Identify Your Audience: Research begins with understanding your target audience. Use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and customer surveys to gather demographic data, interests, behaviors, and preferences. Competitor Analysis: Study your competitors' social media presence. Analyze their content, engagement strategies, posting frequency, and follower interactions. This can provide insights into successful content types and help you identify gaps in your own strategy. Keyword Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or social media platforms' search functions to discover trending keywords, hashtags, and phrases relevant to your industry. Incorporate these into your content for increased visibility.

Before deploying your tactics, you need to have a strategy and understand the purpose for using social media. How will using this marketing channel assist you in your overall business objectives? Once you have identified this, you can then start to think about what you want to achieve - you can do this on a platform basis. I.e. Is a particular platform going to be a customer service channel or a channel for sharing recruitment opportunities or will it be multi-purpose? You can also look at this from a content perspective - each piece of content may have a different goal. Either way your purpose and goals should align with business objectives.Your metrics can tell you how well your content is performing against the goals you have identified.

Understanding your audience enables you to create content that resonates - which can hopefully support someone engaging with the content taking the desired action from it i.e. commenting, clicking on a link etc. The desired action is dependent on the goal set previously. A goal could be to raise awareness, drive traffic to a website or build engagement. Metrics will help you monitor how successful you are in relation to the goal. The first link in the chain is your audience - knowing who they are is key. You can build personas based on your audience to help you with content production. Understanding where you are in the market against your competitors is also important. This aids with your proposition - why should someone choose you?

Finding out what your audience is talking about and how they are behaving online is great for informing your content strategy. You can look at content on a granular level - for example how are people engaging with a specific piece of content (liking, commenting, sharing) and how they are talking about it? Is it positively, negatively or neutrally? What type of content is it etc? Understanding this can help inform whether you'd like to produce content around this topic and in terms of trends can help you decide whether to get involved or not. On a broader scale (not looking at individualised content pieces), it can help you understand what type of content you could produce, what format you could produce it in and what the topic could be.

I think we must look beyond traditional competitor analysis. Explore online communities, forums, and niche social media groups frequented by your target audience. Analyze their unfiltered conversations to uncover hidden desires, pain points, and emerging trends that traditional research might miss.

Testing and experimenting with your content is a great way to find out what works and what doesn't work with your audience. There are a variety of factors that you can test in terms of content, including the topic. In terms of an asset, you can test the format, length, what's on the asset, its type and more. However, testing not only involves the asset but also the copy that goes alongside it - for example you can test captions, hashtags, post length etc. Once you have chosen your variable/s and the platform/s you want to change it on, you can implement the change/s and use metrics to understand the impact it or they have had. The final stage of this process is to use this knowledge to inform future content and decisions.

Trend Monitoring: Stay up-to-date with industry trends, current events, and viral topics. Tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, and social media monitoring platforms can help you identify trending topics to align your content with what's currently popular. User Generated Content (UGC): Research user-generated content that features your brand or product. Sharing UGC not only saves you time on content creation but also builds a sense of community and authenticity around your brand. Content Calendar Planning: Use your research findings to plan a content calendar. Map out the types of content you'll create, posting frequency, and key dates for promotions or events. This helps maintain consistency and relevance in your content strategy.

Experiment with different variations of your social media content to see what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing can help you identify which headlines, images, captions, or calls-to-action perform better and optimize your content accordingly.