What Social Media Managers Actually Do When Starting with a New Brand: A Step-by-Step Framework

As someone who loves guides, processes, checklists—basically anything that resembles a methodology, my (probably outdated) degree in Advertising and PR and my 10+ years analyzing social media have pushed me to put together a quick recap of everything I believe any Social Media Manager should keep in mind when starting with a new brand, redefining the brand they’re currently working on, and/or validating key elements after a rebrand.

Phase 0: Learn before you act

The first (and most important) thing is understanding the brand’s roots.

How does the brand describe itself? How does it behave within its industry? Who buys it (people or organizations?) What do they need? How does the brand meet those needs? Why does the brand communicate on social media? Which channels does the brand have active?

All of these questions can be answered pretty easily (thankfully!) with a few core corporate documents the brand should have. Don’t be surprised, though, if those documents are collecting dust in a drawer (or the modern equivalent: a Drive folder inside another Drive folder that without a doubt you’ll need to request access to).

What documents do you need before touching anything?

Those mysterious, hidden documents are:

1. SWOT (or DAFO if you grew up with the Spanish acronym)
2. Buyer persona (or the modern version: ICP, Ideal Customer Profile)
   

On top of that, you’ll want to round out your context with info that the marketing team usually has closer at hand:

1. Sales and communication channels
2. Marketing objectives
3. Competitor benchmark

What if you don’t have access to all the documentation?

The piece that’s most likely outdated or the one they can’t hand you quickly is the competitor benchmark. If that’s your situation, you’ll have to build it yourself. I highly recommend using a market analysis guide to speed-run that research and get a solid baseline.

Phase 1: Audit your brand's social media communication

You think you haven’t… but we both know you skimmed straight to this section without having all the documents above. Let me say this lovingly: you can’t keep going like that. If getting everything feels like a complete headache, at least structure: the SWOT, the ICP and a v1 competitor benchmark with whatever the brand has shared with you. It’s non-negotiable if you want the rest of your work to be grounded.

And a quick note: if you’re new to the field and some of the terms still feel fuzzy, keep a Social Media Management glossary nearby, it’ll make this (and a lot of other reading) easier.

Now, let’s get into it.

In this communication diagnosis, your goal is to measure the alignment between what the brand is, what the brand says it is, and what people think it is. In a perfect world, that alignment would be 100%. In reality, it almost never is. Your job is to push it as close as possible, and make sure it supports the brand’s marketing objectives. Yes, feel free to save that paragraph for the next time your aunt asks what you do for a living, or when a colleague tells you their company has “the boss’s cousin handling social media because he’s a beast at replying on Twitter.” 😒

Do the brand’s strengths show up in its content?

Grab your SWOT and look at the Strengths section. The key insights you want from this part of the diagnosis are:

1. The percentage of posts that mention (directly or indirectly) one of the brand’s strengths
2. A list of competitors who are talking about any of your strengths
3. A table that includes:
   1. Strength being communicated
   2. % of communication dedicated to it over the last year
   3. Common patterns in how that strength is communicated
   4. A list of keywords used to communicate it

I know what you’re thinking: this is extremely detailed work for someone with zero time and five Slack messages already waiting. True. But here’s the good news: you don’t have to do all of it manually. Lean on technology. There are tools that analyze your content using AI like Welov.io that can help a lot with this step. And if you want to go deeper, there are also resources on how to communicate brand strengths effectively, which fits perfectly with this exercise.

Does your content actually resonate with your target audience?

Time to grab the document that defines your ideal customer and continue the diagnosis.

To be more efficient and to avoid drowning in subjectivity, I recommend using AI here. It’s well-known that you can assign AI a role, so this is the moment to have it become your ideal customer. Use a prompt that tells it to act as your ICP, then cross that perspective with the brand’s posts so you can answer questions like:

1. To what extent does the buyer persona feel identified with the brand?
2. If the buyer persona only saw the brand’s posts, what purchase intent would they have?
3. What concerns or doubts might the brand’s social communication trigger for that buyer persona?
4. What type of post would the buyer persona save?
   

If the brand targets multiple buyer personas in its social communication, repeat the exercise for each one.

Do your CTAs map to an actual objective?

Everything above is great, and I’m sure you enjoyed pretending to be the brand’s ideal customer. But now we have to get serious about why the brand uses social media and how its content contributes to marketing goals. In other words: this is your real focus.

