Social media strategy is crucial in determining the success of your social media marketing. Without a proper strategy, your path towards achieving social media goals will be rough. It is necessary to build a perfect strategy so that you don’t lag behind.

To build a perfect social media strategy, you must understand the 5Ws of social media strategy. These 5Ws will answer all your questions and help you to build the outline of your strategy.

Why do you want to be on social media?

Ask yourself why you want to be on social media. This will lead you towards your social media goals. Your goals should be specific, measurable and time bound. For instance, if your goal is to increase engagement on social media posts, it cannot be measured nor is it specific. An example of a goal is to grow your Instagram followers by 1000 per week. This is specific as you’re focusing on a social media network. It is measurable and time bound to grow 1000 followers per week.

Who is your target audience?

Defining target audience is important, as they are the end receiver of your content. Every business and creator makes content to target the potential audience who are more interested in what you are providing. To know who your audience are, understand who they are. Are they specific to some occupation, gender, location, age group etc. If you are a beauty influencer, your target audience are women. If you are someone who sells pop culture phone accessories, your target audience are young people who are mostly engaged in pop culture.

What are you going to share?

Defining your target audience will automatically help you understand what you are going to share because all target audiences have different kinds of interest levels to consume the content. Younger audiences like to engage with memes and entertainment so giving them content in their interest level will boost your engagement and followers. Give your audience what they want.

Where are you going to share?

This is a very important aspect of a social media strategy. Where you will share the content will be a major factor in determining the success of your social media strategy. For this is it necessary to understand where your target audience usually hangs out? Which social media platform they spend their most time and conduct your marketing strategies there. If your target audience are millennials then market on Facebook where the majority of millennials reside. If your target audience are professionals then LinkedIn is the best option.

When are you going to share?

Time is a pivotal factor in social media strategy. If you want to boost your content engagement and increase more followers, you must post at the right time when your audience is most active. This will not only boost engagement but also helps with wider audience reach.

To effectively plan your social media strategies, make a social media content calendar. This will help you to scrutinize what, where and when you will post content on social media.