of insurance will cover if a vehicle is damaged or stolen.
• Workers’ compensation insurance : If you have employees, this type of policy works with your general liability policy to protect against workplace injuries and accidents. It also covers medical expenses and lost wages.
• Commercial property insurance : This covers damage to your property caused by fire, theft, or vandalism.
• Business interruption insurance : This covers lost income and expenses if your business is forced to close due to a covered event.
• Professional liability insurance : This protects your business against claims of professional negligence.

Find an insurance agent, tell them about your business and its needs, and they will recommend policies that fit those needs. 

11. Buy or Lease the Right Digital Media Company Equipment

To run a digital media company, you will need computers, software, cameras, and storage devices.

12. Develop Your Digital Media Company Marketing Materials

Marketing materials will be required to attract and retain customers to your digital media company.

The key marketing materials you will need are as follows:

• Logo : Spend some time developing a good logo for your digital media company. Your logo will be printed on company stationery, business cards, marketing materials and so forth. The right logo can increase customer trust and awareness of your brand.
• Website : Likewise, a professional digital media company website provides potential customers with information about the services you offer, your company’s history, and contact information. Importantly, remember that the look and feel of your website will affect how customers perceive you..
• Social Media Accounts : establish social media accounts in your company’s name. Accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and/or other social media networks will help customers and others find and interact with your digital media company.

13. Purchase and Setup the Software Needed to Run Your Digital Media Company

To run a digital media company, you need software to create and manage your content, as well as software to sell and distribute your content. Some common software options for creating content include Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, while common software for sales and distribution include Apple iTunes and Amazon Kindle.

14. Open for Business

You are now ready to open your digital agency. If you followed the steps above, you should be in a great position to build a successful business and know everything you need about starting a media company. Below are answers to frequently asked questions that might further help you with how to build a media company.

How to Finish Your Ultimate Business Plan in 1 Day!

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With Growthink’s Ultimate Business Plan Template you can finish your plan in just 8 hours or less!

How to Start a Digital Media Company FAQs

Is it hard to start a digital media company.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the ease or difficulty of starting a digital marketing business will vary depending on your digital marketing skills, experience, and resources. 

However, if you follow the steps above, you should be able to start your digital media company without too much difficulty.

How can I start a digital media company with no experience?

It can be difficult to start a digital media company with no experience, but it's not impossible. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• Do some research. Make sure you understand the digital marketing space and the competitive landscape.
• Develop a strong business plan. This will help you outline your goals and marketing strategy .
• Build a strong team. You'll need talented and experienced people to help you grow your own business.
• Be prepared to invest money and time. It will take a lot of hard work and dedication to make your business successful.
• Stay focused and don't give up. Successful businesses take time to build, so be patient and don't get discouraged.

If you follow these tips, you'll be on your way to starting a successful digital media company.

What type of digital media company is most profitable?

The most profitable type of digital media company is one that creates and distributes content across multiple platforms. This could include websites, social media, and other digital channels. Companies that focus on multiple platforms are typically more profitable than those that focus on a single platform, such as just a website or just social media.

A digital media company can also be more profitable if it has diversified revenue streams. This means that the company generates income from multiple sources, such as advertising, subscriptions, and e-commerce. Companies that rely heavily on one source of income are usually less profitable.

How much does it cost to start a digital media company?

The cost to start a digital media company can vary depending on the size and scope of the business. However, in general, there are some basic costs that are incurred in starting any business, such as incorporation costs, legal fees, and marketing expenses. In addition, there may be specific costs associated with launching a digital media company, such as website design and development costs, online advertising expenses, and subscription fees for digital content platforms.

What are the ongoing expenses for a digital media company?

Digital media companies incur a variety of ongoing expenses, including personnel costs, marketing and advertising expenses, and software and hardware expenses. Personnel costs can be significant for digital marketing agencies , as they often employ engineers and technical staff to design and maintain their websites and online audio and video content. Marketing and advertising expenses are also common for digital media companies, as they strive to build their audiences and generate revenue. Software and hardware expenses can also be significant for digital media companies as they often need to purchase and maintain servers, storage devices, and other computer equipment.

