How To Create A Social Media Strategy In 7 Steps

What A Social Media Strategy Is

A social media strategy is a brand’s plan for what social media should do for the business. It sets out the goal, the job of each platform and the numbers that will show whether the plan works. People also call it a social media marketing plan.

We looked at a year of posts on 128 brand Facebook pages in Primal’s social media data. Pages that posted more often got more engagement each week. Yet engagement per post did not rise or fall with how often a page posted. On Facebook, no format beat the page’s own average on more than about half the pages. So how often a page posts, and in which format, explains little about how a single post does. Spend the team’s time on what each post says and the job it does in the plan.

Decide what each platform is for and how you will judge it, and fill the calendar after that.

How A Strategy Differs From A Content Calendar

The strategy decides why and where a brand posts, and the content calendar decides what goes out and when. A calendar lists each post with its date, platform, topic, format and owner. The strategy changes a few times a year. The calendar changes every month and follows the strategy.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan In 7 Steps

The plan starts with one business goal and ends with a monthly look at the numbers.

1. Set one business goal and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that show whether you are reaching it.
2. Study your customers and competitors. Find out what customers ask, which platforms they use and what competitors post.
3. Choose platforms by the job each one does, such as reaching new people or answering customers who already know you.
4. Pick your content pillars, the main topics your brand will post about every month.
5. Set how often to post and in which formats, at a pace your team can keep without the posts getting worse.
6. Plan a monthly content calendar, and split the budget between regular posts and paid ones.
7. Review the numbers every month against where you started, and change the plan where the numbers say so.

How To Set Social Media Goals And KPIs

Start from the business goal, then pick the numbers that show progress towards it. A brand that wants more people to know it watches reach. A brand that sells through chat watches new messages. The table matches common goals to the numbers to watch and where to find them.

Business goal	Main KPI	Where to find it
More people know the brand	Reach and views	Insights in Meta Business Suite and TikTok Studio
More people take an interest	Engagement rate, shares and saves	The insights for each post
More people message or ask for details	New conversations and leads	The inbox in Meta Business Suite and your LINE Official Account chats
More people buy	Link clicks and orders from social media	Google Analytics and your online shop

The number of people who follow a page is a side figure. It says little about whether people saw or cared about your latest posts. In Meta’s insights, look at the net change instead, which is new follows minus unfollows over the same period.

What Reach, Views And Engagement Mean In Meta Insights

Reach is the number of people who saw your content, and views is the number of times it was displayed. So one person can add many views but only one to reach. Meta’s help page on Page insights says reach covers both organic and paid distribution. A person who saw both appears in reach once.

The figure many teams still call impressions now shows in Meta’s insights as views. The capture below is the post insights part of that page. On a Facebook post, engagement covers reactions, comments, shares and clicks.

How To Calculate Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is engagement divided by reach, times 100. Take a post that reached 8,000 people and got 240 reactions, comments, shares and clicks. Its engagement rate is 3%.

Some tools divide by views or by the people who follow the page instead. Check which base a report uses. Then compare the rate only with your own page’s other posts. Pages in different categories have different normal rates.

How To Research Your Customers And Competitors

Before you choose platforms and topics, find out what customers ask, where they spend time and what competitors post. The quickest source of questions is the team that answers your chats and calls. Ask them for the questions they heard most last month. Each one is a post topic people already want to read.

For competitors, open the pages of 3 to 5 brands your customers compare you with. Note how often each one posts, which formats it uses and which posts get comments or shares. To see the ads a competitor is running now, search for the brand in the Meta Ad Library, which is open to anyone.

What Social Listening Is

Social listening is tracking what people say about your brand, your competitors and your product category on social media and on forums such as Pantip. Teams use it to find repeated questions, complaints that need an answer and topics people are talking about now.

You can start by hand. Search for your brand and product names on each platform once a week. Pay for a social listening tool once there are too many mentions to read yourself.

