how tf does one come up with a 'social media strategy'?

hiiii friend,

every week i get some version of the same message in my inbox:

'i don't know what to post' 

'i post consistently and nothing happens'

'i have a hundred ideas and none of them feel right'

'i see someone else doing something so simple and it's outperforming everything i've spent hours on'

underneath all of these conversations is the same question: what's the actual strategy i'm supposed to be using here? because clearly 'just posting' isn't enough.

'strategy' feels like something meant for sports wins or how to rob a bank, i don't know. but we're going to talk about what social media strategy even means or should look like because it's something i get asked about all the time.

i think the reason it feels impossible to answer questions like the ones above is most people go looking for someone else's strategy instead of building their own. they find a framework that worked for a creator in a completely different niche, with a completely different life, a completely different amount of time to give, and they try to force their content into it.

surprise surprise it doesn't fit. 

because it was never built for them. it was built for someone else's brand, someone else's capacity, someone else's audience.

instead, here’s how you should think about social media strategy:

that's the equation i use for everything. but before i walk you through it, there's another strategy worth knowing about first. it's called:

it looks like posting every day for a year and coming back with your findings. because you will learn just as much from that as you ever will from planning too long and staying inconsistent. 

i’ve learnt there's a fine line between planning and action, and most people get stuck on the planning side because they're waiting for it to be perfect. it won't be. so if reading an equation right now feels like one more thing standing between you and just starting, skip it.

go post. come back to this later. you will learn just as much from that as you ever will from spending time planning your content just to avoid posting.

but if you do want to plan and fully intend to follow through on that plan, here's how you do it......