How does a digital media company make money?

There are a few ways a digital media company makes money. One way is through advertising. Companies pay to have their ads placed on the website or app, and then the company will receive a commission based on how many people view or click on the ad. Another way is through subscriptions in which people pay a monthly fee to access the company's content. Finally, some digital media companies make money by selling products or services related to their content. For example, a website about travel might sell travel insurance or flight tickets.

Is owning a digital media company profitable?

There are a few reasons owning a digital media company can be profitable. First, the number of people who consume digital media continues to grow. Second, companies are willing to pay a premium for quality digital media content. Finally, digital media is an effective way to reach a large number of people.

Why do digital media companies fail?

There are a few reasons digital media companies fail. First, it's difficult to compete in the saturated marketplace of digital media. Second, they don't always have sufficient funding early on to grow and scale their business properly. Third, some business owners may not focus enough on the customer experience to attract and retain customers. Finally, they may fail if they cannot pivot quickly to new trends in the media industry.

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The way a business uses social media can make people like or dislike the brand. If a business shares posts at the right time, it can build strong relationships with the audience. Creative pictures and smart words can change how customers think about your organization. This is the real power of good social media management.

Over time, we’ve seen how a well-planned and maintained social media marketing strategy, especially when using efficient tools like a Social Media Scheduler , can make a big difference. It’s not by chance but because of careful planning and doing things the right way.

What Is Social Media Management

Social Media Management tips are important part of today’s business marketing plans. It means making, planning, studying, and interacting with posts made on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.

This isn’t just about putting up new posts on your company’s social media pages. It also involves talking to your audience and finding new ways to get more people to see and interact with your posts.

You need to understand how different social media sites work and how your target audience uses them. In simple words, social media management helps businesses achieve their goals by using social media in the right way. Choosing the right platforms for your brand is another of the handy social media management tips.

Good social media management is more than just posting updates on your company’s social media pages. It also involves talking to your audience and finding new ways to get more people to see and interact with your posts. While it might seem easy, managing social media can take a lot of time. Because of this, many companies choose to hire a dedicated social media manager or use a tool that lets them plan posts ahead of time.

Managing social media accounts for clients is no small feat. It requires careful planning, consistent communication, and a deep understanding of each client’s unique brand and audience. From creating engaging content to tracking analytics, managing social media accounts for clients involves numerous tasks that require a strategic approach.

A key aspect of managing social media accounts for business is focusing on customer engagement and brand representation.

For instance, a company may use its Facebook page to share updates about new products or services, respond to customer inquiries, and engage with followers through comments and likes. These are practical social media management examples that help businesses connect with their audience and build a strong online presence.

Furthermore, managing social media accounts for businesses also includes monitoring trends, tracking performance metrics, and adjusting strategies based on these insights.

Looking for an effective social media management tool?

Look no further than social champ, an all in one social media management tool for publishing, scheduling, monitoring analytics, and more, 20+ social media management tips for your business.

We have compiled our top 20+ social media management tips for your business accounts to implement this year!

Plan Your Social Media Posts Well

Every post you share on social media should be useful or interesting to your followers. Think about what your followers might want at different times as they get to know your brand. Do they need information, fun, or inspiration? Your posting plan should be able to change to meet these needs, making sure your followers always find your posts helpful and enjoyable and making this one of the most practical social media management tips for beginners.

Use Pictures and Videos to Tell Stories

Use tools to help manage your social media, be regular and honest in your posts, talk and interact with your audience.

Engaging with your audience regularly is also among the most effective social media management tips. Social media is not just about posting stuff; it’s about making friends and talking to them. It’s a place for two-way chats, not just one-way messages.

Make Sure Your Posts Look Good on Phones

Lots of people use social media on their phones or tablets. So, it’s really important to make your posts look good on these smaller screens.

