Creating valuable content consistently has a lot of great benefits for your campaign. Here’s how to plan your social media content and execute it cleanly!Content is key to your social media campaign. Each platform favors different types of content, and the best ones resonate with people because of how they appeal to your target audience. However, you might be thinking that creating social media content is an intimidating task to take on. Social media content creation does indeed take a huge chunk of your time. You’ll have to sit there, think of what to post, include a photo or a graphic, use the right hashtags, and interact with your followers on a daily basis for months on end.
That’s exactly why you need to have a social media content plan. An excellent content plan would help you make the most out of social media, save time and resources, grow and maintain your audience, make your brand more credible, increase awareness, and improve audience engagement. It’s important to have a process to follow that would keep your brand from looking like a headless chicken. Creating valuable content consistently has a lot of great benefits.
Before anything else, you need to know who you’re talking to. This isn’t just limited to the individual accounts that like or follow your page. Your target audience may include opinion leaders who could also influence your followers. Since your followers listen to them, it is also important to include them as part of your demographic.
One of the best ways to effectively define your target audience is to use personas. Personas are a simple but descriptive means to create a representation of your target audience. Anders Hjorth from The Blueprint made an easy-to-follow persona template that does exactly that. A short description of them, their media preferences, interests, and values are some of the things included in the persona template.
You shouldn’t post about anything and everything just because you can. A good social media content plan considers what topics to post about and where to post them. Go back to the basics of communication: its goals are to educate, entertain, or persuade. In the same way, your posts must do just that, except for the last part. Specifically for your purpose, your posts must educate, entertain, or sell. You could have an educational post for a certain, a relatable meme or gif in another, and a promotional post in the next.
Hashtags are a useful tool and they play important roles on Twitter and Instagram. Now that you have an idea of what content to make, pair these with the appropriate hashtags. The right hashtags can boost your post’s discovery. Since these are used across social media profiles, choose one that is related to your post especially since these hashtags may trend. Users often browse through content through trending hashtags, and if your post has these, they will be found there. Hashtags also serve as the bridge between your content and content created by other creators but related to one another.
Following a schedule saves you from cramming to come up with something to post or from posting too many memes or too many sales posts. A specific strategy ensures that your posts serve a purpose and that you aren’t posting for the sake of it. For example, you want to post five times a week. On Mondays and Fridays, you have educational posts. Tuesdays and Thursdays are for entertaining posts. Finally, on Wednesday, you have a sales post. You want your target audience to know, prefer, and choose your brand. Planning what to post and when you post helps achieve this.
Amanda Holiday from Buffer presents a way for you to streamline content creation: batch working. When you batch work, you focus on a specific topic to work on and divide tasks for this topic into days or hours. The principle behind this is to focus on one task at a time which helps improve your productivity and increase your creativity. Here is a five-step plan that is sure to help execute your social media content plan flawlessly:
Step one is to plan a month’s worth of content. This helps keep you from being on your toes and establishes a consistent pattern of posting. You won’t have to worry about what to post for each day if you already have a plan to follow. Once you’ve mapped out the content for the month, you’re ready for step two.
Step two is to list visuals to use per week. This includes photos, videos, graphics, and something a little more platform-specific, like an Instagram Reel, for example. Once finalized, you can proceed to create these visuals. Remember to have an easy-to-customize template. A template establishes a constant theme for branding and saves time compared to creating something new each week.
Step three is to write the copy. To help you write quickly, you should have a caption formula, much like you have a visual template. Your caption formula should have a good attention grabber that gets your audience to press “read more;” the body which has all the necessary information that piqued their interest, and a good call to action that tells them what you would want them to do next.
Step four is to schedule your posts. Now that you have everything you need for each post, it’s time to schedule them with the help of social media management tools (such as Buffer, Later.com, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social) according to your content calendar. You must use the tool that works best for you so that you’d use it often.
Step five, the last and final step, is to include hashtags. These hashtags must be associated with the theme of your posts and, depending on the platform, must be used to the full extent or sparingly.
Popular belief states that you can make your content viral if it has that certain “wow factor.” However, the truth to the matter is that it takes a lot of preparation to achieve social media success. A creative, proactive, and innovative social media team with a brilliant content plan is most likely to achieve great heights.
Reach out to your target audience and achieve your business goals with a social media content plan now!