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Toyzie Studio
Social Media

Updated 5 minute read

What a social media strategy should decide before the first post

A strategy is not a promise to post more often. These are the decisions that need to be made before anything is published, while it is still cheap to change your mind.

Most social media accounts do not fail at the point of posting. They fail earlier, at the point where nobody wrote down what the account was for. Every post then has to carry a decision that was never made, and the person publishing ends up guessing weekly about tone, subject and frequency.

A strategy does not have to be a long document. For most small businesses it is two or three pages, and it exists so that anyone who opens the calendar knows what belongs in it and what does not. These are the decisions that document needs to settle.

Six decisions to settle first

  1. 01

    Who the account is for

    Not an age bracket. A description specific enough that you would recognise the person in your inbox: what they are trying to do, what they already understand, what they are quietly sceptical about, and where they currently look for answers. If two people in the business describe this audience differently, the account will end up with two voices.

  2. 02

    What the account is for

    An account can build recognition, answer objections before a sales conversation, attract applicants, or support customers who have already bought. Those are different accounts with different content. Choose the one that matters most in the next twelve months and write it in a single sentence, because that sentence is what makes a post good or irrelevant.

  3. 03

    Which platforms, and why each one

    Choose on two grounds: where your buyers already spend attention, and which format you can produce to a decent standard every week. A founder who is comfortable on camera and a founder who writes well should not end up on the same platform by default. Two channels kept properly are worth more than five kept alive.

  4. 04

    The themes you will return to

    Three or four recurring subjects, each tied to something the business genuinely knows. Themes stop the calendar becoming a list of unrelated ideas, and they turn planning into a question of which theme comes next rather than what on earth to post today.

  5. 05

    The rhythm you can hold in a bad month

    Set the frequency you could still meet during your busiest fortnight, then treat anything above it as a bonus. A quiet and reliable account reads as a stable business. An account that publishes daily for six weeks and then stops for two months reads as a business in trouble, which is the opposite of the intended effect.

  6. 06

    How you will judge it

    Agree the measures before there are any numbers to look at, otherwise you will judge the account by whichever figure happens to look best that month. One measure of reach, one of engagement quality and one that connects to the business, such as enquiries that mention having seen you somewhere, is enough to start with.

A strategy is not a decision to post more. It is a decision about what the account is for, written down so it survives a busy week.

Write the tone as rules, not adjectives

Tone is usually described in adjectives, which is why it drifts. Adjectives cannot be checked against a draft. Rules can. Write down the words you use for your own product, the words you never use, whether you write in the first person or as a company, how you reply to a complaint in public, and what you do when something in the news sits close to your industry.

The test is simple. Someone covering the account for a fortnight should be able to read those rules and sound like you. If they could not, what you have written down is still adjectives.

Decide in advance what you will not do

Strategies are easier to follow when they rule things out, because most of the pressure on a channel arrives as a suggestion in the moment. Writing the exclusions down turns a run of awkward judgements into one decision made calmly, in advance.

  • The platforms you are deliberately not on, and the reason, so the question stops being reopened
  • Subjects the business will not comment on in public
  • Whether you will show client work, and the permission you need before you do
  • Whether you will take part in trends whose meaning you would have to look up first
  • What happens to a good idea that has no home in any of your themes

Judging the account honestly

Reach, followers and engagement all move for reasons that have nothing to do with your business, so treat them as indicators rather than results. What is worth recording each month is smaller and more useful: which posts brought a message from someone who could actually buy, which subjects people asked follow-up questions about, and which formats were quick to make against which ones quietly consumed a full day.

Give the plan a review date before you start, roughly three months out. Three months is long enough for a rhythm to become visible and short enough that you have not spent a year on a channel that was never going to work. At the review the question is not whether the numbers went up. It is whether the account is doing the job you wrote down at the start, and whether the rhythm is one you can still keep.

What the finished document contains

  • One sentence on who the account is for
  • One sentence on what the account is for this year
  • The platforms chosen, with the reason written next to each
  • Three or four themes, each tied to something the business knows
  • A publishing rhythm you could hold in your busiest month
  • Tone rules a stand-in could follow without asking
  • The measures you will look at, and the date you will look at them

More notes

Reading about it is the easy part. Running it is the work.

If this is work you would rather sat with someone else, tell us what you are trying to get done and by when. The reply will be specific about what that would involve.

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