Keep an Eye on How Well Your Posts Do

Try out different things to see what works best, run social media advertisements, try to make your posts go viral, team up with micro-influencers, make your posts useful, relevant, & informative, know when to talk about trending topics, monitor growth & adjust your strategy, show people behind your brand, be smart with hashtags, pay attention to what people say on social media, leverage the benefits of user generated content, keep an eye on new updates & features, share reviews.

Related Article: 6 Social Media Engagement Ideas to Embrace Your Audience!

Following the social media management tips mentioned above can greatly improve your presence online. The secret to good social media management in 2024 is a good mix of data-driven insights, real human connection, and the ability to adjust to the ever-changing online world. To keep growing and doing well, your approach should be as changing as the audience you want to engage. By using these strategies, you don’t just increase your brand’s visibility and trustworthiness but also become a leader in your field. Get ready to take on the social media world. The tips provided are not just a simple guide but a starting point for taking advantage of the many opportunities offered by the social media world.

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How Can Startups Leverage Social Media for Brand Building?

Apr 5, 2024

In the fast-paced world of startups, mastering social media can be a game changer for brand building. We've gathered insights from brand managers and creative directors to bring you 15 expert strategies. From planning consistent, high-quality posts to leveraging user-generated content campaigns, discover how to make social media work for your startup's brand narrative

Plan Consistent, High-Quality Posts

We paved our way from a small startup to an international company with clients in over 150 countries. A huge part of it has always been social media. Before we started our blog and began appearing on webinars, we built our brand awareness on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The most effective way of building your brand on social media is through a simple strategy: Plan out when and how you want to post. Consistency is the most important part of creating a reliable image. So, think about how much time you can actually devote each week to each platform. Don't plan out too many posts per week if the tempo will be too high for you and you will have to eventually resign. It's better to post once or twice a week, but ensure that what you post is consistent with your brand, your color identification, and your needs.

Just because you're working on your own doesn't mean you can't create high-quality content. High-quality content is rich in information; it's engaging and memorable. So, each time you create a post, create a small checklist in your head: Is this content quality?

It's good to focus on building a very strong base audience when you're starting. You are going to achieve that by holding Q&A sessions and creating engaging posts and stories where you explain some concepts or ask questions to the viewers. You can quiz them on matters connected to your field of work. We used to ask our audience what were indicators of a strong brand in their opinion, answer some of the top comments, and then post research on the topic the following week. This way, our audience started to rely on us as thought leaders in the field. They would share the research with their colleagues, and suddenly, our following would grow more and more.

Waleria Pagowska , Product Marketing Specialist, Brand24

Showcase Behind-the-Scenes Content

One highly effective way for startups to leverage video marketing on social media is through the creation of "behind-the-scenes" content. This approach humanizes your brand, allowing your audience to connect on a more personal level. Showcasing the faces behind your products or services, your workspace, and even the process of how your goods are made, or services are executed can significantly enhance brand loyalty and trust. This type of content doesn't always require high production values, making it a cost-effective strategy that can yield high engagement rates. By giving your audience a peek into your brand's world, you're not just selling a product or service; you're inviting them into a story they'll want to be a part of.

Mike Vannelli , Creative Director, Envy Creative

Engage in Relevant Facebook Groups

A proven method of leveraging social media for brand building is to have members of your team join and engage in relevant Facebook groups. For example, if you sell cheese, you could join recipe groups, moms' groups, and, wait for it... cheese groups! Engage with the posts and group members through posts and comments, and try to elevate your profile to moderator status when possible to give you a bit more leeway with self-promotion. From there, start funneling people to your brand page and consider making a group for your brand once you have momentum.

Dennis Consorte , Digital Marketing & Leadership Consultant for Startups, Snackable Solutions

Be Creative and Take Risks

Honestly, the mistake most startups—and businesses in general—make on social media is taking it too seriously without being willing to take a risk. Be creative and have fun with it. Which brands do you actually remember for their social media posts? For me, it's brands that have fun with it, like Wendy's, or sports teams like the Chargers, who do cool stuff like turning their schedule reveal into an anime video instead of just dropping a screenshot of a list of dates, times, and opponents.