You’ll need the document outlining marketing objectives and then ask (or rather, ask the content): do the calls to action used on social align with the objectives the brand is trying to achieve?

To answer that, build a table with:

• CTAs used across the last year’s posts
• % usage of each CTA
• Common patterns for each CTA (same theme? same audience?)
• The objective each CTA is supposed to drive
• A validation check: does it map to a direct marketing objective for social, or not?

Phase 2: Define the next 90 days

If you’ve made it this far, I’m willing to bet you already have a doc open full of notes: things to improve, ideas you had mid-audit, questions to ask the person responsible. If that’s you, just know: I like you a lot 🤗. And yes, that doc is your starting point.

Now you need an action plan that turns all of this research into something real.

If you have the time, I recommend repeating the previous exercises across the entire category, meaning the set of social posts from your competitors. You’ll get answers to questions as useful as:

1. How could the brand communicate the Opportunities in the SWOT within the category?
2. Are those opportunities already being claimed by another competitor?
3. Could the buyer persona feel more attracted to another brand in the category?
4. Which CTAs are working best in the category?
5. What content themes are not being covered by the category but would resonate with the brand and the ICP?
6. Which Weaknesses are strengths in your competitors’ communication?
7. Which SWOT weaknesses is the brand accidentally communicating without realizing it?
   

When you finish, you’ll have a (very) extensive document that lets you build a detailed, data-backed action plan with informed and validated decisions.

Your goal is to create a plan for the next 90 days: your starting point for transitioning into stronger social communication. How? By using AI to condense everything you’ve researched so you’re not starting from a blank doc (and spiraling into full-on panic and mental shutdown 🫰).

At this point, you can use a prompt (filled in with the outputs of your exercises) to generate a structured 90-day plan you can refine and execute.

<sub>Act as a senior Social Media strategist with experience in brand communications and content marketing. I’m going to give you the full context of a brand so you can build a detailed 90-day action plan. The goal is to improve the consistency between what the brand is, what it communicates, and what its audience perceives while aligning everything with its marketing objectives.
---
## BRAND CONTEXT
**Brand name:** [name]
**Sector:** [sector or industry]
**Core value proposition:** [short description]
---
## INPUTS FROM THE PREVIOUS DIAGNOSIS
**SWOT summary:**
- Strengths: [list]
- Weaknesses: [list]
- OpportunitiesThreats: [list]
- Threats: [list]
**ICP /  Ideal customer:**
[Describe the profile: role/title, motivations, fears, social behavior, content they consume]
**Active brand channels:**
[Example: Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok...]
**Marketing objectives:**
[Example: lead generation, brand awareness, retention/loyalty...]
---
## COMMUNICATION DIAGNOSIS FINDINGS
**Strengths that show up (or don’t) in the content:**
[Summary of which strengths are communicated, which are missing, and how they’re being framed]
**How strongly the ICP identifies with the posts:**
[Conclusions from the AI role exercise as the ideal customer]
**CTAs analyzed:**
[Which calls to action are used, how often, and whether they support the real objectives]
---
## SECTOR ANALYSIS (BENCHMARK)
**Main competitors analyzed:** [list]
**Opportunities detected in the sector:**
[Which topics nobody covers, which CTAs perform well, which of your weaknesses are competitors’ strengths, etc.]
---
## PLAN INSTRUCTIONS
Using everything above, create a 90-day action plan structured into three 30-day blocks with this logic:
- **Month 1 — Foundations: immediate fixes and definition of baseline editorial pillars
- **Month 2 — Activation: implementation of new topics, formats, and CTAs aligned with objectives
- **Month 3 — Optimization: review early results, refine the approach, and scale what works
For each month, include:
1. Main objective for the period
2. Priority content pillars/topics (with justification based on the diagnosis)
3. Recommended format types by channel
4. Proposed CTAs and the objective each one supports
5. Tracking KPIs
6. Key tasks or milestones
Be specific, use the diagnostic data to justify each decision, and prioritize impact over volume.</sub>

Phase 3: Measure, learn, repeat

From here on out, you keep measuring. Save the insights and documents you generated and pull out the most important metrics for where the brand is right now.

How often should I run this analysis?

Over the next few months, track post performance in detail. After three months, run a clean comparison between your current results and your initial baseline.

Review, adjust, and keep going.

Welov.io can help here too, with personalized and automatable prompts that make ongoing diagnosis and validation much easier to maintain. If you want to try it, you can create a free account 😉.