Increasingly businesses are becoming more aware of the role social media plan in the marketing plan. However, many social media users for business are not able to track its impact or results. Many business owners realize that they should be in the social space, but jump into it without a strategy. Without a well thought out strategy social media marketing can seem ineffective and ultimately a waste of time.

In this webinar, Edgar’s founder Laura Roeder discusses the steps to develop an advanced social media strategy. I will outline Laura’s step-by-step guide and give additional tips and examples to solidify her points.

1. Batch Updates

Batching refers to creating categories and accomplishing a group of smaller tasks at once. For example, if you want a cookie, would you bake just one or a dozen? When it comes to social media updates, Laura suggests writing your social posts in batches. Develop different categories for your updates, such as blog posts, 3rd party content, promotional, or fun posts. Then determine how many posts for each category works with your strategy. Using this framework, batch your updates (copy + images).

As a social media manager, the morning scramble to put together a day’s worth of posts can be hectic. By setting up your updates in batches ahead of time you can develop the best copy, optimize your images, and choose great 3rd party content to share with you audience. By planning ahead, it will give you a better opportunity to ensure that every update is top quality.

2. Determine Frequency

As a suggestion, Laura outlines this formula for determining update frequency (specific for Twitter): six updates per day which is thirty updates per week. Then look at how many categories you have to determine who many of each type you’ll need to craft to total thirty posts. Your weekly or monthly number may be different depending considering your unique content mix. What percentage of your updates will be your blog pots, 3rd party content, and promotional content.

It is so much easier to write updates when they are broken down in this way. Although the numbers may seem daunting to tackle in one sitting, remember that are eventually going to be writing those updates anyways. Why not take the time to more clearly craft your content mix and frequency strategy.

3. Write Posts

Next, it’s time to actually write out your updates. Laura recommends businesses write out updates for three months at once. Again, this seems like a daunting number, but with the batching strategy this is entirely possible. Benefits of the batching method include saving time, easier work flow, and readiness for review. It’s a lot easier to source out twenty great 3rd party articles in one sitting, than searching for one article everyday.

This strategy isn’t going to work for all types of businesses. Determine what time frame works best for your industry and your resources. Does your industry curate a lot of new content? Will information be outdated within three months? Do you have one person on your team handling all your social media efforts? Do you have multiple people writing social media content? Answer these questions to develop your unique strategy surrounding writing social updates.

4. Repeat Content

You may be apprehensive about repeating content on one social media platform, or posting duplicate content across a number of platforms. However, Laura argues that repeating content is completely acceptable. She goes on to outline why this practice is acceptable by accompanying her point with some staggering statistics, including the fact that only 4% of Facebook users see updates, and that the half-life of a tweet is only 24 minutes.

With numbers like this, it’s safe to conclude that a huge chuck of your audience will not look at your content. In order to get the most eyes on your content don’t hesitate to post multiple updates on the same content across platforms. We use this principle at VA Partners when we publish a new blog post. To get the most amplification of our blog posts, we Tweet it out two times the day it’s published, and again once on the next day. In addition, we are also re-purposing our older blog posts consistently.

5. Schedule Updates

Now that you have all your posts, you can schedule them. The biggest advantage about scheduling social media updates is that it actually gets done. It’s easy to get caught up in the morning bustle, meetings, and other activities at work, and social may take a back seat. By scheduling your posts you can be certain that they are going out. Being consistent on social media is vital. Scheduling your posts will also eventually give you insights about what your best times to post are.

Here at VA Partners we have also been experimenting with what the best time to tweet is. Consider not only what you’re posting on the weekday within work hours, but also your weekends, early mornings and evenings. A concern for many businesses is that your social presence will seem too robotic if it’s very strictly scheduled. However, it’s important to realize that although your posts are scheduled, it is still you writing all the updates. Even with scheduling, you still speak with your brands voice and can remain authentic.

6. Live Interactions

Batched updates don’t replace live interactions. After all, social media is meant to be social. The great thing about this approach is that once all the pre-planned updates have been scheduled, it allows you to allocate more of your social media time to monitoring and interacting with your audience. For example, you can follow event hashtags, participate in Twitter chats, and develop conversations with your audience. Making social media a part of your daily routine by setting aside time in your day specifically for checking on social. Alternatively, not something that is always running in the background, which can be distracting throughout the day. Remain spontaneous with your social media accounts, but do so with a process. Determine who in your department of company will handle real-time tweets and content production go stay within your brans’s voice.

At VA Partners we’ve found connecting with people through social media to be a great way to cultivate conversations. For our client Sales for Life, using our marketing and social media strategies, we were able to increase website and blog views by 300%, within the first three months. Making connections on social media has also resulted in new relationships that eventually lead to sales. We have also used social media interactions to build a community of local associations and bloggers.

Once you’ve developed your strategy conduct regular audits to see how well your strategy is working. An individual post can fizzle out quickly on social, and an account’s growth can take time. This is why a social media strategy is so important. It gives you a concrete plan and metrics to measure yourself against.

If you’re interested in discussing your social media strategy and how it works it contributed to an Inbound Marketing Machine, contact us. Sign up as a Moz community member for access to their webinars on demand.