Are you planning to increase your brand’s social media engagement? Starting your social media content with a proper plan can help you enhance your engagement rates and help in kick-starting your social media game. However, setting up a plan for various social media channels can be intimidating.
With every business on social media, it is quite challenging to develop a strategy that beats the competition. Marketers often complain that they spend so much time scheduling content; they hardly have any brainpower left to think of innovative content ideas.
Although several planning tools and technologies are available to help you plan your content, they are not sufficient. For a content marketing strategy to be effective, you need a deep understanding of your target audience, well-defined objectives, and effective content management systems.
We have compiled a simple guide for you to plan your weekly social media content. Below are the 7 steps which you can easily follow to organize and manage your content:
1. Identifying Platforms
The first and foremost step is to analyze which social media platform suits your business model the best. To get a better insight at why is this important, let’s have a look at a few stats:
- More than 70% of Facebook users are 18–24-year-olds
- More than 74% of Instagram users are 18–24-year-olds
- More than 40% of Twitter users are 18–24-year-olds
Similarly, usage varies from country to country and interest to interest. For example, LinkedIn is mostly used by professionals as compared to Gen Z, which are more interested in social media platforms like TikTok, which is why you need to identify the right platforms for your business.
Knowing where your target audience is highly engaged can help you in developing a perfect social media content plan.
Key Takeaway: Look at your social Medias insights to monitor and track your audience’s engagement.
2. Different Goals for Each Platform
Each social media platform works differently; hence the content displayed on it requires to be platform appropriate as well. Having a separate goal for each platform can help you identify your progress across each platform without confusing them all in one.
Simply write down your desired goal for each platform without mixing them. For example, Instagram is more effective than other social media sites for enhancing user engagement so you can develop your Instagram goal as:
- To increase brand engagement in the primary target audience by 5% through user-generated content
On the other hand, Facebook can give you access to a broader audience, and so you can set goals to increase your brand’s reach through attractive posts and linking them with your website landing page.
For instance, Boohoo, a fashion retailer, continues to drive sales and engagement through its innovative social media strategy. They use a mix of video, images, and text-based content to keep their users engaged and entertained. On Insta, you can peruse through their delightful posts that take a Boohoo spin on current trends and pop culture to increase user engagement. On the other hand, they do sales promotion on their Facebook page as it has a wider audience.
3. Styles
The tone, style, and content are different for each of your social media platforms. Although you need to present a unified message, the style of content should be different for each platform. For example, Instagram is famous for its stories, live casts, light-hearted content, and photography-based content. On the other hand, TikTok is more for video content that includes music, voice-overs, animations, and so on. Paying attention to the style you want to follow for your social media is important, and it helps deliver the message that you are trying to get across.
Many small businesses are using social media to their advantage, especially during COVID. One such brand, carpet cleaning, is utilizing social media effectively by maintaining the same friendly tone and yet using different styles of content to reach their target audience. For instance, their Facebook contains detailed information on how to contact the business along with feed ads. On the other hand, their Instagram is geared towards creating brand recognition and engagement through conversational content.
4. Plan Ahead
One of the most common mistakes that people usually make in content is that they don’t plan, which makes it difficult to manage your content schedule. How much is going to post in a day, and at what time? How many posts on each platform? How many videos and how many audio posts are you aiming for?
You must have a planned answer for all these questions and more to form a coherent and well-executed content strategy.
Similarly, you need to plan for upcoming events, specially curated content that promotes the brand in the relevant socio-cultural environment. Planning ahead can give you room for creativity and experimentation with your content, such as surprise sales, giveaways, influencer collaborations, etc.
5. Create a Content Calendar
Having a content calendar has multiple benefits, but most of all, it helps you stay on track and focus on meeting your targets. Having a content calendar can take away a lot of your stress and help in keeping things aligned.
A social media calendar can help you:
- Stay consistent
- Save times
- Can help you brainstorm more ideas before posting
- Fewer chances of making typing errors
Using a social media calendar can help you strategically observe worldwide global moments and events and then plan your content accordingly. Another advantage of planning content is that it gives you more time to plan creative content strategies. When marketers don’t have to worry about posting content multiple times a day, they can direct their energies towards creating the most engaging content.
6. Content is Visual Too
Now that you are focusing on content creation, you should be careful about the graphics and visual appeal of the Images and Videos you choose. There are millions of posts on social media every day, and to leave your mark, your content must have amazing graphics.
Also, be careful about the dimensions of each platform and create your posts accordingly. There is no need for high-quality equipment to create content; however, learning some basic editing software can help you improve your social media game.
Some of the tools, including VSCO, Lightroom, and Snapseed, have made editing easier and faster. You can also try Canva to create custom dimension posts for specific channels.
7. Track and Analyze Your Content
Now that you have started posting your content, you must track analyze their performance. Most of the social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram show insights through which you can monitor your post-performance.
Other than inbuilt analyzers, you can also use online tools like Google Analytics, to track your performance. These tools will monitor multiple factors like what time is your audience most active on, which posts got the highest reach, etc.
The analysis can help you focus on improving the areas that are lagging and can provide you a detailed review of your efforts. Through these analyses, you can monitor your campaigns and improve them based on the reach and response you got. You must also perform a social media audit at least once a month to figure out all the problems in your strategy and work on it.
Final Thoughts
The above mentioned step-by-step guide indicates how you can create and manage a social media content campaign while saving time. Remember to focus on quality rather than quantity when it comes to content creation. The more relevant posts you create, the better response rate you will receive.