How to Build a Social Media Strategy That Actually Supports Your Goals

Let’s face it: social media is the fabric of the internet these days. From Instagram to TikTok, LinkedIn to YouTube, billions of people spend hours scrolling—and hopefully engaging—with your content.

It’s no longer a question of whether your organization needs a social media strategy (you know you do). The real challenge is making that strategy do more than just fill your feed. It needs to support your organizational goals.

Last post, I shared how to build an authentic, engaged audience for your organization. Now we’ll focus on what to do with that social media audience and how to connect your social media strategy to outcomes and results that actually matter.

1) Know Your Target Audiences

This might seem obvious, but too many organizations gloss over it. Before you post that amazing content you worked so hard on, pause and name your target audiences.

List them. Prioritize them (I know, I know—they’re all important, but do the exercise). Think about what they care about most, and where they spend time online. You don’t need to do formal research and it’s okay to make educated guesses. But ask around, dig a little, and most importantly, experiment. The beautiful thing about social media is that you can easily experiment and adjust based on the data.

Once you’ve mapped your audiences, align your visuals and copy with their needs, tone, and what adds value to them.

2) Every Post Should Have a Purpose

Once you know who you’re talking to and where to reach them, it’s time to give every post a purpose. That purpose might be explicit (call-to-action or CTA) or implicit (building trust). Either way, each post should move your audience to think, feel, or do something.

The Three Main Goals of Social Content:

• Awareness: Optimizing for reach, impressions, views. Great for building new audiences.

• Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, follows. Helps boost your content in the algorithm.

• Conversion: Clear CTAs that move your audience into your owned environments (email, website, donations, events).

You won’t always hit the goal you were aiming for, and that’s okay. If you crafted a post for awareness but it drove engagement instead—you’ve learned something about your audience and your content! But without setting an intention at the outset, it’s hard to know what’s working and why.

3) Conversion Is (Usually) the Most Valuable Audience Action

While awareness and engagement on social media is important and has a role, conversion—moving audience into your owned environment—is usually the most valuable result of any piece of social media content.

Why?

Because you’re moving audience—the people you care about and need to do your work—into environments your organization owns. Social media platforms are fickle. They are walled gardens with black box algorithms. They own the audience, not you. You’re renting it. If you spend thousands of hours of staff time and money behind building a massive social media audience that gets bought by a billionaire who suddenly changes the game, you’ve wasted all that time and money.

You should always be thinking about ways to move audiences—and their data—into environments you own. That means email subscribers, SMS subscribers, website engagement, purchases, donations, volunteers, attending Zoom calls or webinars.

4) But You Can’t Convert All the Time

A good social media strategy will do a healthy mix of posts for awareness, engagement and conversion. If you’re attempting conversion all the time, it can sometimes come across as transactional.

Creating content that is authentic and adds value to your audience is still important—even with purpose behind your posts. It’s a balancing act between authentic, people-first content and achieving the action you want the audience to take.

If you have good content and know the purpose behind it, you won’t have to worry. You’re doing your job. Your audience will grow on the platform and they’ll convert into owned channels.

5) Connect Your Social Media Strategy to Organizational Objectives

If you’re doing 1–4 well, it becomes easier to connect your social media strategy to broader organizational goals.

For example: if your organization is new, growing your audience might be your first priority. That’s a valid goal—and it should be reported to leadership as progress.

When I worked at a federal agency, one of our goals was increasing the number and diversity of grant applicants. Email was our best channel for that, so I made growing our subscriber list the goal—and we increased it by 85% in two years.

Even in a small shop, connecting communications goals to organizational goals is not only doable—it’s essential. You don’t need ten KPIs. Pick three. Track them. Report quarterly. Show impact. It builds credibility, helps you make the case for more resources, and proves your value.

CTA Example (That is Also a Real CTA)

Need help translating communications or social media strategies into organizational objectives? I’d love to work with you!