This blog is dedicated to sharing the seven components, one-by-one, needed for a strong social media strategy, i.e., a Power Presence. 

I’m going to share the seven components, one-by-one, needed for a strong social media strategy, i.e., a Power Presence. This is for personal brands and business brands alike as each principle can be scaled up or down depending on how big of an entity the brand is.

Power Presence Principle #1: Purpose

A clear social media strategy starts off with establishing the foundation of its purpose – the point of having a social media presence in the first place. 

It includes the mission statement of your brand (the why) and the goals for your social media strategy. Those goals are written in concept form and in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can actually measure if you’re making progress or not.

A lot of times, those goals are identified by doing an audit of the performance of your existing social media channels. 

You should at least have annual goals which change each year. You can break those down into quarterly goals, but going for a targeted goal for an entire year is a powerful exercise – leaders buy into it, you learn A TON, and you’ll be set up the following year to be even more successful. 

Power Presence Principle #2: Plan

Now that you’ve established who you are and what you represent and goals around that in your Purpose, you have to externalize those elements by establishing your M.A.P. so your purpose can connect with others.

Message

Audience

Platform(s)

How to do this:

1. MESSAGE: Establish 3-5 viewpoints (content pillars) that make up you overall message as a brand. 
2. AUDIENCE: Write down several sentences about the ideal audience (person or group of people) that you’re talking to in your message. You’re identifying the characteristics of your perfect client. 

PLATFORM(S): Identify the platforms that you’ll continue to use or start using to share your message. Every brand is unique in how it should approach choosing which platforms to be active on. There are a number of factors to consider, but the most important thing to remember is that you should not be on more platforms than you and your team can handle. You should be able to consistently put out content on each platform for at least three months before you consider adding another one. There have been plenty of times where brands have needed to sunset platforms as well. 

Power Presence Principle #3: Posts

Now, we’re getting into the part of a social media strategy that most people think of first, but it’s important to take the time to begin with the initial two principles which set the stage for the actual content that you put out into the world. 

Actually putting together the posts that are shared on your platforms are what you work on at this point. Building a content calendar that houses your consistent posts on a weekly or monthly basis is a smart way to have a holistic view of your content and not just look at posts one at a time.

This is where you exercise your copywriting, your picture-taking, your video-producing muscles to put your messaging in front of your ideal audience.

A question I get regularly is how much should a brand be posting and the answer depends on multiple factors, but a good rule of thumb is to at least post once a week across your platforms. 

That’s the baseline. 

From there you could go to three times a week and some brands have the resources and audience to sustain posting every day. It’s truly unique to the brand. 

Power Presence Principle #4: Process 

Process includes how to actually work the platforms – what buttons to press, how to adjust the settings, what’s the content scheduling tool that you use or do you post natively in each platform.  

Process also includes content production. Content production consists of the structure and workflow for how the content gets made from A to Z. What are everyone’s roles and responsibilities for all involved and the timing for it all. 

Lastly, Process includes integrating teams. Every team involved in making content should have a regular touchpoint to go over what’s being made. This is so content can be repurposed on different channels, people can be informed about priority messages others are working on, and what ends up happening is people start offering ways to enhance content that’s already being made as everyone’s now in the loop. 

A great way to do this is to have a weekly editorial meeting where a representative from every potential content channel can get together and discuss the content they’re working on.

Here are the areas of content channel owners who need to be involved in this meeting and ultimately integrated into the content-production process. I’m aware that not all of these will apply to every brand. Also, some of these roles might come in the form of in-house employees, vendors, freelancers, or contractors. 

• PR
• Sales
• Marketing
• Social media
• Internal communications
• External communications
• Executive communications
• HR communications

Social media is a very popular outlet for brands and it can almost feel as if everyone in an organization wants their say in what gets posted on social media channels. But keep in mind that social media content needs to be integrated into the content of the overall brand, so if you’re putting out a newsletter, the same messaging should be included on social media; if you’re putting out a message internally to your employees, that content too needs to be considered for your social media channels; and if you’re composing a blog article, that content needs to be represented on social media.

