The ubiquity of social media combined with an essentially non-existent barrier to entry for creating content means that more often than not content gets created first and the determination of whether or not it’s a good idea comes later.

As obvious as it sounds, I’ll just say out loud that this approach is backwards.

What this often comes down to is the age-old conflation of tactics with strategy.

Quick definitions:

A tactic is an action taken for the sake of its immediate result.

A strategy is a plan for implementing a series of tactics to achieve an ultimate goal.

Essentially, tactics are the “how” while strategy is the “why.”

Here are a handful of hypotheticals that might help illustrate the difference in the context of our media:

Tactics: “When does this video need to be posted?”
Strategy: “Why does this video need to be created?”

Tactics: “Should we update our feed weekly or monthly?”
Strategy: “Is a feed-based content platform the most appropriate way to publish our content?”

Tactics: “How can we make this more relatable?”
Strategy: “How do we want to be perceived?”

Notice that pretty much every tactical decision has a strategy assumption built into it.

Basically, you can either decide your strategy up front—in which case most of your tactical decisions will have ready-made answers; or your strategy will be revealed in retrospect as the result and sum of each individual tactical decision.