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How to Make a Social Media Content Plan
Social media is a series of platforms where people socialize online. These networks allow users to stay in touch, which gives companies great places for their brand or product.
By planning your social media posts, you’ll find you are less stressed, more confident and prepared.
Regular professional posts will grow your community, boost visibility and engagement, and therefore sales, if that is your end goal.
In this post, you’ll learn the 10 simple steps for creating a social media content plan.
Let’s get to it!
What is a Content Plan?
A content plan is a guide on what content to post, on which channel and why.
It helps you create and share written content, pictures and videos to get your brand, products or services out there to your target audience.
The content plan identifies your audience’s problems and provides solutions. It’s a roadmap, laying out everything you have to do.
This will help you see what type of content works best for your company.
According to the IAB Annual Report 2019, the high percentage of users on these networks make them a great channel for communicating with both current and potential clients. So, having an organized content plan will help make your life easier, whether you’re a freelance community manager or a marketing agency.
How to make a content plan for social media
Let’s go step-by-step, starting with an initial SWOT analysis and a short list of the most important points we’re going to cover. Obviously, this is a living document that you’ll have to update based on the results you see.
1. Analyze the initial situation
2. Establish a buyer persona
3. Set the goals of the content plan
4. Types of social media content
5. Which networks to use and how often to post
6. Promotion plan
7. Measuring social media content plan
1 Analyze the initial situation
First, we have to analyze our current situation, where we’re starting from, and also analyze our competition.
We need to know how many followers and how much growth we see on each platform, and the same for the competition, plus the time and frequency of posts, which previously posted content had the most reach, whether the competition uses Facebook Ads, etc.
To do this, Metricool is a great all-round tool. We’ll tell you how to use it in point 7 of this post.
Initial SWOT Analysis
This analysis shows us where we are and helps put together a strategy that will get results.
❇️ Strengths: Internal factors that give you a competitive advantage and help you overcome the threats.
Example: You’ve just been awarded a grant and are going to be able to hire someone and improve conditions.
❇️ Weaknesses: Internal factors that put us at a disadvantage.
Example: you don’t post videos.
❇️ Opportunities: External factors that could give you a competitive advantage.
Example: you’re going to hire someone to make videos.
❇️ Threats: External factors that could cause you trouble in reaching your goals.
Example: your competition posts two videos a week and you don’t.
This gives us a better understanding of the most important aspects of our company so we can start deciding what to do.
2. Establish a buyer persona
The buyer persona represents your ideal client. Careful: this isn’t the same as your target audience, which is the niche you’re targeting. Within that niche, you have one or several buyer personas.
For example, a target audience could be women aged 30 to 45 in Granada who like to do sport.
And the buyer persona would be much more specific. María, 37 years old, works part-time and wants to go to the gym in the afternoons.
So, establishing the buyer persona makes it easier to reach them and create the right social media content plan.
3. Establish the goals of the content plan
I always find it funny when we’re working with a new client and, in the initial briefing, they say:
No, not goals, I just want to sell!
This is when we explain that, in order to sell more, first we have to work on visibility and establishing real, measurable goals so we can work and move forward.
So, a real goal would be to get more clients over this coming year and the action that will help us do that is to boost sales in the online shop by 20% in six months. To do so, we have to see which type of content to work with and on which social network.
This mainly depends on the budget. Our budget determines what types of marketing actions we can take. It’s best to have educated clients, meaning they value and look at the price of our services, which makes our work easier and more profitable.
4. Types of social media content
The type of content most commonly used in any content plan is blog posts with links to social media to help get them out there. Remember, talking about your products isn’t enough to reach your audience… Practice active listening to find out what your clients and readers are interested in. This will help to give you ideas for your content plan.
This could be tutorials, guides, rankings, surveys, success stories, how-to, why or how-much articles, and they can include pics, videos, infographics, podcasts, video interviews, etc..
For example, an easy option is to post once a week about some kind of happy or fun activity that can brighten up the morning for the professionals reading your content. And use the #happy and the day of the week.
Even though, on Facebook and Instagram stories you’re in company mode or work on personal branding, you can also share non-business moments: leisure moments or unexpected situations. Like in the example, a pic of me and Ariel, my neighbor’s pet. It’s about applying storytelling to your content to give it value added.
Surveys to encourage active listening, as we mentioned before. At some point, you may want to get your audience’s opinion. For example, let’s say your company is thinking about launching a new line of cosmetics and wants to delve deeper into market research. You could be interested in posting a short survey on Facebook and giving the first 100 customers who complete it 50% off.
However, content is more professional on LinkedIn and should convey seriousness and credibility. One example is a short interview we did at a conference held by Andalucía Emprende.
On LinkedIn, in addition to sharing your blog posts, you should really share content from other blogs on your subject, providing value added for your community.
Experiment by adding new post formats, creating infographics, holding Facebook contests, etc. after researching your audience and competition. And above all make it fun and original.
Get inspired by content from other companies in your sector that are already well positioned, drawing on content from sources published by companies in other countries…and when you do, try to improve on the existing content. Try not to copy too much, though, original content is always better. Get inspired, but in moderation.
51% of B2B marketers prioritize creating visual assets as part of their content marketing strategy. (HubSpot, 2019)
5. Which networks to use and how often to post
Facebook remains the most widely used social network and will drive lots of social traffic to your blog. It’s great to share your blog posts on your Facebook page, and in groups related to your subject. How often depends on your product and your goal. On average, three or four times a week is good. Although, for some products or at the beginning of a campaign, it’s best to post daily.
Posting the same content at different times of day is most common on Twitter, because scheduling an average of three to five tweets a day, our own and some from related bloggers, really helps drive traffic to our blog. On Twitter, you have to tweet daily to notice a difference.
The ads are very cheap and can help us gain traction to position our posts and boost brand image.
On LinkedIn, use LinkedIn Pulse to your advantage. This tool helps you enrich your profile with content reflecting your experience, training, etc. This content remains on your profile and is visible to many people, helping improve your positioning on Google because it’s indexed before content. It also drives qualified traffic to your blog.
Instagram is more visual content and, although our experiments haven’t shown that it drives much traffic to our blog, it does improve your brand image and engagement.
On Google my business, you should post things that help your local SEO. Don’t wait for Google to notify you that your post is going to expire. Be proactive and post a few times a week, including pics, text, URLs and hashtags.
6. Promotion plan
For promotions, it’s best to create a posting calendar to schedule content. All you have to do is organize by date, type of content, channel and frequency. With everything organized, it’s much easier to promote and measure it, making it more effective.
This is where paid ads come in. We might be interested in paying to get leads or clients instead of just organically promoting our content. On Facebook Ads, for example, campaigns are highly effective since the CPC (cost per click) is cheaper than Google Ads, depending on the product.
7. Measuring social media content plan
Without metrics or monitoring, we won’t know what worked best so we can either keep doing it or change tactics.
Tools like Google Analytics, Metricool… and many others make online marketing reporting and the work of professionals in the sector much easier.
Metricool is a powerful tool.
We’ll explain why and how using it will make your digital content successful. You can link to your web/blog, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google my Business and Google Ads.
Very interesting metrics on posts, including: Number of followers, post reach and engagement, types of content that work best and interactions… You can also add your competitors and download reports for your clients.
Conclusions
A social media content plan is a roadmap that establishes the content we’re going to use on each social network.
Did you like this post? Think there’s something important that we didn’t mention?
Drop it in the comments and we’ll add it! 👇🏻