If all you're doing on social media is posting 'Here's our mandatory post celebrating (insert holiday here),' interspersed with sharing a blog post from your website because you read somewhere that you need to post on social media, you're not going to get anywhere.

Your brand on social media doesn't have to mesh perfectly with how you are perceived elsewhere. Just because Wendy's social media is sarcastic and witty doesn't mean I expect the cashier to make a quip about how my diet is going because I ordered a Diet Coke with my four Baconators.

So, if you're just starting out and don't already have a healthy number of followers, you need to actually get some attention somewhere. Start out trying to engage in a fun, funny, or creative way wherever and whenever you can in replies or trending topics. No one is going to find you if you're just posting generic content to your timeline or story every day with no followers, so you have to insert yourself where people are already engaged.

Travis Schreiber , Director of Operations, Erase Technologies

Tailor Strategy to Startup Nature

Social media offers a cost-effective way to not only increase brand awareness but also reach a global audience, thanks to the large user base of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The key to successfully using social media is to tailor the approach to the specific nature of the startup—be it a product (B2C) or a business-to-business (B2B) solution. This differentiation is critical because it dictates the strategy that should be used.

For B2C, direct interaction with the target audience is of paramount importance. One effective method is to use influencers. Depending on your available budget, initiating collaborations with micro-influencers can be a smart strategy. They can reinforce a brand's message by reaching potential customers in a way that is both authentic and engaging.

And for B2B, the most suitable platform is LinkedIn. The emphasis should be on demonstrating expertise and clearly articulating the startup's unique value proposition. Partnering with influencers who are respected experts in the field can also be beneficial, as their endorsement can increase trust.

Olga Natalchenko , pr manager, Wiserbrand

Integrate Channels into Unified Strategy

Reusing everything and integrating all channels into a single strategy, then adapting them to different channels, is what works best for us—and it's the most cost-effective approach.

Here's an example from my workplace: SEO is our most crucial customer acquisition channel, which is why it is the centerpiece of our strategy. Now, when we create an article on a certain topic, we ensure to also create an infographic that we share on social networks on that topic, make posts on X and LinkedIn, and produce a YouTube video.

This way, we cover the topic comprehensively and ensure we reach our audience, no matter which channel they prefer.

Marco Genaro Palma , Chief Marketing Officer, PRLab

Host Live Virtual Events

Start by doing live virtual events on social media! These days, social media platforms allow startups to easily go live. Startups can host AMAs on their social media channels to directly connect and speak with their community members on social media.

Brian Wong , founder, Spectrum

Build CEO/Founder's Personal Brand

The social media strategy used for your startup is critical to its success, and leveraging the right outlets is key. However, one often overlooked marketing tool is building the CEO/Founder's personal brand.

Leveraging the expertise of the leaders in the organization, showcasing their passion for the brand, and building their sphere of influence can take your startup to the next level. The human-to-human factor builds the 'know, like, and trust' factor that is nearly impossible for a faceless startup to reproduce on its own.

Also, for startups that are seeking funding, the saying is 'VCs fund the founder,' thus adding to the importance of building the CEO/Founder's personal brand.

Claire Bahn , CEO and Co-Founder, Claire Bahn Group

Create Engaging, Shareable Content

One effective way for startups to leverage social media for brand-building is by creating engaging and shareable content that resonates with their target audience. This could include behind-the-scenes glimpses, user-generated content, and interactive posts. From my experience, this approach helps foster a sense of community around the brand and encourages users to become brand advocates, ultimately leading to increased brand visibility and loyalty.

Jayen Ashar , CTO, Scaleup Consulting

Weave a Relatable Brand Narrative

Use storytelling. Storytelling on social media isn't just about sharing what your product or service does; it's about weaving a narrative that connects your brand's values, mission, and vision with your audience on a personal level. This method goes beyond traditional advertising by engaging potential customers in a narrative they find relatable, inspiring, or compelling.

For instance, a startup can share stories about the challenges it faced in the early stages of its business, the inspiration behind its products, or how its services are making a difference in customers' lives. This approach enhances brand visibility. It's about creating content that resonates on a human level, making its brand memorable and distinct in a crowded market.

