Having a social media plan in this day and age is as essential as making profits in your business. The world has evolved beyond just opening a business account to fulfil all righteousness and posting. You have to plan to get maximum benefits from using a social platform to target your desired audience, market your business and make sales.
A Social Media plan is simply a detailed description of everything you want to get on doing on your social media page and through which you expect to achieve your goals as a business.
Statistics have shown that 55% of the world’s population use social media and on average, people spend about 2h27 minutes per day on social media (lmao, why do I feel statistics doesn’t even know what is up yet?).
This is an indication that currently, not having a plan to go by is not wise. Businesses should want to invest in having a detailed online marketing plan to strengthen their position in the digital market, grow their industry and be profitable.
Since you are now sure of the importance of having a plan and is anticipating a ‘what next?’, we will be diving into HOW TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN IN 5 SIMPLE STEPS
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Your Starting Point:
The more specific your plan is, the better your performance will be.
For a successful social media plan, setting attainable precise goals is the first step.
Establish and prioritize goals that will allow you to create well-structured campaigns, measure your progress and enhance the marketing strategy. Assign values to your goals and understand what you need to achieve via social media, but make sure you aren’t swayed by vanity metrics.
We agree with Hal Stokes, founder of Happier, that “Social media is one area of business where you don’t need to outspend your competitors to beat them”.
In studying your competition, pay attention to what social campaigns they are implementing, the contents they publish, the tone of communication and even the frequency of posts. Track their strengths and be up-to-date with your competitor’s strategy to stay ahead. Learn from your competitors, make comparisons and check out what they are not doing that you can implement and build on to make you stand out.
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Defining your Target Audience:
Understanding your audience is very important to achieving the goal of creating a successful social media marketing plan.
After all, satisfying their needs should be one of the driving forces for a business (of course we aren’t going to dispute the fact that making money is the first, but if you don’t satisfy customers’ needs you won’t make profits.
Defining your audience is to organise research and break down the details of who they are, and what they want and check out the kind of content to be made that will be directed to them to make sure they are effectively engaged. Knowing your audience persona will allow you to create content and will help you adjust the content to their expectations. With leads gotten from the research on who your audience is, you will be able to convert them into customers in no time.
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Pick the Right Communication Channel:
Know the platform or platforms your target audience dominates, set your brand then concentrate on those platforms.
If you’re familiar with only a few, you can check out good platforms like Pinterest, LinkedIn and Quora.
Open an account, create an excellent business profile with a profile picture and use your logo on your platform. Get familiar with the features of each of the social platforms you will be using to get all of the benefits you are supposed to get from using it.
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Content Organisation and Posting:
Discover the best communication line, tone and format for every platform and implement it in the contents you will be creating.
Different social media platforms need a different content posting game plan because of their peculiar features. You could also craft a unique update for each online platform every time you want to post or post the same content across all the channels you are employing. The latter is a tactic known as “cross-posting”, a tricky one requiring a lot of skill when used but saves time and resources and is also a very practical way to get more audience on the particular message you are trying to pass.
Consider using UGC (User-Generated Contents) like videos, images, stories, audio and text to connect with your audience but do not lose focus on giving content that only supports the business goals.
- In content organisation, plan your content ahead and wisely. The frequency of your posts depends on the number of subscribers you have. Be sure you do not overwhelm your followers. Make a research on the ideal way to give your followers content without choking them.
- Develop a specific template for all your social media posts and utilize your social media marketing tools cut down into four which are: The content curation tool, content creation tool, social media scheduling tool(like a content calendar to keep tracts of all activities, events, holidays) and the social media analytics tool.
Coinage your team, develop a practical workflow. It isn’t a one-man job to carry out every task. You need to have the best people on board, name tasks and assign them to the team. Make sure there is cooperation so the tasks can be completed.
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. Maximize your Reach and Analyze your Results Constantly.
Posting content now and then is not enough to put your social media advantage to its full potential. Maximize your reach by investing in paid campaigns, partnering with influencers( find those within your niche).
Analyze and evaluate your success at the end of the fixed season you already laid down.
Gather your initial ‘getting started’ data for your goals and measure your performance against them.
Set up social media Key Performance Indicators. They help keep a record of the effectiveness of your adopted strategy and give you accurate results on your profitability.
Be sure to constantly enhance your social media marketing strategy.
- Note: At the end of the day, in a promotion campaign, social media marketing should be a part of your whole marketing plan so, therefore, remember to employ other marketing strategies to complement it.
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