Social Media Content Strategy in Alexandria

Deciding what the account is actually for

An account can be a catalogue, a service desk, a proof that the business is real and working, or a place to build an audience for a season. Those produce completely different content, and an account trying to be all four is usually recognizable by how little any of it achieves. Strategy is the decision, made once, that everything afterwards can be judged against.

Who the account is talking to, specifically

A wholesale buyer, a retail customer, a corporate procurement officer and a summer visitor are four different readers with four different questions. Naming which of them the account is for, and in what proportion, is what prevents a feed that addresses everybody and persuades nobody. Where a business genuinely serves two, that is planned rather than left to resolve itself.

What a strategy contains

Strategy produces the decisions the rest of the work depends on:

• The single job the account is doing for the business
• The audiences it serves, named and put in order of value
• The content themes worth returning to rather than a list of ideas
• Platform choice based on where those audiences actually are
• A posting rhythm the business can sustain in a busy season
• How the inbox is handled, since that is where the outcome lands
• What will be measured, agreed before anything is published

Themes outlast ideas

A list of thirty post ideas lasts a month and then the account is starving again. A small set of themes that the business can speak about credibly forever produces content indefinitely, and it also makes the account recognizable. Businesses that run out of things to post did not run out of ideas, they never had themes.

What a trading business can credibly talk about

Product and range, capability and capacity, process and how things are actually made or moved, proof through work delivered, and answers to the questions customers keep asking. These are unglamorous and they are also the things a buyer here wants to see. An account posting motivational quotations is describing an agency's difficulty rather than a business.

Planning around a season that dominates the year

Where the summer carries the revenue, the calendar is not evenly weighted and the strategy should say so. The quiet months build the audience, answer slow questions and prepare material; the season sells to the audience already there. Treating every month identically wastes the cheap months and under uses the expensive ones.

The commitment has to survive a busy month

Most content plans are written in a calm week and abandoned in a busy one, particularly in businesses with no marketing staff. A rhythm is set at a level that survives the worst month rather than the best, because an account that goes quiet for six weeks costs more credibility than three extra posts ever bought.

Deciding what success means before starting

An account judged on followers will be optimized toward followers, which is easy to buy and hard to bank. Agreeing the outcome first, usually enquiries and answered questions, is what keeps the content honest. Analytics and reporting covers measuring it.

Choosing what the account will not do

A strategy that lists everything the account could do is a wish rather than a plan, and the useful half is what gets excluded. Deciding not to chase trends, not to post daily, or not to serve a second audience for now is what makes the remaining commitments achievable. An account attempting everything available to it is the most common way a small business wastes a year.

Revisiting it when the business changes

Strategy is not permanent, and the usual trigger for revisiting it is the business itself changing: a new range, a new market, a shift from retail toward wholesale. What does not justify a rewrite is a slow month or somebody seeing a competitor's post. Reviewing deliberately once or twice a year prevents both drift and constant restarting.

Related work

Strategy is only useful if it becomes work. Content creation turns it into posts, and publishing and scheduling keeps it running. Both sit under social media management in Alexandria.