Study: Optimizing a Social Media Content Strategy

In Software Advice’s recent social media study, 168 marketers 168 marketers were polled about their social media content strategy. Keep reading to find out what works – and what doesn’t work – for marketers today.

Tactics for Optimizing a Social Media Content Strategy

Modern marketers have a seemingly endless number of things to keep up with, thanks to the need for a solid social media content strategy. There’s all the Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest posts, plus responding to users, listening for new leads, managing your brands reputation… The list goes on and on. But what tactics are most important to marketers today? Of the 168 marketers polled, these are the tactics they found most and least important:

The tactic marketers found most important this year? Images. With the growth of image-based sites like Pinterest and Instagram, images and photos must play an important part in your content strategy. Although images come naturally to some companies (just look at how amazing Sephora and Anthropologie’s Pinterest accounts are), it doesn’t mean that you should forego images just because your company doesn’t make pretty clothes. Any company can create and share images using apps like PicMonkey and PinWords. Just find a few quotes relevant to your company, make it look pretty and voila! Instantly sharable image.

Marketers also found targeting specific groups, hashtags and users especially important this year. Thankfully, social media has made this task a cinch. From the incredibly customizable target audiences on Facebook, to the plethora of hastags for seemingly every industry imaginable, reaching your audience is easier than ever. However, when you’re creating theme messages it’s important to keep in mind that that users want to be talked to on social media – not advertised at. Even though many marketers found CTAs important, it’s even more important not to over use them. Just remember – only tag users when relevant, only use relevant hashtags and use CTAs sparingly.

What works for one social channel is not going to work for all of them. That’s why marketers also found optimizing images, videos, and limiting the number of characters for posts important. While Pinterest’s 500 character pin descriptions might be great for describing your new video tutorial, you only have 140 characters to pull users in on Twitter. Once you learn about the different image sizes, character lengths and what your users respond to, optimization will become second nature.

Goals Achieved Through Social Content

Of course building brand recognition, gaining followers, increasing customer engagement, generating leads, building thought leadership, and driving traffic, SEO and direct response sales are all great things to have success in, but at it’s core social media marketing is about building and nurturing relationships. That’s why it’s so wonderful to see that nurturing relationships has been so successful for marketers. As I mentioned above, people trust people – not ads – so by treating them like a human being over social media, users will be more likely to interact, remember, purchase from and recommend your brand.

So who were these people?

Of the 168 marketers polled, 77% worked at small companies of between 1-100 employees:

With the majority of companies being relatively small, it’s no surprise that 64% of their marketing budget came in under $250,000:

However, that doesn’t mean that these findings are any less important to 20,000 people corporations spending millions of dollars every month on advertising. Why? Because social media is here to stay.

What are some of your favorite social media marketing strategies? Let us know in the comments!