Social Media Marketing Strategy

This workbook turns the course into a working social media operation for one real business account. As you complete it you will set a measurable objective, score and choose your platforms, build content pillars and a quarter of planned posts, document a community-management and crisis playbook, and stand up UTM tracking that lets you calculate a defensible ROI. The templates give you a platform scorecard, a content calendar, a community-response guide, and an ROI dashboard so the whole strategy lives in one place and the numbers are decided before you report them.

Lock one measurable objective and commit to the two or three platforms that fit your audience and your capacity.

Pick a single primary objective from the five honest objectives (awareness, engagement, traffic, leads, or direct sales) and rewrite it as a specific, measurable, time-bound goal for the next 90 days. This goal will drive every later decision in the workbook.

Describe one specific real customer, then map them to where they actually spend attention. Fill this for your single most valuable customer type before scoring any platforms.

Score each candidate platform 1 to 5 on the five criteria, then double audience fit and capacity fit before totaling. Commit to the top one or two as primary and secondary.

Define content pillars, set a sustainable cadence, and build a batchable calendar that ships even on a bad week.

Find the overlap between what your audience wants and what you can credibly talk about, then name three to five recurring pillars and assign a posting ratio. Keep direct promotion to roughly one post in ten.

Set a posting cadence you can keep on your worst week, then assign each weekly slot to a pillar so the week stays balanced. Fill this for one representative week.

Brainstorm roughly ten post ideas per pillar in one sitting to create a backlog the calendar can draw from, then map the next month onto specific dates including business events.

Earn unpaid reach by building for saves and shares, writing strong hooks, and using native formats and discovery well.

Run every important post through the signals the algorithm rewards before it goes out. Fill this for one upcoming flagship post.

Take a single post idea and write five different hooks using five different patterns (the mistake, the number, the contrarian take, the result, the question or curiosity gap). Pick the strongest and note why.

Build a focused discovery stack rather than dumping maximum hashtags. Fill this for your primary platform.

Document response standards and a crisis playbook, set up UTM tracking, and calculate a defensible ROI you can present.

Document the standards that keep replies fast, consistent, and on-brand even when different people answer. Fill this once and share it with anyone who manages the account.

Decide how you will respond to complaints, trolls, and a rare crisis before any of them happens, so an emotional moment does not become a public mistake.

First stand up the measurement plumbing: define a UTM naming convention for source, medium, and campaign, tag every social link, route traffic through a link-in-bio page or shortener, connect Google Analytics 4, and define the conversions that count (purchase, booking, form submit, qualified DM). Then use the ROI formula (value gained minus cost, divided by cost) with honestly valued time, tools, and ad spend, and summarize it for a decision-maker on one page.