How To Plan Your Social Media

Social media can be really time consuming and it’s often something that many people feel overwhelmed by. To help make the process easier, you need to plan your social media.

As a business owner, you probably have some kind of business plan (even if it is written on the back of a beer mat, or in a notebook somewhere). You know what you want to achieve and have aims or goals that you are working towards and have some processes in place to reach your vision.

It’s similar with social media. Those people who have a plan are the ones who are more likely to achieve their aims with social media. You know yourself, if you just post randomly, or have no purpose then you will probably feel like your social media isn’t pressing the right buttons or being an effective marketing tool.

So, how do you plan? I meet so many people who actually only do the above and only post as and when and this is great for some people, but for many this is when it starts becoming stressful or ineffective and you just don’t see results.

So, if you want to improve your social media, here are my top tips to help you plan…

1 –   Start with the basics

As I mentioned before, many business owners will have a vision for their business and some short term or long-term goals they want to achieve. So, I want you to go right back to the basics and really think about why you want to use social media – what is the purpose? Are you purely doing it to raise brand awareness, do you want to grow a community online, do you want to sell products? Perhaps you want to improve your engagement or grow your likes. By defining key aims for your social media (as with all marketing) you will have a clearer focus and have a greater understanding of what you need to do to hit those goals.  

2 – Create content in advance

One of the best ways you can keep on top of social media is to write your content in advance. You can do this weekly or monthly. Some people even do it quarterly or annually. If you set aside 1-2 hours a month and plan what you are going to write and when you’re going to post it, you will begin to plot out the content for your social media.

The way I do this is by creating a spreadsheet (you could use a notebook, word document, Trello document – whatever works best for you) and breaking it down into each day of the month. I then think about what is going on that month in my business, what’s happening in the world, look at themes for days of the week (such as #wisdomwednesday) and start writing out my posts.

By having them written in advance means I then don’t need to think about it too much during the month as everything is already written and planned.

3 – Scheduling

Scheduling has to be my favourite social media tool – it is a life saver. Once you have all your posts written, you can then go into a scheduling tool, such as Buffer and create them in advance. You can schedule them to go live on a certain day and time – days or weeks in advance. By doing this means you can then get on with the day to day running of your business knowing that your social media posts are being shared.

The thing to keep in mind is to keep checking back for comments and interact with your audience.  Don’t just post and run. Social media is “social”, so you do still need to do the day-to-day engagement side of it too; otherwise what’s the point?!

So, by following these 3 simple steps you will have a clearer focus for your social media, know exactly what you want to achieve from it and then know if it is being effective. Social media is not an easy game, or a quick fix. It does take time and if you want to see results from it you really do need to invest time in it to make it work. Taking those few hours to map out your content and schedule in advance will save you time in the long run, rid you of the overwhelm and ensure that your social media is more effective.

For £20 off my Mini Marketing Masterclass on “How to create content for social media” just use the code 2022TREAT.