How to Plan Your Social Media
Social media happens instantly, and the world moves fast, but many of your social campaigns can be automated and planned with excellent organizational skills. We’ll walk you through planning, developing, and scheduling a successful social media campaign.
Quick Social Media Tips
- Organize the details before anything else (events, important dates, etc.)
- Plan your social media 30 days out
- Select platforms thoughtfully
- Develop the social campaign
- Schedule the campaign
- Leave room for flexibility!
Organize the details before anything else (events, important dates, etc.)
Proper social media planning starts with a company that’s organized. If you don’t know what’s happening in your company a month from now, you’ll have a challenging time communicating that to your audience. That means things like events, webinars, product launches, new services, etc. will become more complicated than necessary.
There’s simply no way to overstate this first point. The rest of your social media campaigns will suffer immensely if details aren’t planned, and ideas aren’t adequately formulated.
Plan your social media at least 30 days out
This step is 1000% easier when the first step is completed. Planning your social media 30 days out is incredibly simple because your business is already forward-thinking. Consider upcoming events, items you’d like to promote, and create a calendar that makes sense. This means you can develop a social media campaign for July in June. Proactive instead of reactive!
Select platforms thoughtfully
You’ve considered the kind of content you’d like to share and what will be promoted, but before you develop anything, this step must happen. At first thought, the motivation is to be on every platform that exists. This is the wrong thinking! Instead, we need to consider two things: (1) where is your audience? And (2) will they find this valuable? If your audience is middle-aged men and women, TikTok isn’t your best bet. If your audience is younger, in the range of 18-24, Instagram is perfect.
“There are nuances to each platform, and if you select every platform and don’t tailor your content, it’ll fall flat.”
Once you’ve discovered if your audience is there, consider how you can make your content most valuable. On Facebook, that could mean a Facebook Live. On Instagram, that could mean an IG story. There are nuances to each platform, and if you select every platform and don’t tailor your content, it’ll fall flat.
- The Big Five
- The Others
- TikTok
- Snapchat
Each holds value in varying ways. Find what works well for your company and tailor specifically for it. I would recommend starting with two networks and branching out from there.
Develop the social media campaign
This is considerably the most straight-forward and challenging step of them all. Develop content, posts, and updates around the content you chose to highlight for the month. You may reach a stumbling block here and need to hire a creative agency such as Studio490 to help develop the social media campaign.
Schedule the campaign
Most of the large social media platforms will provide insights on when your fans are on the platform most often. Aim to post your campaign when people are looking at the social media platform! From platform-to-platform, this could vary wildly.
Leave room for flexibility!
Finally, essential to the framework of social media is to leave room for flexibility. Plan what you can, but leave room for things you couldn’t expect. Give yourself breathing room to post about something you couldn’t have anticipated 30 days ago. The important part about this is that your planning from the previous steps will free you to have the time to manage small, instantaneous updates as the regular campaign publishes automatically throughout the month.