Social Media Strategy is the engine room of every Social Media Marketing Framework. It gets frustrating when the strategy that was once yielding great results for your social media suddenly stops giving you great results like it use to. I know that is the reason why you became interested in this article.
Not to worry, in this article, I will share with you, step-by-step, what I do when my Social Media Strategy stops working.
1. I Check My analytics
The first thing I do is to check my analytics. I watch the trend from when it was going well, to when it became constant, to when the drop began. When I have been able to pinpoint these dates, I go to my second step.
2. I check my Daily Report during those days
This is why having a daily report worksheet for your actions on social media is very important for social media marketing. It helps you monitor all the daily actions you’ve taken for reference in the future. I look out for the differences between the actions I was taking when the strategy was working to when it stopped working. This step is very crucial so you need to pay attention to details. Here are the important steps I take;
When going through my daily report, I take note of
- My engagement strategy
- Contents I posted those days and its analytics
- Any other factor that could’ve affected performance those days such as Sponsored ADs, Influencer marketing, collaborations, etc.
By the time you’re done with these first two steps, you might’ve come up with one, two, or more theories that could be the possible explanation for why your strategy has suddenly stopped working. Now, keep in mind, the reason the strategy stopped working could be more than one, but how exactly do we determine this? WE TEST THE THEORIES
PS: If you do not have a daily report don’t worry, it only makes diagnosing the problem a lot easier but not impossible. The absence of a Daily report simply means you’ll have more fun coming up with and experimenting with several theories.
3. I research
I check to see if the platform has introduced new Updates that might be impacting my strategy. I also check up on what my competitors are doing and what is working for them. I also do some research across several websites to see how others in similar situations solved theirs.
The information gotten from this research helps me with formulating my theories.
4. I test out my theories
Here, I dismantle my strategy into steps and test my theories out. Let’s say the engagement strategy I used to perform on my page was reduced and I used steps 1 and 2 to come up with these theories
- I didn’t use some engagement strategies on the days I registered a decline
- Some hashtags I used on the days I was doing well were absent during the decline
- I posted a smaller number of reels during the decline
- I wasn’t posting consistently during the decline, etc.
Now with these theories, I develop a plan to address each of the above theories one after the other. It could look something like this;
- Use the missing engagement Strategies every day for 1 week.
- Use the missing hashtags on posts for 5 days (when it comes to hashtags you do not want to repeatedly use one set a lot to avoid being shadow banned).
- Post more reels for 2 weeks.
- Post consistently for one month.
PS: Do this one after the other not concurrently. This will help you measure how each of them contributed to the overall success of your strategy individually.
While testing your theories it is important to keep track of the analytics before implementation and after implementation. This will help you compare the results each of these strategies gave you and only then will you be able to pinpoint the cause of the decline while also knowing the correct set of strategies that will solve it.
I will give you an example of a page I worked on.
Company X is a FinTech B2B platform that targets an audience between the ages of 30-55yrs. They came to me to help them with their Social Media page (I started with Instagram and Facebook as that was their most active platform) that hasn’t registered any meaningful results in a long time and these were the steps I took;
I Checked analytics
While checking analytics, I found out that all the metrics were very low. Reach was at –67% follower growth was at –71%, etc. I came up with 3 main theories
- The objective they were hoping to achieve with the social media page wasn’t viable as their primary target audience might not be using the platform.
- The content they were posting was ineffective and not for their audience
- They had ineffective strategies or no strategy at all
I tested my Theories
Now that I have something to work with, I went in to test them out. I started with the content.
Facebook and Instagram are first, engagement-focused platforms driven by entertainment, then information and education. With Facebook and Instagram, the more engagement your post gets, the more visibility it gets and the more reach it gets. With these in mind, I created a new Content Strategy. The content calendar I created was focused on passing those same messages in simpler form through entertainment. This is because I wanted to get the attention of the demographics with the largest presence on these platforms and get them to engage on these posts which will help the Meta Algorithm rank these posts for more visibility.
Did it work? Yes, it did, at the end of the day, we registered over 700% increase in followers and over 1k% increase in Reach. All efforts were organic at this time.
The next part I worked on is the strategy. I found out that they had no strategy so I went in to create all their social media Strategies. I changed the primary objective to Awareness as I found out through comments and DMs, that people didn’t truly understand what the business was all about. I applied the engagement strategy I came up with for 2 days and saw instant results. I was getting the attention of the target audience. By the time the Awareness objective was applied across all the other strategies, including creating content that educated the audience more about the business& answered some FAQs, entertained them enough to draw them in to actually see and understand the message the business was trying to pass, etc., the stats were already going off the roof.
Their main objective was to get business owners to subscribe to their platform, I originally felt this won’t be possible with Instagram and Facebook as these aren’t the primary social media channel for the demographic they were looking for but I had to test out my theory and see. I decided to include sponsored Ads in the mix. I targeted specifically B2B business owners and surprisingly, we were able to get some subscribers, not up to the target we set but it was something, I didn’t even expect to get conversions from Facebook or Instagram.
Finding out why strategies aren’t working on social media is my favorite part of Social Media Marketing. It feels like an adventure to me and with every strategy challenge I face, I come out with a whole new knowledge and skill.
I truly hope that this will help you figure out why Your strategy has stopped working.
