Ask most food or wellness brand owners (or their marketing teams) whether they have a social media strategy and the answer is usually yes. Ask them what it includes and you start to hear things like “we post three times a week”, “we try to stay consistent”, “we stay on top of trends”, or “we try to post at least three Reels per week”. Those are all tactics (and some of them are actually useful), but none of them is a strategy.
This distinction matters more than it might seem, because it explains why so many brands post consistently and still feel like social media isn’t working (or, as I always say, it feels like throwing content into a black hole). Consistency without direction produces content — like, a lot of content. But it doesn’t necessarily give you the results your business needs. And if you consider that Instagram’s engagement rate dropped 26% in 2025 and every platform is noisier than it’s ever been, the brands that are making social media work for them are almost always the ones with a clear strategic foundation (because showing up matters, but there needs to be a reason for that, too).
This post is about what a social media strategy is, what it includes in practice, and why having one changes what you can realistically expect from your social media presence.
What’s a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a documented plan that defines what you’re trying to achieve on social media, who you’re trying to reach, how you’ll reach them, what success looks like, and how you’ll know if things need to change.
That sounds straightforward. In practice, it means answering some questions that are harder than they look: What is this business actually trying to do on social media right now — and is that the same thing it was trying to do eighteen months ago? Who specifically is the ideal customer, not in broad demographic terms but in terms of what they care about, what they’re struggling with, what their shopping habits look like, and what kind of content makes them stop scrolling? Which platforms are worth the investment of time and resources, and which are being used out of habit or obligation? What does the content need to do — build awareness, drive website traffic, generate direct enquiries, or something else? And how will you know whether any of it is working?
A strategy answers all of those questions (and more) before anyone thinks about what to post. It’s the foundation that every content decision starts from. Without it, you end up creating content based on what seems like a good idea, what’s trending, what a competitor is doing, or what’s easiest to make… none of which reliably produce results.
In my work, I’ve found myself building strategies for brands at very different starting points, and the biggest variable I’ve come across is how much foundational work needs to happen before we can even get to the social media specifics. A business that has never formally worked through the marketing basics (target audience personas, tone of voice, positioning) needs a strategy that covers all of that before getting to the social media specifics. It takes longer and goes deeper, but it’s also useful beyond social media because this information can be applied across every marketing channel. A brand that already has those things figured out and can answer “who is your target audience?” with something more specific than “everyone who cooks” (yes, I’ve heard that one) needs a strategy that takes those existing foundations and builds the social media layer on top of them, nailing down the details that are specific to showing up, creating content, and measuring results on the platforms themselves.
In both cases, the strategy covers the same essential areas. What changes is how much groundwork we lay first.
Something I hear occasionally from brands who already have their target personas defined: “if we have that sorted, do we still need to pay for a social media strategy?” The answer is yes — because a social media strategy includes the specific details that make daily content decisions possible, like platform choices, content mix, format strategy, up-to-date platform insights, measurement framework, and how success is defined and tracked. A general marketing overview doesn’t contain that, and without it you’re back to posting based on what you think might be a good idea.
Over nine years of working with clients (from solopreneurs and founders to brands with dedicated marketing teams, agencies, and businesses just starting out), I’ve built a structured onboarding process that makes this as clear and efficient as possible. My questionnaire is designed to guide people to the answers rather than assuming they already have them. And the questions aren’t technical and limited to marketing professionals: I’ve prepared them in a way that works smoothly for founders and brand owners, and they’re specific enough to be useful while also being accessible enough for everyone, no matter how much marketing experience they have. Two of the questions clients most often comment on are “when users interact with your social media pages, how would you like them to feel?” and “what are the most common questions you get from customers?” — both of which sound simple but consistently give us plenty of information that shapes the entire strategy.
What a strategy is not
The confusion between strategy and tactics is so common that it’s useful to be specific about what a social media strategy is not.
A content calendar is not a strategy. A content calendar is a scheduling tool that tells you what to post and when. It’s useful and necessary, but it’s downstream of strategy. A content calendar built without a strategic foundation is just a list of things to post.
A posting frequency is not a strategy. Posting every day, three times a week, or twice a month is a volume decision. Volume matters, but it’s one variable in a much larger picture. Posting frequently without knowing whether the content is reaching the right people or producing any meaningful result is a way to share a lot of content that doesn’t do much.
