Building an unmatched social strategy by asking the tough questions.
This started out as one of my usual LinkedIn posts, and it turned out I had more to say than the character limit allowed, so here we are.
This is more of a list of questions to ask, with context, designed to help senior marketers or social leaders really get under the skin of their social strategy and make sure it offers the most value to their teams. Why? Because social teams are often the first place brands look when cutting costs, and it comes down to the team's ability to demonstrate ROI. These questions aim to help brands figure out how to build an efficient, and incredibly effective, social presence in 2026 and beyond.
Let's get to it…
Before Launch
Why do we exist on social? Really interrogate the benefit of your presence. Do you even need an organic strategy, or should you show up through paid ads and creator partnerships only? Every brand is different, but don't do something for the sake of doing it.
How do we know if we're succeeding? In other words, how do you measure your success, and more importantly, how does the CEO/CMO/CFO measure it? Nine times out of ten, you aren't aligned. You don't have to be, but your team should know what you're being measured on. Which leads me on to…
How does that success contribute to the overall business objectives? This shifts your thinking from views and engagement to true brand awareness and commercial objectives, the things that keep you in the role.
How do we prove the impact we can't directly track? This is the one that saves you in the budget conversation. So much of social's value is "dark": the DM that never gets logged, the founder a prospect quietly followed for a year before they ever inquired, the search that only happened because someone saw a Reel. You will never attribute all of it, but you need a defensible way to evidence it: brand lift, share of search, assisted conversions, community sentiment. Waiting for a clean last-click line from post to purchase is how social teams end up looking worthless on a spreadsheet they were never built to win.
How long do we give it? This helps set boundaries around performance. If your goal is to improve brand awareness, these things can take months. If that's the case, make sure the business is aligned and you have a way of measuring at the start and at the end, to see whether the results match your plans.
What are the roles of the formats we use? Some call this a content framework, or content pillars. Ideating around "creative" is often a waste of time in social; it's better to consider how the different formats deliver different benefits.
Does each platform have its own job? LinkedIn is not TikTok is not a community Discord, yet most brands cross-post the same asset everywhere and call it efficiency. It isn't, it's the fastest way to be ignored on all of them. Each platform has a different audience, a different behavior, and a different metric that actually matters. Decide what role each one plays before you decide what to post on it. If you can't explain why a piece of content lives on one platform and not another, you're publishing, not strategizing.
How do we build our brand on social? This is different from how does our brand show up. One considers adding value that strengthens the overall brand proposition; the other simply considers what makes good content that happens to feature the brand from time to time. The second is where your brand ends up looking and sounding totally different from every other touchpoint.
How is our social strategy fed by, and how does it feed, every other marketing touchpoint (not just creators and paid)? This helps break down the walls between teams and removes the silos that so often plague marketing. The biggest mistake I see here is a feed full of short-form content with the odd static commercial post offering a deal dropped in at random. That's not strategy, it's the clearest sign that the questions above haven't been answered.
How quickly can we actually go live? Count the hands a post passes through before it's published. I've watched brilliant reactive ideas die in three days of approvals while the exact moment they were built for came and went. Speed is the single biggest advantage social has over every other channel, and most brands hand it away at the sign-off stage. If someone on your team spots a cultural moment on a Tuesday morning, work out, honestly, whether you could be live before it's gone. If the answer is no, that's a bigger problem than any content pillar.
These are vital. They will change the way you think about your channels. That doesn't mean the channels become boring; it means they become as valuable as they can be to the business. I will not shut up about the conversations that happen every year between the CFO, CEO and CMO, where the CMO is tasked with justifying the spend across channels. If your social presence hasn't made a demonstrable contribution to the bottom line, it'll be the first thing to get cut. The same goes if it can't show how it has genuinely moved the brand's positioning, awareness or consideration.
What I've often seen is social entrusted to junior or mid-weight team members who know how to build great content but don't know how that content plays a role in building the business. Great content creators don't have to be great strategists, but you sure as heck need a great strategist in the room when you're planning to create content.
So what happens when you're live on social? The questions shouldn't stop.
After Launch
Do we get value from this? There is absolutely nothing wrong with looking at something after a few months and saying, "this isn't working, let's pivot." What matters is that you go back to your initial answers and make sure whatever you add is still built on the foundations you established.
Is our community getting value from this? This is the most important one. We measure Community Influence to see how well content is activating an audience, building advocacy and growing key business metrics. Any agency worth their weight in gold would do the same, and brand teams shouldn't be immune to that challenge.
How do our reports help us unlock more success? You already know what success looks like; knowing how to scale it is a skill social teams can unlock to demonstrate even greater value.
If we could start or stop doing one thing tomorrow, what would it be? Always cut the things that aren't working, or that take too long for too little return. Remember that the social team is still a financed resource, and taking a full day to produce an asset that generates no business results is a waste of time. Equally, just because something doesn't exist in your agreed strategy doesn't mean it shouldn't. Set an expectation around "all-hands" meetings that your social team can trigger, so they can put forward the additions they believe will contribute to the business's success.
Closing Note
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on social are where every social team I've ever worked with falls down. I've partnered with brands who make them up based on sales targets, take a previous year's number and add a random percentage, or literally guess. There's a better way. Rather than reach for industry benchmarks, I always advise looking at sector benchmarking. That means looking at the competitors in your space, establishing how that sector performs generally, and setting your benchmarks from there. As we know, the role of a follower is changing, and if you're optimizing for Reels or short-form content, your views are where your other metrics should stem from. Being able to articulate that, along with the expectations around your results, will help you set boundaries within the business. That's how you take a more leveled approach to everything you do.