Which Social Media Platforms To Use In Thailand

Choose platforms by the job each one does in your plan and by how many your team can run every week. We suggest starting with 2 or 3 platforms your customers already use. The table shows the main options in Thailand.

Platform	Job in the plan	Common formats	Audience in Thailand
Facebook	Brand information, chat with customers and ads	Photos, albums, Reels and live video	About 52 million
Instagram	Products and the look of the brand	Reels, photos and carousels	About 21 million
TikTok	Reach new people and help them find products	Short videos and live video	About 57 million aged 18 and over
YouTube	Explain products and answer questions that take time	Long videos and Shorts	About 47 million
LINE Official Account	Talk to customers who know the brand, and send news and coupons	Chat and broadcasts	LINE has about 56 million users
LinkedIn	Business to business (B2B) brands and hiring	Posts and articles	About 6.5 million members

The audience figures come from DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Thailand report, which draws on each platform’s ad tools and on LINE’s own figure. A brand that closes deals in chat can reach new people on Facebook or TikTok. It can then bring interested people into its LINE Official Account to talk. A brand whose product people need to see in use should plan short videos. Our TikTok marketing guide covers them. A business to business brand that hires often can add LinkedIn, and a brand whose buyers have long questions can add YouTube.

LINE VOOM closed in Thailand on 2026-09-28, according to LINE for Business. A plan that used VOOM now uses LINE Official Account broadcasts and LINE Ads instead. Account owners can download their old VOOM posts until 2026-12-31.

What Content Pillars Are And How Many To Use

Content pillars are the main topics a brand posts about every month, and each one does a different job in the plan. We suggest 3 or 4 to start. A small team can then fill every pillar each month, and people learn what the page covers.

The table is a one-month plan for a brand that closes deals in chat. Its Facebook page posts 3 times a week. Only 3 of the 12 posts are offers. The rest answer questions, show the product in use and show the people behind the brand.

Pillar	Job in the plan	Example topics	Posts a month
Customer questions	Help people understand the product before they decide	Questions the chat team answers every week	4
Product in use	Show the product working	Demonstrations, before and after	3
People behind the brand	Show who looks after customers	The team, how the product is made	2
Offers and events	Get people to message or buy	This month’s promotion, coupons	3

Mark McDowell, who founded Primal, starts a social plan with what makes the brand worth talking about. For a bathroom dehumidifier brand, the first pillar was the hidden problem, so the awareness posts showed mould, damp towels and foggy mirrors. Install stories with a before and after came next, with brand content running alongside. We test different formats and, each month, give more of the work to the format the data shows is doing best. For a new brand, organic posts alone reach few people and do not bring enquiries quickly, so we also set a budget to promote the best posts.

At the end of the month, check which pillar got the highest engagement rate or the most new messages. Give that pillar more posts next month. If a pillar does poorly 2 months running, change its topics or its format.

How Often To Post And Which Formats Work

Post as often as your team can keep up every week without the posts getting worse. In our data, the middle brand Facebook page posted about 3 times a week. Half the pages posted between about 1.5 and 6 times a week.

We looked at every post over 12 months in Primal’s social media data. That covers 128 brand Facebook pages and 27 brand Instagram accounts, 46,372 posts in all. Pages that posted more often got more engagement in total each week. Engagement per post did not rise or fall with how often a page posted. So extra posts add to the weekly total only when each one is as good as the posts before it.

To compare formats fairly, we measured each format’s average engagement against the account’s own average. That way a small page and a large page can be compared. The chart shows the share of accounts where each format beat the account’s average.

On Instagram, Reels beat the account’s average on 21 of 25 accounts, carousels on 13 of 24 and single images on only 2 of 26. On Facebook, every format beat the page’s average on about half the pages or fewer. Make Reels the main format on Instagram. On Facebook, test formats with your own page’s content and read the insights for each post. These are public figures, so they include posts that were paid to reach more people.

