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Most organisations have a social media presence. Fewer have a social media strategy. The difference is usually visible: accounts that post regularly without a clear sense of who they’re talking to, why those people should care, or what the posts are supposed to achieve beyond filling the content calendar.
A social media strategy doesn’t need to be long. But it does need to exist, and it needs to connect to something outside itself.
Social media objectives that mean something
The most common social media objectives, “increase engagement”, “grow our following”, “build brand awareness”, are not really objectives. They’re things that might happen as a result of doing social media well, but they don’t tell you what you’re actually trying to achieve or how you’ll know when you’ve achieved it.
Useful social media objectives are connected to wider organisational goals. If the organisation is trying to recruit more volunteers, a measurable social media objective might be a specific number of people clicking through to the volunteer sign-up page from social channels in a given period. That’s trackable, it’s connected to something that matters, and it gives you a way to evaluate whether your activity is working.
Social media objectives that exist only in relation to other social media metrics, follower counts, likes, impressions, tend to drift. They look fine, but they don’t tell you whether the activity is actually useful.
Platform selection: an honest assessment
Not every platform is worth your time. The question “should we be on this platform?” should be answered by asking who uses it, whether your audience is there, and whether you have the capacity to do it properly. An account you post to twice a month because you feel you should have a presence is not a communications asset.
The platform selection section of a social media strategy is the one most worth revisiting every year. Platforms shift, audiences move, and the honest answer to “is this still worth doing?” changes more often than most organisations admit. It’s easier to close an account than to maintain a bad one indefinitely.
Tone of voice on social media
Your tone of voice on social media should be a version of your broader organisational voice, not a separate personality. The most common mistake is treating social media as an opportunity to be chattier and more informal than the organisation actually is, which can feel inconsistent to people who encounter you in other contexts.
Decide what your tone is, write it down, and make sure everyone who posts on behalf of the organisation has read it. This doesn’t need to be a lengthy document. A page of principles and examples is enough.
A template to work from
The social media strategy template covers platform selection, objectives, audience, measurement, tone of voice, content themes, and posting approach in a single editable Word document, with a PDF reference version. It works best alongside a broader communications strategy rather than in isolation.
Social Media Strategy Template
Editable Word document and PDF reference version.