7 Steps to an Effective Social Media Strategy in the Age of Web3

Follow our 7-step guide to build an effective social media strategy: get up to speed with Web 2.0 and prepare for the arrival of Web 3.0 (Web3).

More than a decade into the Web 2.0 era, and on the eve of the Web 3.0 revolution, many brands are still lagging behind when it comes to a real social media strategy.

Looking back, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the iPhone all landed in our hands between the mid- and late 2000s. Now we’re entering the next generation of the internet, often called the metaverse, which gives us even more digital ways to communicate with our audiences.

But don’t panic if you don’t have a well-defined strategy yet: you’re far from alone!

While close to 60% of the world’s population is reportedly active on social media, more than half of B2C brands admit they have no real social media content or strategy.

What’s more, most brands rate themselves as amateurs when assessing their social media expertise, and more than half of the brands surveyed even admit that their social media marketing is mediocre.

Without a strategy, you’re just guessing. With Web3, the metaverse, digital goods, and virtual worlds on the horizon, you can’t skip the strategic foundations of Web 2.0 and hope to move on.

Stefanie Hingley, COO of Mission Impact, an organization that helps women rise in Web3, put it this way: Web2 and Web3 have a lot to learn from each other, and much of the work is building bridges between them. Leave behind the practices that slow you down, she argues, but bring along the ones that provide structure and let you scale sustainably. Things are moving too fast to reinvent the wheel, so take the best of what exists and adapt it to future needs.

Anticipation, determination, and strategy are usually what win the social media battle.

1. Start Your Social Media Strategy With an Executive Summary

This is a one-page summary that briefly sets out the purpose of social media for your company and how it ties in with your current business goals and objectives.

Note any Web3 tests or predictions as well.

Define your main goal and the specific objectives you’re trying to reach. Make sure you identify a primary channel, and avoid trying to do everything on every network.

For example, if you’re a B2B company, consider creating content for LinkedIn first, then repurposing it for secondary channels.

Our Web3 Tip

Explore and research what other brands are doing with Web3. What’s working? Start holding team meetings to discuss your social media strategy, perhaps even in Meta Horizon Workrooms.

According to the Meta Newsroom, Horizon Workrooms works in both virtual reality and on the web, and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely through the power of VR, whether you’re brainstorming on a whiteboard, working on a document, hearing team updates, socializing, or simply having conversations that flow more naturally.

Set benchmarks and include measurable results to make sure every stakeholder approaches the objectives with the same expectations. Bigger goals call for more precise objectives.

Sample objective: grow your Instagram audience by 20% by the end of the quarter.

2. Audit Your Social Media Presence

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is a smart way to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Start by auditing your brand’s social channels against two or three competitors. You can even pick a non-competing brand as a source of inspiration and aspiration, ideally one that’s already active in Web3.

Wendy’s, Airbnb, Netflix, Buffer, HubSpot, and Cisco, for example, are known for their social media savvy. It pays to look beyond your own industry and see what works.

Compare content types, engagement, posting frequency, audience size, visuals, use of video, tone, and customer service messaging. What’s their response rate?

Here are more factors to compare and consider:

• Live streaming
• Courses and webinars
• Influencer marketing
• User-generated content
• Features such as Reels and Stories
• Communities
• AR/VR (augmented and virtual reality)
• 3D
• Virtual worlds
• NFTs
• Coins, tokens, or cryptocurrencies
• Metaverse collaborations
• Audio experiences
• Emoji use
• Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps
• Keywords and hashtags
• Third-party content
• Branded search results
• Comments

According to Social Media Examiner’s 2022 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, brands and marketers see increased exposure and traffic as the main benefits of social media. Turning social media into measurable ROI, such as more sales and lead gen, remains a real struggle.

Recent reports suggest that Facebook and LinkedIn are the channels of choice if you’re looking for leads from social media.

3. Focus on Your Social Media Goals

Let’s quickly review the difference between long-term goals, strategy, short-term objectives, and tactics, known as GSOT.

• Goals: your overall social media aims.
• Strategy: the approach you’ll take to reach your goal.
• Objectives: the measurable steps you’ll take to carry out the strategy.
• Tactics: the tools and tasks used to pursue an objective tied to a strategy.

Examples:

• Goal: make your book the No. 1 bestseller in the metaverse category.
• Strategy: increase the amount of content you publish on social channels supporting the book’s topics, ideas, and opinions.
• Objective: increase unique visitors from social channels to the book’s website or landing page by 50%.
• Tactic: work with metaverse and Web3 influencers, and build exposure with branded hashtags and behind-the-scenes content using Stories, Facebook Live, and Twitter.
• Advanced: join and host events in Web3-focused communities using Twitter Spaces, Clubhouse, Discord communities, and virtual worlds such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, Roblox, or AltspaceVR.

4. Develop Your Buyer Personas

Half of all brands don’t have an advanced social media strategy. The share of brands with defined buyer personas should be far higher than that.

In fact, brands really need buyer personas. They matter in Web 2.0, and they’re an absolute must if you want to survive and thrive in Web 3.0.

Marketers have always preached the value of personas, but it quickly gets harder when it’s time to invest the time and effort to create and actually use them.

The good news: if your competitors are fumbling their personas, that gap is a big opportunity for you.

Never forget: buyer personas + social media = a winning formula.

The payoff shows up as real gains in:

• Conversions
• Relevance scores
• Engagement
• Efficiency across the board

So it’s essential to build your own buyer personas.