From experience, I can tell you there’s also a practical cost to treating posting frequency as the strategy — and it’s one I think more people should hear about. It tends to go like this: you decide you need to post X times a week, work backwards to figure out how much content that requires, and hire someone to produce it. Then you realise you don’t know what to say in each caption, the content gets fewer interactions than expected, the page feels like it’s going nowhere, and you end up micromanaging the person you hired because you feel like you need to take back control. You end up with a pile of content nobody ends up using, a strained working relationship, and the same strategic gap you started with. The problem was a foundational issue all along: you need a strategy before diving into all of this.
Following trends is not a strategy. Things like trending audio, viral formats, and popular content styles can be useful tools within a strategy, but they’re not a substitute for one. A brand that chases every trend without understanding whether those trends are relevant to their audience tends to produce content that performs inconsistently and doesn’t build anything coherent over time.
And a social media strategy is definitely not a fixed document that you write once and follow indefinitely. Platforms, user behaviour, and business priorities all change constantly. A strategy needs to be revisited and updated — ideally every few months, or whenever something significant shifts. Using a strategy from 2022 in 2026 means you are planning your social media presence based on assumptions about how platforms work that are no longer accurate, features that are either missing from your strategy or no longer available, and what your audience wanted four years ago, not now. No wonder you are incredibly frustrated by your results (or lack thereof).
What a strategy includes for a food, drink or wellness brand
In practice, building a social media strategy for a brand involves working through several interconnected elements.
Audience clarity is the foundation of everything. This means going beyond “our customers are middle-aged women who care about health” and getting specific about what those people want to feel, what problems they’re trying to solve, what content makes them stop and pay attention, and what kind of relationship they want to have with a brand in this space (and much more). The more specific and honest the audience picture is, the better every subsequent content decision becomes.
Clear goals that are connected to real business outcomes. Not “grow our following” or “increase engagement” — those are metrics, not goals. Goals sound like: generate a minimum of ten qualified enquiries per month from Instagram, increase website traffic from social media by 30% in the next quarter, build enough brand awareness to support the next product launch. Goals need to be measurable, specific, and tied to something that matters for the business. Just to give you an idea, the most recent goal I created for a client strategy was keeping the CTR for the link in bio over 15% for the next 6 months.
Platform choices made deliberately rather than by default. Not every food or wellness brand needs to be on every platform. Instagram remains the most important channel for most of the brands I work with, but the decision about whether to invest in Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Threads should come from understanding where the specific audience is most active — you should never pick your platforms based on a general sense that those might be useful or those are the ones you use so they must be the right ones.
A content framework that defines the mix of content types, the topics and themes the brand will consistently address, the formats that serve different goals (awareness, engagement, conversion), and the brand voice that runs through all of it. This is basically the architecture that post ideas fit into.
A measurement framework that defines which metrics matter for the goals. Likes and follower counts tell you very little about whether social media is working for a food or wellness brand. The metrics that tend to matter more are saves and shares (signals of genuine content value), link in bio CTR, DMs and direct enquiries, profile visits, mentions and website traffic from social (and of course it’s important to understand how these numbers change month after month). You set the goals first, then give metrics their own priority system. This is also a point where you need to trust your social media strategist: I know you might be tempted to simply track followers and engagement rate based on likes and comments, even if they said otherwise. That would be a huge mistake because in that way, you cannot possibly have enough meaningful information to update and adjust your strategy and content, plus you would also plainly ignore the judgment and expertise of the person you hired for the job, which makes zero sense.
A review process: a regular commitment to looking at the data, identifying what’s working and what isn’t, and adjusting accordingly. This is what turns a strategy from a static document into an active tool, but I have seen firsthand that it’s a step that gets skipped more often than it should.
Who is responsible for it depends on how you work. I create strategies for clients who then implement everything on their own, and strategies for clients who continue working with me on implementation — which means the accountability for analytics and adjusting the strategy remains with me in some cases and with the client or their team in others. But there always needs to be someone who takes on this responsibility and will be there checking the numbers regularly, identifying what the data is actually saying, giving the strategy enough time to produce meaningful results before making changes, and knowing when it’s time to adjust something versus when it’s just a slow month. If that person isn’t you and isn’t someone on your team, it needs to be whoever you’ve brought in to manage your social media.
