Nearly every business today has a social media presence. Far fewer have a social media strategy.
If your posts are getting a handful of likes but aren’t creating measurable business results, you’re not alone. Many businesses invest hours each week creating content without seeing much return. The good news? A few strategic changes can dramatically improve your results.
Here are seven steps to help your social media efforts work harder for your business.
Step 1: Build a team
Social media management done well requires solid strategy and planning and does not have to rest on a single person’s shoulders. Not only do multiple team members share the workload, but you also benefit from different perspectives and specialties.
When selecting your social media team members, you want to choose people who are already active on social media and enjoy using it. It’s helpful to have members who are hip to the platforms you will be using, and they should be savvy enough to understand the strategy and engage audiences while preserving brand and maintaining appropriateness. Some initial posting oversight may be necessary, but you don’t want someone on your team who requires ongoing monitoring.
Step 2: Identify your audience and their interests
You know who your customers are. Now you need to think about their habits and interests. Yes, demographics are important – especially when determining which platform(s) will reach audience segments best. But it will also help to determine interests and behaviors of your audience to understand what types of content will engage them.
Questions to ask yourself about your target audience include:
- What challenges are they trying to solve?
- What goals are they working toward?
- What information would they find valuable?
- What other brands or organizations do they follow?
Additionally, it’s worth looking at who else your audience is following (both your competitors and other pages that might naturally overlap) and how they are interacting with those brands.
Step 3: Choose your platform(s)
You might think you need to be on all the social media platforms. Or perhaps you are struggling with simply managing a single one. The key to how many platforms you need, is in how many platforms you can manage well, starting with the one(s) most applicable to your audience. Managing well means posting regularly, responding to audience engagement and seeing continued growth. Once you have a good track record with a single platform, you can start to branch out.
It’s important to note that although some social media platforms can be connected, allowing a single post to serve multiple places, each medium will respond best to content specifically designed to match its preferred format. This means that managing multiple platforms well may mean planning and posting different content for each medium.
When selecting your platforms, you want to consider your audience. In general:
- Facebook remains one of the strongest platforms for community engagement, local businesses, events and product discovery. While younger audiences spend less time there than on other platforms, it continues to reach a broad demographic and is particularly valuable for adults over 30.
- LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B, professional networking and business services. Audiences here typically range from 25 – 34 years of age and are highly educated and affluent.
- Instagram, due to its reliance on Reels and Stories, is great for visual brands and local services. This audience skews younger, with more than 60% of their total audience being 18 – 34-year-olds. They are highly active, respond to fast-paced visual content, have purchasing power and consume a mix of content.
- TikTok is an ideal platform for reaching younger demographics with the main audience chunk being ages 16 – 34. This platform focuses on connecting people through shared passions, so using it effectively means finding the right subcultures that align with your brand.
- YouTube is an excellent platform for long-form educational content and evergreen visibility. This platform tends to resonate best with audiences aged 15 to 35, though growth is happening fastest with older generations. The audience typically falls into one of three categories: Dedicated learners, casual entertainers and niche enthusiasts. Attention spans with this audience are short which means videos must engage them within the first few seconds to hold them till the end.
Step 4: Identify your goals
A natural goal for most businesses when it comes to their social media efforts is to connect with audiences and build awareness. But your efforts can do so much more. Knowing what you want to accomplish with your efforts is important to formulating your strategy and knowing how to measure results.
Some goals you might consider:
- Keep customers updated
- Build relationships
- Support the community
- Promote products
- Increase brand awareness/market to new customers
- Provide customer service and support easily
- Get people to like our brand
- Drive traffic to the website
- Connect with like-minded prospects
- Keep up with competitors
- Gain referrals
- Become established as an industry expert
Your strategy should identify all the goals you want to achieve, so that your content formulation can be deliberate for each. This will result in the highest engagement.
Step 5: Create content that supports your goals
Once you know your goals you can start to determine what sort of content you need and what resources you have available. Resources should include both internal and external sources, and fall into categories such as:
- Educational content: Tutorials, industry news and quick tips; Think about trending topics for your industry, step-by-step instructions and customer FAQs.
- Entertaining/Emotional content: Behind-the-scenes, brand storytelling and relatable moments; Find opportunities to highlight employee milestones and customer successes. Celebrate holidays, show glimpses behind-the-scenes and of staff having fun. You can also consider community events and news.
- Promotional content: Product features, launches and offers; This is an opportunity to debut new products and services, convey what you do to make customers’ lives easier and share occasional marketing messages and commercials.
- Social Proof: Customer testimonials, case studies and reviews
A common mistake many businesses make is posting only promotions or salesy content. A healthy social media presence includes a mix of educational, entertaining, community-focused and promotional content. Many marketers follow an 80/20 approach—about 80% of posts provide value or build relationships, while 20% directly promote products or services.
Step 6: Formulate a posting strategy
A critical step in managing social media well is to maintain a consistent presence. While recommendations vary, consistency is far more important than volume. Posting three quality pieces of content each week is often more effective than posting every day without a strategy.
If you feel you need some guidelines, this 2025 article from Hootsuite can help. But please note the original point – quality and consistency trump strict formulas.
- Facebook: 1-2x/day
- LinkedIn: 1-2x/day
- Instagram: 3-5x/week
- IG Stories: 2x/day
- TikTok: 3-5x/week
- YouTube: 1/week
To maintain audience engagement, it is also important to develop a feedback strategy to ensure all audience interaction is acknowledged and all opportunities are maximized. This is where having a team can be especially helpful, as various team members can respond to engagement based on their area of expertise.
Timing of posts is also important to consider. Overall, engagement is higher across all platforms on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and typically between the hours of noon and 6pm local time. Weekends and early morning post tend to result in the lowest engagement across all platforms.
Each platform offers direction on the precise times that produce the best engagement. Facebook and Instagram, specifically, have distinct behavioral trends.
- Facebook: engagement is concentrated in the afternoons but sustains good momentum into the evening
- Instagram: favors the midday slump, making the midmorning to early afternoon window the sweet spot
Step 7: Determine which metrics you will watch – then watch and react accordingly
The last step to any good marketing campaign is measurement, and it starts with knowing which metrics you should be watching.
Social media platforms today have lots of metrics to watch. It is worth spending time to learn the different measurements and what each means. In general, here are some wide guidelines of what to watch for a few common goals:
- If one of your goals is to build Awareness, you want to track follower growth, reach and impressions. Dig deeply to determine what types of content move the needle most.
- If you are working to drive brand engagement, measure page visits, shares and engagement through Likes and comments.
- If you hope to increase customers, track things like click-through rates, website traffic and leads generated.
Metrics tell the story of what’s working—and what isn’t. If educational posts consistently earn more shares than promotional posts, create more educational content. If videos outperform graphics, invest in more video. The goal isn’t simply to collect data, but to use it to refine your strategy over time.
Social media success rarely happens by accident. Businesses that consistently see results have a clear strategy, understand their audience, create valuable content and continually refine their approach based on performance.
If your social media feels like a constant obligation instead of a valuable marketing tool, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
At Vantage Consultants, we help businesses develop practical social media strategies that produce measurable results—from content planning and team workshops to full-service campaign management. We’d love to help you make your social media efforts pay off.