When done effectively, storytelling can boost engagement rates, increase followers, and drive conversion rates, as people are more likely to support and purchase from brands they feel emotionally connected to. Additionally, leveraging user-generated content as part of your storytelling strategy can amplify your brand's reach and authenticity.

Encouraging your audience to share their stories about your brand or how your product has impacted their lives expands your brand's presence and credibility through genuine, customer-driven narratives. This approach enriches your brand's storytelling and builds a community that feels valued and connected to your startup's journey.

Kristin Kimberly Marquet , Founder and Creative Director, Marquet Media

Proactively Manage Online Communities

One effective way for startups to leverage social media for brand building is through proactive community management. This involves actively engaging with the audience on social media platforms by initiating conversations, responding to comments, and participating in relevant discussions. Proactive community management helps in creating a relatable and approachable brand image, fostering a sense of connection and loyalty among followers.

Engaging with the community doesn't just mean addressing queries or concerns; it also involves sharing valuable content, asking for feedback, and showing appreciation for customer interaction. By doing so, startups can build a strong, engaged community that feels valued and heard. This active engagement not only increases brand visibility but also provides invaluable insights into customer preferences and behaviors, which can guide future marketing strategies and product development.

Steven Picanza , Co Founder, ANEWBrand

Integrate SEO Keywords in Posts

Searching for products/services within social media is gaining popularity, especially with younger audiences. Startups can integrate SEO keywords into their social media content to make their posts searchable within the app and search engines. The brand should add keywords within their video content (spoken out loud and/or included within overlay text), captions, alt text, and image file names. This strategy can be effective for noting the products/services that the brand offers, where the business is based, and the core mission of the company.

Megan Gersch , Owner + CEO, Megan Gersch

Share Stories and Nurture Community

I think the best use of social media for effective brand building is, one, sharing storytelling content and, two, nurturing your community. Creating engaging content that tells a story and feels true to your brand and voice will resonate with (and attract) the right people.

Social media is a great way to have one-on-one conversations with your community and to build loyalty. Your community and brand will be shaped by their (customers') feedback. Nurture these relationships!

Ally Case , Founder + CEO, Uppercase Media

Analyze Competitors for Content Strategy

Startups leveraging social media for brand-building should rely heavily on a data-led approach. This means analyzing the performance of content published by their competitors and understanding what kind of content is working best with different audiences on different social channels.

In the ever-changing landscape of social media marketing, this kind of intel helps brand managers tweak and pivot their content strategy because what worked last month isn't necessarily going to work next month—trends move quickly!

Furthermore, utilizing competitor analytics on your target social media channels will de-risk your social content strategy overall. Doing so essentially shortcuts the test-and-learn process and enables you to execute content ideas based on competitive data insight. Why not utilize the communication techniques and media types that you know are already cutting through in the News Feed and use these to inform your next best posts?

Tim Hill , Co-Founder and CEO, Social Status

Leverage User-Generated Content Campaigns

Use UGC campaigns to build up customer relationships and leverage their recommendations to promote your new product. By releasing a product beta to unique customers and testers, you can begin to build buzz with their reviews, ratings, and video content before launch.

Customer videos using your product and similar UGC can become the marketing material to run in your social media campaigns, landing pages, and other content. UGC strategies are also easy to gamify to pump up engagement rates, or in hashtag marketing to encourage more views and interactions.

Feature users' content as your promotional material to inspire new customers, pique their interest, and get involved. Authenticity and social proof drive better purchase conversions, making UGC the natural route to onboarding customers and building new rapport.

Joanne Demeireles , CXO, Oula Health

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More From Forbes

Six ways social media fuels b2b startup growth: attracting success.

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Nat Lennox is a B2B Marketing Advisor & Consultant at Nat Lennox .

In part one of this series, I briefly discussed how B2B startups can use social media to create positive business outcomes by driving revenue. In this follow-up, let’s discuss using your socials to attract success through talent acquisition, earned press and easier funding rounds.

