Most advice about a social media strategy is the same list of steps. They are sensible, so here they are, with the parts I’ve actually had to do for the community radio station website I run. That means a lot of scheduling and the odd surprise from a platform’s login system.
Step 1: Decide what the posts are for
Pick one main aim. More visits to the website, more listeners and more followers are all different aims, and they need different posts. For my station, every post exists to send people to a show page, so the post has to make someone want to click. Write the aim down in one sentence, and check it against every post.
Step 2: Find out where your audience is
You don’t need to be everywhere. Look at where your website visitors already come from (Google Analytics shows this) and where your existing followers are, and start with the top two.
Step 3: Choose the platforms
I post to six places for the radio station: Instagram, X (Twitter) and Threads through a scheduling tool called Buffer, Bluesky and Mastodon directly from my own script, and Facebook, which I still do by hand with an email reminder to prompt me. I’m not suggesting you copy that. If you’re on your own, two is plenty.
Step 4: Make the profile do its job
- A bio that says what you are and who it’s for, in one sentence.
- One link, to the page you most want people to visit.
- The same name and picture everywhere.
Step 5: Schedule, but check the plumbing
Scheduling saves time, but it breaks in ways nobody warns you about. Two examples from my own set-up:
- Bluesky doesn’t make links clickable for you. If you post from a script, you have to tell it where the links, hashtags and mentions are. I wrote that up on my coding site, Codebusters, and the limit is 300 characters, so plan your wording.
- Instagram access tokens. If you post through the API, you need a token, and they can expire. Mine is a Page token that never does, which my own refresh log reports as "Expires in 0 days", and that is not a fault (that is written up on Codebusters too).
Step 6: Measure one or two things
Don’t track everything. Choose visits from social to your site (the "Traffic acquisition" report in GA4 splits it by source) and one engagement number, such as comments or saves. Look at them monthly, not daily.
Does social media help SEO?
Not directly. Links from social platforms mostly don’t pass ranking value in the way a link from another website does. What social does is get the page in front of people who might link to it, and that is where the link-worthy bit comes in.