Audience and cycle mapping
Where your buyers research, how long the decision takes, and who else is involved before money moves.
Social strategy
Pick the platforms on purpose, then run them properly
Most social programs fail on the decision made before the first post. Being present everywhere at low quality loses to being genuinely good in two places your buyers already are.
The most common social brief starts with a platform list and works backwards. That gets the order wrong. The question is where your buyers form opinions, how long they take to decide, and what format carries your expertise well. The platform list is an output of those answers, not an input.
The second failure is cadence. Teams commit to a volume they can hold for six weeks, then go quiet, then restart with an apology post. An account that publishes twice a week for three years is worth more than one that publishes daily for a quarter, both for the audience and for the entity signals search engines and language models read.
The third failure is governance. Nobody wrote down who approves a post, who responds to a complaint, who speaks in a crisis, and what the brand will not say. Without that, either everything stalls in review or something goes out that should not have.
This page covers those decisions. The individual platform pages under this pillar cover how each surface is actually run once a channel has earned a place on the list.
What it is
What a social strategy engagement produces
A written set of decisions your team can execute without asking a strategist every week.
We start with the buying cycle rather than the audience persona. A category where someone decides in an afternoon needs a completely different presence from one where the decision takes nine months and involves four people. Short cycles reward discovery formats and fast response. Long cycles reward proof, named experts, and consistency over years.
Channel selection then runs against explicit criteria: does the audience actually research here, does your best format work natively, can you sustain the cadence the platform rewards, and is there a commercial path from attention to conversation. A platform that fails two of those is a distraction no matter how large its user base is.
Message architecture keeps the program coherent without making it repetitive. There is a small set of things the brand argues, each one tied to something you actually sell, and each platform expresses those in its own native format. That is what makes a program feel like one company rather than five disconnected accounts.
Cadence is set against real capacity, counted in hours from the people who have to produce and approve. We would rather commit to less and hold it than plan a volume that collapses in month two. Governance closes the loop: an approval path, a response standard, an escalation route, and a short list of topics the brand will not comment on.
Fit
Who this is for, and who it is not for
We would rather say no early than sell a program that cannot work.
Right fit
- You are on several platforms and cannot tell which ones are worth the effort.
- Social has been running without a written plan and results are hard to defend internally.
- You are starting from nothing and want to avoid signing up for six accounts you cannot staff.
Not the right fit
- The decision is already made and you only need hands on the keyboard.
- Leadership will not accept a recommendation to leave a platform.
- The success measure is follower count with no commercial outcome behind it.
Deliverables
What social strategy includes
Decisions written down, with the reasoning attached so they survive a staff change.
Channel selection
Explicit criteria applied to every platform you are on or considering, including a recommendation to leave the ones that fail.
Message architecture
The small set of arguments the brand makes, each tied to something you sell, expressed natively per platform.
Sustainable cadence plan
Volume set against counted internal hours, with a floor you can hold indefinitely rather than a peak you can hold once.
Governance and approvals
Who writes, who approves, how fast, and what happens outside business hours, written as a document rather than a habit.
Roles and escalation
Named owners for response, escalation triggers, and the topics the brand does not comment on publicly.
How we run it
How the strategy work runs
Four to six weeks, ending with a plan someone internal can operate.
Step 1: Discovery and audit
Existing accounts, past performance, internal capacity, and the commercial goals social is supposed to serve.
Step 2: Buyer and competitor read
Where the decision actually happens, what competitors sustain, and where there is room for a different point of view.
Step 3: Channel recommendation
The platforms worth running, the ones worth leaving, and the reasoning for each so the decision can be defended later.
Step 4: Architecture and cadence
Message pillars, format per platform, and a publishing rhythm matched to real available hours.
Step 5: Governance handoff
Approval flow, response standards, escalation paths, and a review point to reassess after two quarters.
How do you decide which social platforms a business should use?
Test each platform against four criteria: your buyers genuinely research there, your strongest format works natively, you can sustain the cadence the platform rewards, and there is a path from attention to a commercial conversation. Failing two means skip it.
- Audience size on a platform is irrelevant if your buyers do not use it for this decision.
- A format that has to be forced onto a platform will underperform permanently.
- Capacity is a hard constraint, not an aspiration to grow into.
How often should a business post on social media?
At the highest frequency you can hold for years, not the highest you can hold for a quarter. Two considered posts a week sustained indefinitely outperforms daily output that stops, both for audience trust and for the consistency signals that support brand recognition.
Where this connects
Where strategy hands off
The plan is the start. These are the disciplines that execute it.
Once channels are chosen, production and publishing run through content management so the cadence set here actually gets met week after week.
The response standards and escalation rules written here are operated by community management which is where governance stops being a document and becomes behavior.
Message pillars are drawn from the same topical map behind SEO content strategy so social and search argue the same things rather than diverging.
What gets measured, and what gets ignored, is defined alongside social reporting before the first post rather than after the first quarterly review.
Amplifying whatever proves itself organically is handled through paid social which is a much better use of budget than testing untried concepts with spend.
Questions
Social media strategy questions we get asked
Start with the decision, not the posting schedule
Fewer platforms, run properly, tied to something you sell.