If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend reading part one, " Six Ways Social Media Fuels B2B Startup Growth: Generating Revenue ," as a primer to this piece. It details three ways social media drives revenue to accelerate growth for your business.

OK! Let’s dive in. Here are three more things social media can help achieve for your B2B startup:

1. Attract top-tier talent to your organization.

The economy ebbs and flows, but the highest caliber talent is always well sought-after, even in a down market. Especially for startups, it can be hard to compete with larger competitors that can throw top salaries and lush perks at prospective employees. However, social media can help startups even the talent playing field.

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The best way to attract top-tier talent—on and off social media—is by leading your current team with integrity and creating a positive culture within your organization. On social media, you can easily highlight these aspects of your business. Social gives potential employees a chance to discover what working for you might be like.

Ready to use social media to land top candidates? Here are some tips:

• Showcase and celebrate your current team members’ wins. Tag them by name (with their permission) and show genuine gratitude for their efforts.

• Like and engage with current employees’ posts. Support their thoughts and opinions at every opportunity.

• Always treat previous employees with integrity and kindness. Wish them well and celebrate their new professional adventures on socials.

• Nominate your talented team members for awards. Celebrate and share any industry recognition they receive.

• Share educational achievements and team activities that made a difference. Off-sites, team-building sessions and conferences that enhance your team’s professional development are great opportunities to share.

2. Generate interest from the press.

Earned media can accelerate a startup's success through increased exposure and brand reach.

When a company secures positive coverage from reputable publications, the credibility earned can build significant legitimacy with potential customers and partners. Well-crafted press proliferates a company’s narrative into the market, building trust and enhancing reputation.

However, many fledgling startups lack the financial resources needed to hire high-powered public relations firms to secure media connections.

Luckily, journalists continually look for stories and sources on your social platforms. Social media allows startups to reach the media with less investment. By sharing thought leadership, investing in video content and encouraging your senior leaders to share their expertise on social platforms, you place your company in the landscape where journalists source material.

Ready to use social media to earn some press attention? Here are some tips:

• Make sure you’re investing time and energy into developing your creative content. Similarly to your customer strategy—engaging thought leadership pieces, industry insights and visually appealing posts will help you stand out in a journalist's feed.

• Use relevant hashtags or occasionally tag journalists in posts related to their areas of interest to increase visibility. Don't overdo it; you want to get their attention without hounding them.

• Stay engaged by actively participating in industry conversations online and responding promptly to comments.

• Focus on building relationships through genuine interactions.

• Steer clear of shameless self-promotion. Journalists seek valuable resources for reliable information and are likely to be turned away by sales-like language.

3. Make fundraising fast and easy.

Venture capitalist funds want to invest in winning businesses that enhance or improve their current portfolios—but from a financial and reputational perspective. VCs are paying attention to which startups are rising fast, who’s grabbing headlines, and which founders are the “ones to watch” with fresh ideas and perspectives. Beyond the numbers, all of these factors help inform their investment decisions.

When founders enter a funding round, they don’t want to feel like they’re begging for pennies.

The most successful rounds start with investors approaching the startup proactively—typically because that investor has already heard the hype about said company and is intrigued by the potential investment before ever meeting them.

Social media is the perfect platform to prime the pump for easy fundraising. By encouraging each of your founders and senior leadership team members to build their brands, you can elevate the VC community’s perception of your business so that they’re primed and intrigued long before you’re talking dollars.

Ready to entice VCs via social media? Here are some tips:

• Take time to develop and build out your founders’ and senior leadership members’ individual social presence. Let them craft their voice and share their genuine interests. Resharing company content is great, but senior team members should be sharing beyond that, with a regular cadence.

• Make sure your company pages and senior leadership pages are connected to relevant VCs in your area to increase visibility.

• Regularly send out a Slack or email reminder to senior leadership with links to earned media articles for easy sharing.

• Encourage your senior leadership team to engage in like-minded communities.

