Social Media Plan: design your own

What is a Social Media Marketing Plan or Social Media Plan?

Before you start with your social media marketing plan, make sure you know what you want and what you need to do to achieve it. 

A Social Media Plan is a guide to organize and schedule all of the actions that you will carry out with your social media accounts.  The main purpose behind a social media plan is to carry out your objectives through online communication.

This plan should…

✅ Respond to the objectives of your business or company. Get straight to the point.

✅ Adapt to the social networks you are going to use to establish a good relationship with your community.

✅ Summarize the approach and actions that you will implement to achieve your objectives through the different networks. 

Watch out! 👀

Don’t lose sight of the end user, they should be at the center of any social media plan. After all, it will be your clients, readers or potential followers who will contribute towards your success.

Why it is important to create a Social Media Plan

While improvisation works at times, you should be strategic and coherent in communicating your message.

Having a Social Media Strategy will better help you:

➡️ Create your brand identity.

➡️ Establish the strength of your personality: beyond just clients, make personal connections to your followers.

➡️ Communicate effectively and ‘catch on with the public’.

➡️ Plan actions in the medium and long term.

➡️ Control your budget: organizing your strategy will allow you to better understand the necessary investment.

How to design your own Social Media Plan

Now that you know what a social media plan is, what it should include and what it can do for you, let’s get started…

Steps to take before designing your Social Media Plan

Before you design your own Social Media Plan, see if you have clear answers to the five following questions:

⚡️ What do you want to achieve with your online communication? Set your goals.

⚡️ Who is your target audience and on which social networks or digital environments can you establish relationships with them?

⚡️ Is there buzz about you on the internet?

⚡️ If you have taken your first steps on Social Media, has it worked out as planned?

⚡️ Who is your competition? How do they interact with social networks?

Steps to design your own Social Media Plan 

The time has arrived to begin defining your strategy…

Work carefully through the process and take it one step at a time.

Your new Social Media Plan is going to become one of your strongest allies to success.

Spend as much time as it deserves!

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS

As previously mentioned, being clear about your business objectives is vital to orchestrating a good plan.

Some examples of the specific objectives for your social media strategy might be:

• Incentivizing purchases
• Creating a brand and being recognized by users
• Creating or expanding your community of fans, followers, subscribers or potential customers
• Improving your online reputation 
• Attracting traffic to your website, ecommerce, blog or digital newspaper

DEFINE YOUR STRATEGY TO UNDERSTAND THE PATH YOU’LL NEED TO FOLLOW 

After clarifying your objectives, it will be much easier for you to map out the different strategies you’ll need to follow to meet those objectives.

For example, if one of your goals was to ‘increase sales through social networks’, you might map out:

• Strategies to increase your visibility online
• Promotional strategies
• Strategies to attract your target audience
• Strategies to expand your database of potential customers

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ACHIEVE YOUR STRATEGY? PUT YOUR PLAN INTO ACTION 

Networks, strategy and action. It’s up to you to put your Social Media Plan into action. Each strategy must be specified with a series of concrete actions that will help you achieve each specific objective.

So, each action must be ‘strategically’ arranged on your calendar:

• Collaborations with influencers
• Sales campaigns
• Discount periods
• Competitions

CHOOSE THE RIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS FOR YOUR BRAND OR BUSINESS 

To reach your potential clients you should engage with the social networks on which they are present. Keep in mind…

• The nature of your products or services
• The nature of the actions required for each strategy of your plan
• The age and gender of your target audience
• Their geographical location and interests

For example: suppose your business is focused on selling cosmetic products for motherhood. You should target pregnant women and moms between the ages of 20 and 42. Facebook and Instagram could be the perfect spaces to show the benefits of your products and strengthen ties with future buyers.

PLAN APPROPRIATELY FOR EACH OF YOUR SOCIAL PROFILES 

Here you should establish the aspects that will shape your character in each social network:

• Tone of communication.
• Purpose of this communication.
• Frequency and dynamic of the publications.

ESTABLISH YOUR KPIS (key performance indicators)

Define the appropriate KPIs to assess your success. If you don’t measure your KPIs, you might drift away from your outlined objectives.

For example if in the previous example, we take the ‘increase in sales’ objective of the online store for maternity cosmetics, some optimal KPIs would be:

• Traffic sources to the store
• Increased turnover
• The return on investment (ROI).

CHOOSE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR MANAGING YOUR VARIOUS SOCIAL NETWORKS 

As described in this post, there are many steps and actions that need to be considered and carried out while designing a social media plan.

There are many tools out there that allow you to keep track of your daily results and that could make your life a bit easier regarding your social media plan. 

And Metricool would like to help you with this!

💥 Get the metrics of your blog, web or social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Linkedin.

💥 Plan all of your social network posts to make your day-to-day tasks easier.

💥 Discover the best hours with the most audience attention for your social profiles.

💥 Measure the results of your campaigns on Facebook Ads and Google Ads.

💥 With the premium version, download your personal reports, amongst other benefits.

💥 Manage the messages of your clients on social networks.

CREATE AN ACTION PROTOCOL FOR THREATS TO YOUR BRAND REPUTATION 

Your strategic plan should include a clear protocol on how to manage a potential threat to your online reputation. Therefore, it’s important that you consider aspects such as:

• Any potential weaknesses that could lead to a crisis for your business 
• Specify who will manage a crisis
• The steps you will need to follow in the aftermath
• Define the tone of responses for each social network

ESTABLISH YOUR BUDGET

Determining your budget will allow you to establish a realistic and consistent Social Media Marketing Plan. Your economic resources specific to your online business strategy will largely determine the dynamics of your actions.

Now, it’s your turn. It’s up to you to design and implement your own Social Media Plan.  We are here to help with any questions and we’ll await your feedback in the comments section!

Sara Martín , 10 June 2020