For brands handling implementation themselves, strategy consultations or training sessions (something I also offer) can help bridge that gap, giving you a clearer picture of what to look for, how to interpret what you’re seeing, and when to act on it.
Why consistency without strategy produces results that are just… meh
This is the part that most brands find frustrating, because consistency is the advice they hear most often and many of them are already doing it. They’re posting regularly and producing decent content, but the results feel disproportionately small for the effort.
The problem isn’t usually the content itself. It’s that the content isn’t connected to a clear purpose, aimed at a well-defined audience, or measured against metrics that reflect actual business outcomes. So the brand posts, things happen (or don’t happen) in the feed, and nobody is quite sure whether it’s working, which creates a situation that’s very hard to improve.
Format choices are a good example of where the absence of strategy shows up clearly. A small B2C account I work with averages 2.5k reach on carousels with consistent link clicks and saves, while Reels on the same account rarely go past 300–500 views and generate very little meaningful interaction (to give you an idea: carousels often get comments or replies in DMs from people who relate to that specific piece of content, while Reels gave us that result maybe twice in a year). Without a strategy that defines which formats serve which goals, a brand in that situation might conclude that their content isn’t working — when the more accurate conclusion is that the wrong format is being used for the wrong purpose.
I’ve written in detail about what Instagram engagement actually looks like right now and why the metrics most brands are tracking don’t tell them what they think they do (read that post here). The short version: visible engagement (likes, comments, follower growth) has declined significantly across the board and is no longer a reliable indicator of whether social media is producing results. The brands that know this are measuring different things. The brands that don’t know this are looking at their like and follower counts and wondering what they’re doing wrong.
The other important takeaway: people might not interact publicly, but they are still watching, and sometimes that silent watching leads directly to a purchase, booking, or recommendation. These two examples say it better than I can: one is about a Reel for which I had really high hopes and barely got 300 views, but booked a client who specifically said “I saw the video and I immediately knew I had to reach out” (no follow, like or comment). The second one is about a carousel post that explained the topic so well that my client got 6 bookings (all mentioning the post) for their highest ticket offer.
A strategy doesn’t fix the algorithm or reverse the broader shifts in how people use social media. What it does is ensure that you’re measuring the right things, producing content with a clear purpose, and making decisions based on data rather than guesswork. That’s the difference between treating social media as part of your business’ marketing plan and having a very time-consuming (and expensive) hobby.
What changes when strategy is in place
If I had to summarise what a strategy does for your business in a few words, it would be: removes the guesswork and saves you from an endless number of headaches. But let’s get to the details.
The most visible change is that content decisions become easier and faster (if you have ever tried to be consistent on social media, you know how much of a game-changer this is). When you know who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to achieve, and what kind of content serves those goals, you’re not starting from a blank page every time. You have a framework to work within, and the individual post ideas that used to feel like a weekly scramble start to flow more naturally from that framework.
The less visible but more important change is in what the numbers start to tell you. When you’re measuring the right metrics and you know what you’re trying to achieve, you can actually see if things are moving in the right direction and you can identify specifically what to adjust when they aren’t.
The clearest way I can illustrate this is with real results from client accounts I have managed.
A food brand I work with saw a 212% increase in profile activity in the month following a content strategy reset. This didn’t involve a fully new aesthetic or changing the posting frequency; I planned a strategic reset that drew from both platform and user behaviour changes, as well as from recent interactions with customers. I redefined the content mix, introduced a new style, and aligned everything around a clear set of business goals. One month later, the account was significantly more active in every metric that matters.
A food brand with an online shop saw a 383.9% increase in external link clicks in the month following strategic content alignment — meaning the content was rebuilt around driving traffic to the right places, but I did this while using all the information I had on their specific audience. The primary goal was online sales, and the strategy reflected that at every level.
A wellness client I’ve been managing for nearly two years has maintained a link in bio CTR (the percentage of profile visitors who click through to the website) consistently above 25%, with peaks above 50% (the industry average for that metric is 2–5%). That result comes directly from a strategy built around the metrics that matter for a service-based business, and content designed to move the right people from the platform to the website (for both brand awareness and enquiries). The full case study is here.
