Making sure that you have a great content strategy is important to ensure your consistent success. Social media platforms are a great way to connect with your audience. And a great social media presence requires effective content. Facebook in particular is a great platform to begin your content strategy.

The platform supports a relatively large variety of types of content. Given this variety, you can begin to track and research both your audience and what kinds of content are most effective for your brand. Here are some steps you can follow to ensure that your content strategy is effective in both reaching your audience and allowing you to learn more about your brand and your market.

Find your audience

While you likely already have followers on your Facebook page, it’s important to narrow down and establish your target demographics. More importantly, you need to find out what it is your audience wants and what kinds of content they enjoy most. In order to create effective content, you need to know what kind of content your audience responds to best.

The best way to narrow down what types of content your audience wants is good, old-fashioned beta testing. Strategically create posts featuring several different types of content – such as a video, an infographic, and a poll – and then track which post gets the most interactions. Content engagement is more than just the number of likes a post gets. It’s also about comments, views, and shares. Use Facebook Analytics to track the kind of engagement your posts are getting.

Once you’ve narrowed down your most – and least – successful posts, take note of their content. Keep track of things like content format, keywords, and hashtags to get a better picture of what resonates with your audience.

Plan ahead

There are several ways that you can make sure you’re consistently creating and producing great content: make a calendar and create content in advance.

Make a calendar for content – Use the calendar to plan out content post dates. It can be a good idea to include important dates, events and holidays that you can leverage for content.

For example, in the weeks leading up to a company event or conference, you can schedule several posts leading up to the event that feature profiles on employees, sneak peeks, or even giveaways. Your content calendar doesn’t need to be overly detailed, but make sure you at least have a general idea of what and when you’re going to make posts. Having scheduled deadlines for when your posts are going to go up will help make sure you are generating consistent content that your audience will look forward to and engage with.

Creating content in advance – As much as possible, create your content in advance. Use your calendar to coordinate and schedule your posts. Creating your content in advance will help give your brand a cohesive feel and ensure that your content is consistent. Audiences respond best to consistently posted content.

If you have your posts created in advance, you’ll be able to stick to your schedule better and will avoid any last-minute mishaps. Being organized is an important piece to your content strategy success. There are several apps that can track your content success – or you can do it manually. Regardless, make sure that you have a system that’s simple, clear, and flexible.

Monitor your plan

An often overlooked part of Facebook content campaigns is follow-up analytics. You need to regularly monitor and track your content. As we mentioned earlier, make sure that you’re tracking important factors such as views, comments, likes, and keywords. It’s also important to notice things like days and time of day your content is posted. Compare the engagement each post gets and see what works – and what doesn’t.

When you find content features that work, update your upcoming content schedule to include some of those features. If you find that videos get a great reaction from your audience, look ahead at your content schedule and see if any scheduled content would work well as a video instead of a text-based post. A great content strategy is flexible and has room to grow with your audience’s needs and wants.

Creating a successful Facebook content strategy is actually quite simple. It does require some planning, strategy, and leg work, but at the end of the day it’s all about consistently producing authentic, quality content.