• Measuring social media’s impact on your fundraising efforts will be a breeze—either you’ll have interested parties approaching your business with investment inquiries, or not. Learn as you go and adjust. If you have a hard time during Series A, for instance, it might be prudent to double down your social visibility efforts far ahead of Series B.

Hopefully, this two-part series can be a reference for making social media an integral part of your B2B marketing strategy. Whether you are using your social channels to shorten the sales cycle, generate demand, enhance the customer experience, attract investment, entice the press or woo top-tier talent, thinking strategically and investing properly in socials can accelerate your growth and lead to incredible outcomes.

Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?

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Here’s your social media productivity plan.

We all want our social media efforts to yield great results, but most of us realize it isn’t as easy as “tweet it and they will come.” Like anything else in your business, you’ll need a plan. But don’t worry!

Creating a social media plan for serious success is easy and doesn’t take a ton of time, which, if you are anything like me, is one of your most precious commodities!

In this article, I will outline five steps for a social media productivity plan: Create Reasonable Goals, Formalize Your Plan, Measure Success, and Repeat!

1. Create Reasonable Goals

Social media marketing benefits just about any other marketing strategy, including brand awareness , customer relationship building , influencer and blogger outreach , etc. And yet, all of these results are hard to quantify.

You need easy, tangible goals to reach on a regular basis.

It’s one thing to say, “I want more social engagement!” or “I need more likes.” But try to quantify it. How many likes would be really helpful? Is it more important to focus on shares and retweets?

For example, you can focus a lot on shares because social is a huge part of an inbound marketing strategy. Consider your business and what is necessary to see some real value.

2. Formalize your Plan

You have your goals, but how you are going to reach them is another story! This is a step that, if not executed correctly, could be a large time sink. My team creates a monthly social media calendar, so we can focus on execution once the month starts. Some things to consider putting in your plan are:

• Upcoming Events : Live events are fantastic for social sharing. Make sure to create or find out the event hashtag to get additional sharing power around it.
• Content Calendar for social sharing : This includes thinking about calls to action (like a banner at the bottom of each post) to maximize retweets and shares.
• Press Releases : Do you have any news to share? Formalize it in a release. The format is pretty straightforward, and you can have ChatGPT write it for you. It is perfect for tasks like this.
• Monthly themes of what are sharing: For example, August could be focused on “Social Productivity,” and everything in the sharing plan has that underlying theme

I found that Google spreadsheet is often the best way, so I can share it with my team and make the planning collaborative.

3. Use the Right Tools

Plenty of social media tools make you and your team more productive. But there’s an important balance here: Too many tools can be distracting, so you need the right amount while still being able to add new tools that use new technology.

My social media tool suite is pretty minimal but I am always ready to add new ones if I come across something that offers new ways to accomplish old tasks. Here are the tools I use daily:

• Agorapulse for social media scheduling and social media listening
• Tweetdeck for Twitter chats. It is pretty much the only free Twitter tool that was left to us after Twitter made their API paid-only
• Text Optimizer which uses AI to create long-form content for video descriptions and social media captions.

All of these tools have pretty solid collaborative features allowing your whole company to contribute their effort to the social media strategy. There are also quite a few business phone apps allowing you to integrate your social media insights into the customer support strategy.

4. Measure Success

Was your goal 60 followers in four weeks or a certain amount of clicks on shared posts? Check in regularly and make sure you are tracking toward your goal so you can make tweaks as you go.

If you aren’t seeing your following grow, perhaps you need to focus more on your engagement outreach strategy, perhaps you need to retweet more of other people’s content to get noticed. These regular check-ins help you avoid having to make a major shift in strategy and keep you productively working on the right stuff to reach your goals.

One example of a tweak that worked was when we started introducing more photos into our social sharing calendar. Posts with photos immediately got more clicks and shares than our text-only-based posts, so we shifted mid-month to put a higher percentage of visual posts.

See how the first month goes, adjust, and start the cycle over again. By being realistic about what you want to achieve, organizing and formalizing a plan, and staying focused on success, you’ll never risk burning cycles on social without the results.

Image: Envato Elements

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