How To: Create A Social Media Content Plan In 6 Easy Steps

1.      Identify Your Audience

This is the easiest step of creating social media content, because it doesn’t actually require any work. You need to figure out who you want to market to. Who are your posts going to be for? What are they for? If you already have a business, you should have an idea of who your customers are. These customers? They’re your target audience.

2.      Choose the Right Social Media Network

If you know who your audience is, your next step is to figure out what social media sites they frequent. This part of your plan is easy as well. All of this studying has been done by the Pew Research Center. They have studied what age group, gender, race and more uses which types of social media the most. This information will help you choose the correct social media platform for your target audience. Know who you’re marketing towards, know where they spend their time on the internet, and create those social media sites.

3.      Invest in SEO and Keywords

Search Engine Optimisation and Keywords are two of the most important things to make sure your accounts are exposed to the right people. Your content will be catered to your audience, but that doesn’t matter if your audience can’t find you. Keywords and SEO allow your pages to be found easily on the internet. Google Analytics is a useful Google Tool that will tell you, once you’ve set up your pages, how much traffic they pull from search engines. If you create content that goes with the trends of keywords that draw people to websites, you should see your traffic slowly go up.

4.      Develop a Calendar for Content

A content calendar is exactly what it sounds like: A pre-planned selection of posts. Know what to post, and when. Almost all forms of social media have the ability for you to preplan posts. This means you can have posts lined up, and they will go live at preset times. Decide what kind of content is best for your page. (If you’re not sure, Feedly is a great resource.) Stick to your calendar to keep your content regular. Pages that are not often used are pages that do not often grow.

5.      Engage, Engage, Engage

A social media platform is only useful if people are using it. This also holds true for individual social media accounts. If people talk to your page and receive no response, they’ll stop talking to you. Use your social media for customer service. Use it for jokes (if appropriate). Use it to make your customers feel safe. If people feel like they can reach you easily, they will try to. If your page gets popular, you may want to invest in Chatbots to help engage your customers. The faster a page responds, the more likely a customer is to maintain a dialogue with that page. A dialogue is an important step to helping your page grow.

6.      Monitor Your Page’s Performance

The last step is to measure your progress and change things if you need to. To check and see if you’re gaining any sales from social media, you should download conversions. Conversions will merge with the Google Analytics mentioned in #3 and help you see if your social media is bringing people to your website. If it is, you have done everything you need to. If it’s not, check and see why you aren’t gaining traction. If your posts aren’t catching enough, consider adding pictures, videos, or animation. Plain, boring posts all the time are not nearly as effective as posts that are visual and involve something that viewers can look at or watch.