Planning for Social Media
Social Media Planning
If you have been doing Social Media for a while, then the first rule of thumb is to take stock of the previous year!
Review your activities, successes and failures
What was your baseline – followers, reach, engagement and growth.
What promotions or content was particularly successful, and which could have been better and how?
These valuable lessons will ensure you continue to curate the right content to the right people on the right platform at the right time. Easy Right?
Well not always! Social media is no easy job and can easily suck up days of your time away from what you do best. Although we champion business owners to do their own Social, it is OK to ask for help!
It also does not mean you relinquish control, it just means asking someone proficient to do the lengthy tasks of building and posting your content.
But to get you thinking the right way, here are a few of my tips to consider whichever way you manage your Social platforms.
Set SMART Goals
Specific - be as clear as you can, this helps really focus what you are trying to achieve
Measurable - How will you measure that success?
Attainable - Have you made it attainable or will you be putting unnecessary pressure on yourself? It is better to take smaller steps, more regularly to achieve social success.
Relevant - Have you made the goals relevant to your business objectives?
Time-specific - Have you given yourself a time period to adhere to, with a clear deadline
Spy on your Competitors
Yes, we all do it from time to time, it is how you learn the good, the bad and the ugly! Setting up alerts in Google and your social platforms makes it easy to keep an eye on them and help you improve future posts.
Set up an Editorial Calendar
The most important part of being good at Social Media is creating an editorial content plan. This can take some time to do, but the effort firstly cements your thoughts into clear focused topics of conversation, secondly stops you taking a scattergun approach to what you publish and lastly keeps your target audience engaged with topics that are relevant to them.
Map out your year - company events, holidays, other dates worth noting
Research the Topics and Subtopics you wish to talk about (SEO work is handy here)
Add in any planned marketing and promotional activities
Create a timeline for execution and allow time for production
Review your marketing goals
Always use Social Media to compliment your other marketing efforts. Traditional media still works, but can be emphasised more through Social Media and lessons can be learnt from comments, shares and engagement.
Try to get your goals to match each other, increasing leads, audience growth, better engagement.
Strategy Execution
Try to choose the tool that suits you best for this. Google Docs, Hootsuite, Excel, Later, QueueSmarter - the list is endless, but the tools have to suit how you work.
Allow time to review content that has been written, upload it and set goals around it, always think about what format the content should be in - video, blog post, PR, Social Media post.
Hold regular meetings to ensure all staff and content writers are on the same page.
How to best use your resources
Try to start recruiting writers (internal and external) for your chosen platforms. Generate your editorial calendar to cover the campaigns or content topics and keep things fresh.
If even thinking about Social Media makes your head hurt and means you are not doing your normal business activities, it is certainly time to re-evaluate who does what!
What can you do in a crisis?
Things can always go wrong, so what will you do?
Have some flexibility in your plan, create more content than needed in case content becomes unusable
Allow time and writers to react to events that happen.
Have others you trust to keep an eye on your Social Media, most of the time you will find friends and family will jump to your rescue if something terrible goes wrong.
Our main advice here is always writing a Crisis Plan for such eventualities, it will keep you calm in a crisis.
This is only a short overview of what planning for Social Meda entails if you think you need to get going, re-evaluate where you are to make sure future posts work harder for you or need a crisis plan (and let’s be honest, the latest worldwide pandemic has taught us we need one!), lets chat.