This Process principle emphasizes bringing all of the channels and messages together not just to benefit your social media platforms, but to benefit your brand as a whole so it acts more strategically and cohesively. 

Social media is not a silo, it is a vehicle for connection – connection across your brand’s teams and connection across your brand’s audience.

Power Presence Principle #5: Proximity

Bringing other humans into your brand story.

This is where your digital brand and social channels really take off – the magic sauce of digital engagement.

It takes two – two things for people to trust your brand and want to follow and grow along with you professionally: consistent messaging (which we’ve already discussed in previous principles) and proximity. 

“Your network is your net worth.” – Porter Gale

It’s a powerful statement. Being in close proximity to others can build trust and uplift your brand as a whole. Digitally connecting your brand with other accounts online shows proximity through online networking.

But, how do you do this? Below are strategies to incorporate into your content when appropriate. Please remember, this isn’t to take advantage of other accounts and people. These are ideas to implement when they’re genuine and aligned with your brand. 

• Opportunities for connecting your accounts to others, e.g., collaborating on Instagram Reels.
• Leveraging other audiences, e.g., replying to comments under a bigger thought leader’s LinkedIn post.
• Tagging – pulling other accounts and audiences into your content when relevant.
• Guesting on podcasts. You don’t need your own podcast to make the audio world work for you.
• Searching and connecting with people on social media. On LinkedIn, you are one click away from any decision-maker.
• Engaging, e.g., sharing others’ content in your Instagram Stories, tagging them, and engaging with them further from there.
• Media, e.g., making yourself available to be an expert source for journalists in news stories.
• In-person networking – NEVER underestimate the power of physically getting in a room with others. Taking pictures and posting and tagging accordingly connects the in-person experience online afterward.

Power Presence Principle #6: Performance

If a magic key existed to unlock your social media strategy – it would be this principle. 

You have to regularly look at your social media metrics and track the data to even have a social media strategy. 

Putting numbers down on paper that represent your goals is how to become more efficient and streamlined with your content. 

I LOVE diving headfirst into a brand’s metrics and crafting the countless number of stories that the numbers tell. It’s so beautiful, eye-opening, and validating for the person behind the brand all at the same time. 

If you’ve never tracked your social media metrics before, start simple and build after you feel more comfortable spotting patterns because that’s ultimately what you’re looking for, is patterns. 

What works and doesn’t work month after month.

At a minimum, you should be looking at your social media metrics once a month and putting them down either in a report or a spreadsheet or both so you can see the progression and the differences between the months throughout the year. 

Some of the standard metrics to track:

• How many posts per week/month
• Follower growth
• Engagement rate
• Impressions and/or reach
• Click-through rate

You can get far more detailed from here with the metrics that you keep track of, but these are where to start and in many instances will be much more involved than brands need to be. 

Also, I would encourage you to review the metrics with others involved in the brand regardless of whether they have a hand in your social media and marketing efforts. This allows others additional awareness into how content affects the organization directly and allows for additional buy-in.

Lastly, if you’re part of a larger organization, make sure your leadership sees your reports regularly. The amount of respect for your work you will get from this one act alone is unmatched.

Power Presence Principle #7: Participation

These are the icing-on-the-cake elements of your social media strategy.

This is when you consider adding on additional owned channels.

If you’ve been consistent on your other social media channels for three months, then this is a time to consider adding other platforms that you’re not on yet or picking back up ones that have gone dormant due to a lack of strategy or resources. 

This is also where starting an employee advocacy program can be incredibly powerful for your brand. Employee advocacy is the practice of employees promoting their company on their personal social channels. It allows brands to leverage their workforce to authentically spread brand awareness and turn employees into trusted online brand ambassadors. 

This is also the best time to create a social media policy for your brand or update your existing one. The HR department governs a social media policy in a brand but the team that leads social media needs to work alongside HR to ensure the most important elements are included. A social media policy is essential as it protects the brand’s reputation, ensures consistency, helps mitigate legal risks, preserves confidentiality, and encourages employee advocacy.