A well-defined social media strategy should detail exactly how your brand conducts itself in social and what content it publishes.

Keep Your Social Media Strategy Broad

Make sure you keep this strategy broad, describing processes and guidelines around things like tone of voice. Avoid being too specific about the exact products and tools that you use, as these are ever-changing and likely to render your strategy obsolete before long.

Use organisational goals and audience insight to determine social channels
Your choice of social media platform should be dictated by your wider marketing aims. Whilst the temptation might be to have as many social accounts as possible, this stretches resources and may result in a lack of focus and clarity.

Think about the wider needs of your business and its marketing. How could the key social channels drive these, and which ones are most relevant for your brand?

Cross-channel content
For a genuinely multi-channel or omni-channel experience, you’ll need a planning process that works across all your teams and departments. Without this, you run the risk of concepts, activities and content being planned in siloed channels; e.g. in-store, website, direct mail, advertising and social media may all be planned independently.

Integrate Your Marketing

This would create a disjointed experience for the consumer resulting in a reduced impact and, ultimately, a reduced revenue from the activity. Consider how you can keep your entire marketing mix integrated, and cross-promote to consumers of your various formats.

The easiest way to do this is to repurpose the same content across several channels. Examples include:

• A white paper or research report sectioned off into shorter blog posts
• Articles and blog posts read aloud to create short podcasts
• YouTube videos cut into shorter edits for Instagram
• Articles and blog posts turned into short caption videos for Twitter
• Photography from a print ad shoot uploaded as a Pinterest board
• A character in a TV advert recreated as a Messenger chatbot
• A conference presentation posted to LinkedIn as a Slideshare

Join the discussion

What are some other ways that you could repurpose content for several different media channels? For example, how could you repurpose a tweet for a blog post? Or a Youtube video into an Instagram post? Write your ideas below.