How To Create A Social Media Content Plan & Increase Engagement

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.

Ways You Can Increase Engagement On Social Media

Social Media engagement is probably the most important factor in the success of your businesses social pages and amusingly the hardest to attain. Engagement can come in many ways, through likes, retweets, shares etc… Essentially engagement just means that the audience is responding to your content.

Luckily for you, marketers have been trying to do this for ages and have discovered a number of ways to engage the audience.

Use #Hashtags

Hashtags are a beautiful thing on social media. They started on twitter as a way to find tweets using the same keywords; this is a great tool for social marketing as it allows your business to hop on to trends to gain exposure to large amounts of people who wouldn’t normally see your page. Hashtags are now used across all social platforms as a way to ‘link’ conversations and posts/content. Now you shouldn’t saturate your posts with hashtags as posts with over 8-10 hashtags tend to get less engagement.

Solve Customer Problems

After you gain a bit of a following with your customers they might start asking questions regarding the product/industry, staying on top of these small interactions is a great way to boost the authenticity of your brand and could encourage more people to start conversations with your business.

Having genuine conversations with your audience can help how authentic you appear on social. This is important because your audience won’t engage with you if your content tries too hard or appears put on.

Check The Timing Of Your Posts

Using social media management software like Sprout Social or Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts to be published whenever you want. Posting at optimal times is something you should try and do as your target audience is likely to be more active at certain points of the day.

Hijack Viral Content

You should always try to stay on top of the latest viral trends as they can be used as tools for grabbing some free engagement. Reposting some viral content to your audience can give you a little boost as viral content gets shared around easily.

Create Unique, Authentic & Emotive Content

If you’re not using any original content on your social media pages then your engagement is likely to stagnate. You should take the time to create good content tailored towards your target audience.

There are so many options for creating content for social media, you can write blogs to inform and entertain the audience on your industry. You can create striking infographics that draw the audience in and are available to repost whenever. Research has shown that images can increase the interaction by 85% on Facebook!

Following these steps can help your social out quite a bit. But if you find that your social is still not growing you could try advertising on social media by using sponsored and boosted posts, you could also hire a social media manager but that’s pretty expensive. For the best performance you should consider outsourcing your social media management to professionals.

Download our Ultimate Social Media Guide and whitepaper.

Your online brand presence is more important than ever.

From setting up the right social accounts for your business, to creating high performing marketing content, learn how to effectively manage your community and reap the benefits of social media.

Looking for support from a social-first digital agency? Get in touch with 123 Internet Group!