Planning or winging it with social media – what’s better?

As a content manager, I guarantee planning is better!

The start of the new year is the best time to get your social media organised for the year. Many businesses are ‘quiet’ and don’t get back into full swing until mid-January.

My best advice – use this downtime to plan your social media for the coming year.

Many businesses don’t (as they’re enjoying spending time away from their computers, catching up with friends, entertaining kids, having holidays etc.) and they end up posting randomly to social media during the year.

And that’s fine; we all seriously deserve our time out.

But winging it with social media is never the best idea. Sure, you may not plan it out while you’re on holidays, but I highly encourage you to spend a little bit of time and put your social media strategy in place.

But if you already find social media your PITA task, you’re probably hating the thought of planning a whole heap of social media posts, right?

Let’s run through what I do to help you get it done – it’s easier than you think!

Things to think about when planning your social media

Willy-nilly, random social media posts don’t work. To help you start planning, ask yourself these questions:

• What is your ultimate goal using social media – more followers, engagement, sales, promotions, connections (or all of the above)?

• Who are your ideal clients (you MUST know this) and where are they likely to be looking online (LinkedIn, Insta, Facebook, etc.)?

• Will your content be written, visual, videos or a combination of all?

• How much time (or energy) do you have to create social posts, or will you find a social media manager to take of it for you?

• Do you have events, blogs, specials you need to promote at certain times of the year?

• Will you add in some fun by posting about random days of the year that match your business (e.g. National coffee day if you run a café)?

• What businesses do you follow that have posts you can share to fill up some of your calendar?

Let’s dive a little deeper into social media planning with my top 4 tips

1. Your social media goals

Before you start any planning, you need to know ‘WHY’ you’re going to be using social media. Don’t do it just because you think everyone is, so you need to – this will never work for you. Social media is another marketing tool, so as you would with things such as email campaigns, you need to work out your goals. Your social media goals could be:

• Increasing your brand awareness to get your business out into the online world and you become what’s known as an ‘authority’ on your topic

• Attracting more followers and in turn, more leads and prospects

• Building existing relationships with your clients and encouraging them to share your posts and recommend you

• Interacting with your customers by putting a face to their favourite products (encouraging them to remain loyal to your brand)

• Earning more money by making sales, selling services, getting more clients etc.

2. Who are your clients, and where do they hang out on social media?

As with any marketing, you need to know who your ideal client is. You need to know their problems, their business, the language they use, the position they hold, and what makes them tick. From here, think about what social media platforms they are likely to use. For example, executives would spend more time connecting on LinkedIn than Facebook, so you’ll be wasting your time posting on Facebook. Sure, you may get likes and comments, but they probably won’t be from your ideal client who will ultimately buy from you.

3. Measure your success

Knowing your goals will help you measure your success on social media. For example, if you want to build your authority using LinkedIn, you’d keep posting and monitor the number of comments, likes and new connections you receive.

If you measure sales or appointments booked, you’ll make sure you’re using links to your products where you can determine the sale has come through from your social platform such as Facebook.

Or if you measure engagement, you can monitor which posts are getting more views, more likes, more shares etc. This helps you to determine what content your audience is loving and what isn’t working.

4. What content will you share

I use a content planner to plan out my content. You can grab a copy here. You could choose to have theme days (e.g. Tips on Tuesday, Fun on Friday), incorporate snippets from your blogs when they are scheduled, share posts from others as you see them (if you think your audience would love it too), mention special days and holidays and the like.

Having a call to action (or CTA) on your posts also help to tell your audience what to do. For example, ‘get your copy now’, ‘buy now’, ‘visit the website’ and so on.

And in a visual world, having a mix of words, high-quality graphics or images, and video will help you work out what your audience reacts to.

So, are you ready to sit down and plan your social media?

If you haven’t already, grab my social media planner as it’ll make your planning a lot easier. Once you get on a roll, you’ll find the ideas flowing. If you need help after you’ve worked out your posts, my team can help create graphics and post to your social channels when needed.

And if you’ve got any more social media content planning tips, I’d love for you to share them here.