Social Media is a powerful marketing tool for business owners. It allows us to promote our products and services to large amounts of people in a time and cost-effective way. Leading to an increase in website traffic and potentially more leads. However, posting useful content that gathers the recognition it deserves is sometimes easier said than done. We want to show you the steps to take to ease the process and make a social media plan you can actually stick to!
Invest in a planning software
We use Trello for our social media plan, and pretty much everything else! It’s great for creating different areas filled with lists, cards and calendars that can be ticked off and moved. We always suggest setting up an account for our clients and they all love it too.
Sign up for your Trello account today – Trello
Awareness days
Searching and recording the relevant awareness days for your industry and business is a great way to start your social media plan. It gives you a starting point and generates ideas on what content to create. For example, ‘National Marketing Day’ is on the 11th of January and as you can imagine it is great for us. It allows us to create more valuable content than you may originally think. Here is how we would break down a day of such importance…
1) Pre Day story post – ‘What is everyone doing to celebrate National Marketing Day tomorrow’.
This is a great way to build awareness around the day and use any popular hashtags that may be trending. We may even tag fellow marketing business owners and clients to encourage them to spread the word.
2) The day itself – ‘Happy National Marketing Day!’
Creating a good quality post is great for our company on an awareness day like this. It allows us to show our followers that our social media is relevant and up to date as well as informing them of the occasion. It is once again a great way to use popular hashtags that are trending to increase reach and brand awareness.
3) Follow up content – ‘To celebrate National Marketing Day we have…’.
Content creation can be hard and sometimes just having that initial suggestion can help generate some ideas. This would be a great time to create and blog or videos about the importance of marketing, and even including some industry updates or top tips.
It’s also a time for us to promote testimonials or customer success stories about how our marketing has helped the performance of a business! Or even a product promotion!
Look at your website
A great way to this is to break up your website material, ensuring that every blog has a video that can be shared summarising its content. Pull sentences and snippets from your blogs or case studies that draw people in and provide them with a link to read the full article. It’s important to use your content in as many different formats as possible as reading a 5-minute blog may be interesting to some people but a 30-second video could be the preferred option for others.
If you are not providing multiple ways to view your content you are limiting your audience!
How often should you post?
We tend to recommend creating a social media plan a month in advance (depending on the industry), planning a minimum of 3 posts a week, then adding more if something important worth sharing about pops up. Having ideas scheduled within a plan gives you enough time to create posts days or even weeks in advance keeping you on top of your social media.
Social media scheduling tools
These programs are great for social media plans as it means you can schedule your posts to be published in advance. This not only saves you time but allows you to post your content at the optimum time, helping your post reach its full potential.
Here at Think Forensics, we currently use Content Studio within our social media plan as it is affordable and easy to work with. We really enjoy this program as it allows the customisation of posts for each social media platform, enabling us to use different language and tone based on our social followers.
Have a look at Content Studio today! – Discovery, Curation & Social Media Management Platform – Content studio
Finally, connect with groups where you can
We believe having a strategic social media plan is so important within your marketing approach. Marketing is changing and becoming more digital, it is important to adjust your approach, so you and your business are not left behind. Creating a plan gives you structure and optimises your use of social media, increasing the likelihood of well-performing posts and more redirected traffic. Start your social media plan today and discover your marketing potential.