Insights

At IronGlove Studio, in additional to our search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), and pay per click (PPC) digital marketing services, we also offer strategic organic social media strategies and implementation to support our clients looking to grow their social media presence organically on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

We take a holistic approach to developing a social media strategy for our clients, understanding the goals they have in mind, the content approaches and key storytelling aspects that could be integrated into the social media content, and the best way to learn from every social media post and story that we create.

Take a look at our steps to build organic social media strategies for our clients.

Account deep dive: Profile observations and social content audit

When we begin working on social media with a new client, we first examine their existing social media pages, identify high-level, easy changes to help improve the page(s), review the content types and opportunities for future content tests, and highlight some essential best practices, helping to educate the client and ensure alignment when our team steps in to support these channels.

Some examples of areas we look at during this stage are profile bios; are there any opportunities to jazz this section up? It’s often one of the key sections that new followers see when they come to a page. Can we include more specific, valuable information here? Is there a key campaign, promo, or website we can link to, short or long-term?

We also look at generally how the accounts are set up; is the client using a Business or Personal account? What do the Instagram Highlights look like? Are they resharing customer photos often? All of these factors (plus more) work together to create a cohesive page and brand, so reviewing how each social media page is working to represent the overall brand, is important.

We also like to call out future opportunities for growth and increased brand visibility. If a client is in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) or eCommerce space, for example, it could also be great to test something like influencer marketing or affiliate sales. Making those points at this early stage will help us in the future with new campaign ideas and ensuring we are continuing to think outside of the box for our clients.

Competitor research

In the early stages of building social media strategies, we also conduct competitor research for our clients. We try to understand: What are competitors doing well? What are they doing not-so-well that we can learn from, or make even better? We examine how their social media pages are crafted, how they respond to customers, and any opportunities we can glean inspiration from to build out our own strategy and content tests to try in the future.

In addition to our regular competitor research due diligence, we use specialized tools that can mimic home user accounts online to search out competitors and see how they really rank online. We also examine ranking factors such as keywords, engagement rates based on Google data, content weight and relevancy, as well as technical aspects of the competitor’s website that may provide indicators of how they are viewed and referred by search engines.

Set social strategy goals and content pillars

From our initial deep dives and research, our team develops an initial social media strategy along with content pillars to help guide how we craft social media posts and the content areas we will be focusing on. We say “initial” because strategies can, and should, develop over time as we learn and better understand what customers, partners, and clients are hoping to gain from working with us on social media management.

At a high-level, our strategies focus on setting key performance indicators (KPIs) to help guide the work we do and help us to set initial performance benchmarks, then breaking down the steps and tactics we can leverage to put the strategy into action. We include our main objectives for the work we will be conducting, engagement tactics (how we will try to engage with the audience), reporting metrics, and general social media tactics we plan on testing.

Build a social media brand persona

In our strategy, we like to build and include a social media brand persona to reference and help guide how we speak to customers. We use this section to bring the brand to life even more through a clear voice and attitude, which will be conveyed through the social media posts.

For an audience to feel engaged with a brand and eager to connect, we like to build out who they will be connecting with. We look at the personality, tone, visual styling (how can the images match up to the persona) and the customer feel; what should a customer feel when responding?

Develop per platform micro-strategy

Every social media platform has different requirements, capabilities, and audiences. Tailoring your social strategy per platform is crucial to success on the platform. We build out a per platform micro-strategy to ensure that we are utilizing each social media platform to the best of our ability and tailoring the content to the audience and objectives for each platform.

For example, there is much less friction to guide customers to a direct link on a Facebook post in the caption, versus on Instagram where direct links are really only easily accessible in an Instagram story or link in bio.

Per platform, we break down our objectives for the platform; often impressions, engagement, and followers as our guiding metrics, the frequency and content we plan to dedicate to this specific platform, our target audience (based on account deep dive, the demographics we are seeing), and tactics to support growth, such as the on-page engagement tools at our disposal, testing direct, engaging questions with customers, enhancing brand partnerships through community management, and more.

Hashtag best practices

An important part of putting our strategy into action also includes how we utilize hashtags and the best practices to ensure we’re getting the most visibility out of them to support our social posts.

We ensure we’re thinking about the accessibility of hashtags such as always capitalizing the first letter of each word in the hashtags, disclosing sponsored content when working with influencers or other partnerships, and using brand-specific hashtags.

The importance of community management

Community management is such an important factor to consider when activating your brand on social media. It is a way to directly get in touch with your customers, reshare content from your customers and partners, deepen relationships, and provide customer support.

We spend a significant amount of time on community management for our clients, we know how important it is to an outstanding brand reputation and fostering positive, long-term relationships with followers, customers, vendors, and other partners.

Post-implementation: Tracking and reporting

Lastly, we include a section in our strategy on tracking and reporting social media performance. Performance reporting is a crucial aspect of social media management as it allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve the strategy, evolving and growing over time as we learn.

We monitor key metrics on a monthly basis, reporting on the previous month, for impressions, follower growth, engagements, link clicks, noteworthy content wins or standout successes, and top performing posts per platform. This data helps guide future content development and highlights areas for improvement.

Like we mentioned earlier, the strategy development isn’t a ‘one and done’ type of project. Ongoing optimizations and changes are required to ensure we keep up with new platform updates and new tools, understanding what the customers are seeking and engaging with, and generally, we aim to test and learn as much as possible to provide the best work and results for our clients.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can support your brand with social media management, reach out to our team today to get started.