Building your brand online is complex and a balance between attracting new followers and engaging with your audience. But to draw people to your account, you need to focus on your social media strategy. Your strategy can be broken down into 5 steps, and I’m providing some free platform recommendations for each step! ⬇️

Content Planning

As a rule, I sit down and plan my content for social media one month at a time. As a super type A person, I love staying organized and having my content topics written down in a calendar format to keep me accountable for posting. Some tools I’ve used for this content calendar purpose are Asana and Trello. Both platforms are very similar in their layout and purpose and offer free personal plans. I will go to the calendar view and add a task for on every day I want to post on social media that month, sometimes with just a placeholder or a topic title or the full post if I have all the information. I use their boards view to keep a running idea bank of posts and their app makes it handy to jot down social media ideas on the go when you’re not in the position to draft a full post in that moment.

Beautiful Imagery

Don’t have time to take some photos for your feed? There are great options for stock photography out there that don’t look like stock photos (no fake laughter and handshakes here). Unsplash and Pexels are just some of my favourites for stock imagery. Keep in mind that while stock photography is great to supplement a graphic or fill a spot in your social calendar, you should also include photos of yourself, your product/service and general graphics as well to keep your feed diverse. Just remember to credit the photographer in your caption if you use the download for free option!

Graphic Design

Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram posts, Instagram stories and more can and should be branded to match your business! One of my favourite tools for business graphic design is Canva. It is a very popular tool, so I’m not surprised if most of you already use it! It is great for creating quick, beautiful graphics to brand your feed consistently. I recommend creating templates for yourself to have a consistent look and feel in the majority of your posts. If you’re feeling fancy and can pay for premium, Canva also lets you save brand colours, logos and access premium elements and photos. Other options include InDesign and Snappa but I consider Canva the best and most cost-effective option of the three in my experience.

Content Scheduling

No more setting yourself reminders on your phone to post to social media at a certain time – you’re better than that! Setting up content scheduling is so easy and such a time-saver. Once a month, take a look at your content planner, draft your messages and graphics and pop them in a scheduler for certain dates and times and watch the engagement roll in. There are lots of options out there for scheduling, including Later, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer and more. All platforms have their pros and cons – for a free version, I enjoy Later’s ease of use and their linkin.bio feature. For a bit of a payment, I like how detailed Sprout Social is and the analytics it can provide. To choose one that’s right for you, determine your must-haves (cost effective, analytics, scheduling to all platforms) and do some research on each of the platforms. Trial and error for a bit until you find the one that works for you!

Analytics

Once your content is posted, don’t stop there! Make sure you’re analyzing your post performance to know if your content is resonating with your audience. Do you have a lot more engagement on that post with fitness tips than you did on that post with a photo of your studio? That’s not a coincidence – your audience is obviously looking for that type of content more from your feed. Using analytics directly from each platform or from tools like Buffer, Later or Sprout Social can help you analyze your content and inform your strategy going forward.

Check out our portfolio for some previous client social media work!