Most social media strategies we inherit are not wrong. They are too big for the team that has to run them. A deck arrives promising five platforms, daily posting, weekly video, a podcast and a community program, and it lands on two people who also own the website, the newsletter and whatever the sales team needs by Thursday. Six weeks later the calendar is a graveyard and everyone quietly concludes that social does not work for their category.
Consistency is the mechanism here, not volume. A brand publishing three good things a week for two years beats a brand publishing daily for two months and then disappearing, because the feed and the audience both reward a habit. So the first question in a strategy session should not be what should we post. It should be what can we still be doing in month eighteen.
Start from capacity, not ambition
Write down the honest number of hours a week your team can give to social. Not the hours you wish you had. Then work backwards. In the Egyptian SMEs we work with, one full time social person sustains somewhere between eight and twelve original pieces a month across two platforms, including the community management that comes attached to them, before quality starts sliding. A half time person manages four to six. An agency retainer buys production capacity rather than magic, and the same arithmetic applies to it.
If the plan needs more than the capacity you have, either the plan shrinks or the budget grows. There is no third option, and pretending otherwise is how competent social teams burn out and leave.
Two surfaces, done properly
Pick the platform your buyer already uses, then one supporting surface. For most Egyptian consumer brands that pairing is Instagram and TikTok, or Instagram and WhatsApp when the selling actually happens in chat, which it usually does. For B2B it is LinkedIn plus an email list you own. Facebook is still where reach lives outside Cairo and Alexandria and among older buyers, so do not delete it because a conference told you to, and do not staff it as though it were 2016 either.
Everything else gets a claimed handle, a complete profile and a link to where you really live. Presence without publishing is perfectly respectable. Publishing without capacity is not.
Three pillars and one shoot day
Define three content pillars and refuse a fourth. Ours are usually proof, meaning the product working and the results it produced, education, meaning the questions your sales team answers twenty times a week, and personality, meaning the people, the workshop and the mistakes. Every idea has to sit inside one of the three or it does not get made.
Then batch. One shooting day a month, six to eight hours, produces enough raw material for four weeks if the shot list is written in advance. The teams that fail are the ones improvising a video on the morning it is due. Put Arabic captions on everything, because most of your audience watches muted and thinks in Arabic even when they read English. Schedule the evergreen posts and keep two slots a week open for whatever is genuinely happening.
Review the social media strategy quarterly against something real
Monthly reviews push teams toward whatever spiked last week, which is how brands end up chasing trends they have no business joining. Review quarterly, and review against saves, shares, conversations started in the inbox and orders that can be traced back to social. Follower count is the vanity number that survived every other reckoning, and it still decides far too many budgets.
A plan that fits the team, on two platforms, with three pillars and one shoot day a month, will outperform an ambitious plan nobody can run. If you want that built and staffed properly rather than improvised, that is exactly what our social media strategy and management engagements are for.