And for a small food brand’s Christmas campaign, a strategic shift from product-focused Stories to emotionally-led storytelling produced a 66% increase in link clicks compared to the previous year’s campaign (organic only, no paid advertising) and the seasonal product sold out. The full breakdown of that campaign is here.
None of these results came from posting more, scrambling for the most trendy post or crying over a follower count that’s not as big as you’d hoped. The work behind the scenes involved posting with a clearer purpose, having a better-defined audience, and focusing on the things that actually reflect business outcomes.
Done posting and hoping something changes?
The brands in this post didn’t get those results because they got lucky with the algorithm or happened to go viral (none of them, in fact, had a viral post). But everything we posted had a reason behind it and a strategy that made every content decision easier and every result measurable.
You can keep posting and hoping something works. Or you can build the foundation that makes every post count and gives you something to fall back on when things flop (because that’s part of the game, too). I work with food, drink, and wellness brands who are done guessing: get in touch here and we’ll figure out exactly what needs to change.
Can I create a social media strategy myself or do I need to hire someone?
You can put something together yourself, and starting with a basic plan is better than having no plan at all. But there’s only so far a self-built strategy can take you because the areas where many fall short are also the most important, like knowing which metrics matter right now, how platform behaviour has shifted recently, and connecting content to real business outcomes. Social media moves fast enough that information from even a year ago can be outdated, which is why direct, hands-on platform experience matters more than a general marketing background. As I always say: if you don’t want to throw your smartphone out the window at least three times a day, you probably don’t have enough firsthand experience to build a proper strategy. At minimum, a consultation with someone working on this daily will save you from building on assumptions that no longer work.
What is a content pillar in social media?
A content pillar is a broad theme your social media content consistently returns to. For a food brand, pillars might be recipes, behind-the-scenes production, ingredient sourcing, and customer stories. For a wellness brand: education, client results, lifestyle content, founder perspective. Pillars give your content a structure beyond filling a feed, and they’re one of the foundational things I define when building a strategy for a new client.
How long does it take to see results from a social media strategy?
Three months of consistent, intentional execution is the minimum before drawing any conclusions — not three posts in three months, but real content volume measured against the right metrics (to give you an idea, for most brands on Instagram, I would say at least three feed posts per week plus Stories). Some things move faster: link in bio CTR can change within weeks of a strategic reset. Others, like brand awareness, social proof and organic growth, take longer. The important thing is having defined goals before you start, so you know what you’re looking for.
What should a social media strategy include?
At minimum: a clear audience definition, specific measurable goals tied to real business outcomes, well-thought-out platform choices, a content framework covering your mix of topics and formats, a measurement framework defining which metrics matter, and a review process. It also needs to reflect how platforms work now, not two or three years ago.
Do I need a social media strategy if I’m a small brand or a solopreneur?
Yes — arguably more than a larger brand, because you have less time and resources to waste on content that isn’t working. Even a focused one-pager covering your audience, goals, platforms, and definition of success can make an enormous difference. The brands I work with range from solopreneurs to established names and the strategic foundation matters at every level.
Is it better to refresh an old strategy or create a brand new one?
If your business, audience, or goals have changed significantly (or if the strategy hasn’t been updated in years), starting fresh is usually more efficient than trying to fix something outdated. If the fundamentals are still there but tactics and measurement need updating, a refresh makes more sense.
How much does social media strategy cost?
It depends on the scope, the starting point, and who you work with. A brand that needs foundational marketing work done before the social media specifics will require more time than one that already has its audience and positioning defined. I offer social media strategy as a standalone service and as part of ongoing management — the details are here.
I’m Chiara — a social media specialist, food photographer and stylist, short-form video creator, and recipe developer based in Ireland. I work with food, drink, and wellness brands across Ireland and internationally, and I’ve been running A Matter of Nourishment since 2017. My background includes an MSc in chemistry, a diploma in digital marketing, and certifications in social media marketing and nutrition: a combination that shapes everything from how I approach a shoot to how I think about content strategy.
A Matter of Nourishment 