Hey everyone! I’m writing to you from good ol’ New York City. I’m here for a few days for a quick work trip and it’s been a vibe. After 5 months of being at Cadence as Director of Social & Brand, I’m finally meeting the whole squad.

In this issue, we will go over the following:

Let’s go! 💪

-Sam

Social feeds are becoming more and more saturated.

Everyone’s competing for attention. Brands and creators are posting at scale and consumers are exposed to thousands of posts a day it seems like.

How does one stand out? How do you drive social performance and stand out among all the content we consume?

Strategy.

You can’t just post to post. You can’t post without a strategy. You just can’t.

Your social media strategy is your heartbeat of your brand in today’s digital age. It’s the extension of your brand strategy. It’s how you drive the role of brand, community, and accelerate business goals.

So today we’re chatting about social media strategy tips. Here are 3 tips that you can apply today to your social media strategy. I hope you find this helpful!

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make is that they view social as just a channel. A place to make posts, and a place to respond to comments. When in reality, this is far from the truth. Social is brand. Brand is social.

Your social media strategy is simply just an extension of your brand strategy. It shouldn’t be net new. You’re not creating it from scratch. It should directly correlate and align with your brand strategy. Therefore your brand positioning should directly align with your social position and DNA. Your social media pillars should also essentially be your brand pillars as well.

I have made this mistake as well in the past. No, you don’t need a social media pillar for product, community, activations, and memes. This is an outdated model in my personal opinion. Your social media pillars = your brand pillars.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to optimize your brand strategy for social media.

One mistake that I see social media teams make time over time is that they focus more on social media tactics rather than social media strategies. Tactics are great, but the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze.

We need to spend more time on crafting, developing, and executing strategies - rather than tactics that just help…amplify. 80% of your time should go into developing strategies, and then 20% or less into developing tactics.

Let me give you an example. Instead of focusing on developing the right hook for a short-form video, or a social giveaway that you want to put on your calendar - you should be putting more time and thought into a social campaign that can accelerate DTC or retail growth. Not to take anything away from developing a hook or a social giveaway, because they are both great and are essential. But we need to view and treat social as a business driver…because it is. Which requires strategy work.

The days of just generating likes and comments are over. Well, in my opinion at least. The best brands in the world do more than just generate likes and comments - they focus on enablement. They focus on shareability.

You can’t just post to post. You can’t just post to fill up your calendar.

Every post you put out in the world is an extension of your brand and needs to be highly intentional, backed by insights, and geared towards shareability. Spark an emotion, and make your community push your content to new communities for you.

Before you go…here are a few quick hitters for you! We’ve got a new Instagram update and a few reminders.

😲 Instagram dropped competitive insights! Instagram is rolling out a new feature in-app where you can do competitor benchmarking. Be sure to check this out and let me know what you think!

📱 Interested in learning more about creating shareable content? Check out last weeks issue to catch up here.

‼ Forward to a friend! If you do find Stronger Social helpful, be sure to forward to a friend.

🤔 Got a topic that you want to see addressed in a future issue?If so, respond to this email and let me know!

Thanks for reading and hope you have a great week!

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