It doesn’t matter if your agency is responsible for content production or social media scheduling. You need to make sure your team has the tools they need to succeed. Instead of reworking your process each month, or for every campaign, establish a set standard that your team can adhere to every time.

These content best practices will help you publish high-performing posts, and streamline your agency’s workflow.

What Are Your Social Media Goals

Set social media goals to create the best content possible for your agency and clients.

Your main goals will influence how your content looks, sounds, and feels. The SMART goal framework is a good choice.

• Specific: Get as precise as possible. Do you want to increase brand awareness or drive more website traffic?

• Measurable: Select a metric that you can quantify. You could measure website clicks, followers, and revenue.

• Attainable: Set a realistic goal for your team. Next, plan for the resources and planning needed to make it happen.

• Relevant: Choose a goal that is related to your business goals. You can increase sales to help you reach your revenue goals.

• Time-based: Give each goal a deadline. You might, for example, set a goal to reach each goal by the end of the quarter, year, or month.

Target the Right Audience

Who are your target customers? You can create social media content that resonates by focusing on your ideal customers.

You can answer pertinent questions, use different media types and build stronger connections with customers.

Here are some ways you can research your audience.

• Get social media insights. Social media channels such as Facebook and Pinterest provide insights into your followers’ demographics and interests. To listen to online conversations, you can also use Agorapulse the social media monitoring tool. This will allow you to identify the interests of your target audience, their conversation patterns, and what they are talking about.

• Review website analytics. Google Analytics provides demographics, interests, and data about what your website visitors are buying.

• Talk to customer service. Discuss the issues and questions your audience has often.

• Discuss your needs with sales. Get insight from sales about customers’ buying habits and preferences for products or services.

Use Your Brand Voice

If you don’t have a distinctive voice, your content could be confused with other content on your followers’ timelines. You can create a brand voice by:

• Demonstrate the personality behind your social media page

• Make your brand more human

• Create a familiar face that followers can easily associate with

Start by reflecting on the mission and values of your organization to establish a brand voice. Identify the key attributes of your brand.

Next, consider the language of your target audience and identify common topics and idioms. To ensure that everyone speaks the same language, share your list of words and phrases with your team.

Choose a Content Mix

It is tempting to add brand content to your social media feed. You wouldn’t want to miss any opportunity to promote your brand.

Many social media users feel like they are being sold to by constant self-promotional content. This can lead to unfollows which can result in your team missing out on sales opportunities.

Post a variety of content types and sources to create a page that naturally educates, converts, and retains loyal followers.

These ideas can be used to combine in your editorial calendar.

• To let your customers be happy, include user-generated material (UGC), and influencer posts.

• Find relevant content from other websites and brands, especially if it is in line with your audience’s questions or interests.

• To better understand your audience, publish interactive content such as live streams and Q&As.

• To further cement the relationship, share news, links, and posts from social influencers with brand partners.

Create Unique Content For Each Channel

It doesn’t matter how diverse your content mix is, optimizing each post for the platform it belongs to is crucial.

These content best practices will ensure that every post looks, sounds, and performs at its best.

• Create copy that is the right length for each channel. For instance, the ideal length for social media posts via Facebook or Twitter is around 80 characters. Instagram posts should be at least 50% longer than normal, which is approximately 125 characters.

• Take advantage of the various options offered by each channel. Insta posts may not allow for links, but they are great for hashtags. Facebook is not the best place to use hashtags but it’s great for sharing links from product pages and blog posts.

• Create optimized images and videos. This may require extra work. However, resizing images or videos for each platform will ensure that you get the most value from your visual content.

Be Inspired by the Competition

You won’t be able to create original content if you copy the competition. It’s a good idea, however, to keep an eye on your competitors.

You might also benefit from the expertise of other brands in your industry that use new content types or platforms.

These are some ways you can find out about the competition and whether they are getting results.

• Look at their social profiles. Make a list and visit their pages at least once per month. Check out their use of new tools such as Instagram Reels or Twitter Fleet.

• Use a comparison tool. Add top competitors to Agora pulse’s Facebook Barometer or Tweet Report Card. You can then compare your performance and see which brands are ahead of you.

• Check out their Facebook Ads library. Do your competitors target your audience in interesting ways? To see the types of ads they are running, scroll through their Facebook Ads Library.

Master Social Media Monitoring

Your team can increase content quality by using social media monitoring.

You can monitor brand terms and mentions to easily track conversations about your brand. You can then identify UGC that you want to share, find common questions, and create content to address complaints and issues.

Social listening can be used to track industry hashtags and competitor news. You can then find the most popular topics to add to your content calendar and discuss important issues. This will increase brand awareness.

Schedule Content at Ideal Times

It is crucial to choose the right time to post social media content. Posts have a limited lifespan. A tweet can only last 15 to 20 minutes. You can increase your social media performance by getting closer to the ideal time for posting. How do you know when the best time to post is?

• Follow standard recommendations. There have been studies that show the best times to share content on social media. These recommendations may not apply to your audience but they can serve as a starting point.

• Get a look at your social media analytics. Use Instagram and Facebook to find out when your followers are online.

• Use a social media scheduling tool like Agorapulse to determine the best time to post, based on your audience’s engagement.

While you may need to post content right now, it is best to schedule all future posts. A social media scheduling tool can increase your chances of posting the right content at the right time. You don’t have to pause your work and make time to post right away.

Stakeholder Approvals

If you are not a small team, you will likely need to get feedback before you publish social media posts. It can be difficult to track and keep track of screenshots and spreadsheets if you have more than one client.

Instead, you can streamline your workflow and request stakeholder approval directly from your social media scheduling software. You can ensure that the content is not published until all stakeholders have signed off by assigning posts to clients or team members.

Optimize and Analyze Content

Even though great content drives great results today, it might not work as well tomorrow or in future campaigns. It is important to track analytics using native insights and third-party reports. This is how to optimize and analyze:

• You can choose a time frame to review social media marketing analytics such as daily or weekly.

• To identify the most important metrics, use your social media goals. Clicks and click-through rates (CTR) are crucial for driving website traffic.

• Look for trends in the data and compare the most recent to the previous period. Your CTR for blog posts might have increased significantly due to your efforts to produce high-quality content every week.

• To improve your performance, turn your findings into experiments. To drive more traffic, you could republish popular posts.

Each account that your agency manages might require a different strategy or goal. These best practices can help your agency build a solid foundation for social media production.