Get started with these persona tools and get to know your buyers:

• Xtensio Persona Maker
• HubSpot’s Make My Persona
• This Is Studio Self

In his book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, digital analyst Brian Solis makes the point that personas should cover not only the people who buy from you today, but also the people who don’t and whom you’re targeting. The research behind an accurate portrait of current and potential customers and their behavior, he writes, should combine demographic, psychographic, and ethnographic data.

When you create your buyer personas, remember to include your networks, stakeholders, community managers and moderators, podcasters, bloggers, and influencers.

The media (journalists, podcast hosts, Twitter Spaces hosts, Clubhouse room hosts) are also part of your target audience. Treat them as real people with real interests and real lives. You may find you feel closer to them.

5. Find Your Brand’s Personality

Every brand needs a well-defined voice, personality, and character. Think about the adjectives that describe your brand. Are you upbeat, funny, playful, or reserved? Maybe your brand is serious, direct, and emoji-free? Will you dare to poke fun at competitors, the way Wendy’s and Taco Bell do?

List how you want to be perceived when people interact with your brand.

In 2009, as social media was taking off, bestselling author and PR icon Aliza Licht played the famous (and now retired) @DKNYPRGirl, an online persona representing the DKNY brand.

As Licht tells it, she created the anonymous DKNY PR GIRL persona on Twitter before any other fashion brand had really moved into social. The account helped pave the way for authentic voices on social media and grew to about 1.5 million followers worldwide across platforms. When she revealed in 2011 that she was the person behind it, the news generated more than 230 million impressions worldwide, including a full page in The New York Times.

The persona also paid off for Licht’s personal brand: over six years, it earned her numerous awards, a TED talk, and a book deal. Leave Your Mark, published in 2015, has since guided thousands of professionals around the world.

6. Make Your Mark: Timing and Dates

Timing is everything. Nobody wants to be a day late and a dollar short.

So be on time, and never late on social media. That means researching the best days and times to post and turning them into an editorial calendar.

Also make sure your reporting is efficient and relevant enough for proper analysis, because there’s a lot of data.

The CEO gets the one-page report, the CMO the two-page report, the sales team the report on sales connections, and the analysts the full ten-page report. That’s a lot of information.

So match each report to the right person and to what matters most to them.

Separate internal and external dates:

• Internal: check conferences, workshops, team meetings, and marketing reports in your industry.
• External: look at seasons, themes, events, and new trends to work into your social media content.

From National Pineapple Day to World Productivity Day, never miss a day! Check the year’s special days and fill your editorial calendar with the most interesting events, festivals, and holidays. Our guide to building a social media content calendar shows you how, and this piece explains why recurring calendar moments matter.

Our Web3 Tip

Sign up for crypto, Web3, and NFT events. Keep an eye out for virtual and in-person events and conferences to train your team, and possibly connect with Web3 partners who can raise your brand’s profile.

7. Measure What Matters

Measuring what really matters is the key to an effective social media strategy.

Every network has its own analytics tools, and reporting can quickly eat up your time. So keep coming back to measurable objectives. Connecting social data to your site with GA4 and web analytics shows which posts actually drive results.

Look at both quantitative and qualitative data to understand sentiment and intent.

Quantitative Examples

These include website sessions, email sign-ups, impressions, and social media metrics.

Qualitative Examples

These include sentiment, such as positive reviews or comments on social posts. For example, did you raise your menu prices and get complaints on your Facebook page?

Quantitative vs. Qualitative

Quantitative data tells you what happened, while qualitative data usually helps you understand the “why.” For example, a positive feature in a well-known publication linking to your company’s website caused a spike in visits.

When influencers who had fallen ill began criticizing Daily Harvest, the plant-based meal delivery service that sells bowls, soups, and smoothies, it was an example of quantitative and qualitative signals combined: falling sales, negative media coverage, and negative sentiment on social media.

Conclusion

Once you’ve worked through all these steps, what comes next?

You might decide to take a different direction based on a new social media strategy. You could venture into the metaverse, launch an NFT collection, keep your hashtag campaign going, or even add budget.

But first, review your reports and progress, and draft an action plan with next steps. Provide analysis along with recommendations that interpret your results.

Also keep an eye on the evolution of Web3, the next generation of the World Wide Web, which spans new economic models, decentralization, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), the metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), connectivity and ubiquity, blockchain, digital fashion, and more.

Having a broad social media strategy matters, but it’s even more important to keep the plan fluid and flexible, and to stay on top of trends.

Meta offers Meta Blueprint, a collection of self-paced courses, certifications, and learning materials designed to help your business move forward.

As a marketer, holding these certifications can help you stand out from your competitors.

Keep the social in social media by staying engaged and joining the conversation. Strategy will follow, flow, and fill in from Web 2.0 to Web3. But make sure you’ve mastered Web 2.0 to get the most out of Web3.

Feeling lost in your social media strategy? Référenceur is a French-speaking agency from Belgium and Luxembourg whose social media marketing team works with U.S. businesses remotely, through video calls and shared screens. Get a free assessment.

Adapted from Search Engine Journal.

Where Things Stand in 2026

The Web 2.0 fundamentals in this guide (clear goals, audits, personas, brand voice, a content calendar, and meaningful metrics) still apply. Several of the Web3 tools mentioned here have changed since 2022: Microsoft shut down AltspaceVR in March 2023, and Twitter was rebranded as X in July 2023. Social content now also shapes search behavior, a pattern we cover in the social-search halo effect.