How To Guide: Create a Social Media Content Plan That Works

If you want to get followers, subscribers, or customers, you need to have a social media content plan. Here’s the thing, you can’t just post randomly on social media or whenever you feel like it. That doesn’t work, so if you’re serious about using social media to grow your business, you need to have a plan.

Why You Need to Have Social Media Content Plan

Social media content plans consist of what content types to post and when to post them. Maybe on weekdays, people buy or connect with you more when you post an Instagram story, but that doesn’t seem to work on weekends.

You figure out what to post by experimenting and trying out different content types, and then seeing what gets the most likes and engagement. You have to experiment for weeks. You can’t figure out what your audience likes by only posting a specific type of picture for one week.

By using social media content plans you don’t have to worry about running out of content. If you do this then you’re prepared weeks or even months before time. There’s no sweating last minute because you can’t figure out what quote to write or which case study to post.

How to Create a Social Media Content Plan

Where are your customers?

To create a good social media plan, you first have to figure out which platforms you’re going to be on. Which platforms are most of your customers on? If it’s possible, you can always ask them, but it’s safe to assume that almost everyone is on Facebook and Instagram. If you are heavily focused on B2B then LinkedIn may well be your chosen platform.

What’s your goal?

The biggest question you need to ask yourself is what do you want to get out of it? Are you looking for brand awareness? Are you looking for more customers? Are you just tired of guessing what people want and want to ask them directly? Do you want a place where people can get to know you?

Whatever the goal, write it down and have it top of mind as your creating your social media content plan.

Who’s your ideal follower?

If you have your ideal customer, then you probably have an ideal follower. You know the questions—how old are they? What are they looking for? Where are they from? What do they like? What would they engage with?

Posting

You have to find out what you want to post, yes, but also what your tone is. Are you Gabby Bernstein inspirational or Gary Vaynerchuk inspirational? Are you funny, informational, full of color? These things all contribute to your brand on social media and whether or not people can tell that you’ve posted something simply by looking at your post, not at your username.

Then, you decide what time you’ll post every day, and what you’ll be posting on that day.

Creating the schedule

Make the schedule on paper, on a white board, or on Excel. Wherever you want, write the day, the times, the content type, the hashtags, and any other necessary information. You don’t want to forget anything.

When you’re creating your social media content plans, however, you can’t be too strict with your scheduling. You have to be open to any new trends and new ideas. If you’re stuck to much on your plan, then you won’t have room to grow. And through growth, we succeed.

Hopefully this has been of some use and you are now thinking about creating your own content schedule to aid your social media activities. As a Certified Platinum SproutPartner we can offer a range of software tools/platform which can assist with this – not to mention an outsourced option if you simply don’t have the time or expertise.

If you have any questions or wish to share other ideas please get in touch with one of our team!