Customers Often Ask Us Whether 20 Or More Posts A Month Is Too Many

It is not too many if each post still gets reach and engagement close to the page’s other posts. In our data, 29 of the 128 Facebook pages posted 7 or more times a week. Check the figures for each post in your insights every month. If reach on newer posts keeps falling, post less and spend the time on the pillars that work.

How To Make A Content Calendar And Schedule Posts

A content calendar is a table of every planned post with its date, platform, pillar, topic, format, owner and approval status. Finish and approve next month’s calendar in the first week of this month. That gives the team about 3 weeks to make the posts before they go out.

A spreadsheet such as Google Sheets works well. Use one row for each post, and put the link to the image or video file in the same row. Whoever approves the post then sees the text, the image and the date in one place.

Schedule Facebook and Instagram posts in Meta Business Suite. Meta’s help page on creating posts says its Active times option recommends posting times. They come from when the people who follow you were most active on Facebook and Instagram over the past 7 days. Those times are your own audience’s, so use them rather than a general posting table from the web. Schedule TikTok videos in TikTok Studio.

How Organic And Paid Social Work Together

Organic social is what a brand posts on its own page without paying. Paid social is paying for a post or an ad to reach people you choose. In a plan that uses both, regular posts test the topics, and the posts that work are promoted or turned into ads.

A simple routine has 3 steps.

1. Publish posts from the calendar, then wait 2 to 3 days for the figures to settle.
2. Pick the post with the week’s highest engagement rate, and promote it to people who do not follow the page yet.
3. Split the budget by goal. Put one part into reaching new people and one into getting messages or orders. Judge each part by its own KPI.

In a month with ads, reach in Meta Business Suite includes the people who saw the ads. Read the ad results on their own in Ads Manager before you decide that your regular posts did better.

How To Set Up A Facebook Page Before You Post

Complete the Page before the first post goes out. Meta’s page on setting up a business Page lists what to add.

1. A profile picture and a cover photo.
2. A description of one or two sentences that says what the business does.
3. A phone number, a website and an email address.
4. An address and opening hours, if customers visit a location.
5. Up to 3 more categories, which help people find the Page.

Then give access to the people on your team who run the Page, so the brand’s Page does not depend on one person’s account.

Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants read Facebook Pages too. Over the last month, Elevate, Primal’s AI Visibility Tracker, logged 285,098 AI answers across about 2,800 queries about 171 brands. Facebook was among the 15 sites cited most often for 161 of those brands. Keep the services, areas served and opening hours on your Page the same as on your website. Our guide to what AI search is explains how assistants pick their sources.

Primal’s team in our Bangkok office plans and runs social media for brands. The work covers the content pillars, the calendar, replies to comments and messages, and a monthly report against the goal. See how our social media management service works.

Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Strategy

Customers Often Ask Us Whether To Run One Page Or A Page For Each Business Line

Start with one main brand page as the home of your brand information. Add a separate page only when a business line serves a different group of customers. That line also needs a team to post for it every week. Put the brand name first on every extra page and link it to the same website, so customers can tell the pages belong together.

Customers Often Ask Us Whether A Page Needs An Ad Budget Just To Stay Active

Yes, keep a budget to promote posts, even without a full ad campaign. It lets your best posts reach new people, such as people in the areas you serve. Run a full ad campaign when the goal is leads or orders.

Customers Often Ask Us How To Set A KPI For Social Media Work

The number of posts or videos is the scope of the work, and the KPI is the result of that work. Results are figures such as reach, engagement rate or new messages. Write down the figures before the plan starts. Agree a target for each campaign, then compare against the starting figures every month.

How Often Should You Review A Social Media Strategy

Look at the numbers every month. Change the pillars, the posting pace and the budget split every 3 months. The monthly figures tell you which topics to keep. After 3 months there is enough data to see which platforms and formats work for your brand.

What Mistakes To Avoid In A Social Media Strategy

Avoid posting offers more often than anything else, leaving comments and messages unanswered, and publishing a post nobody else has checked. Also avoid judging the page by likes alone. Each of these gives people less reason to keep reading the page or to message the brand.