Social Media Marketing requires meticulous planning if your campaigns are to be successful and you are going to achieve a good return on investment. Planning is essential if you are going to engage with your target audience, boost awareness of your brand, become more competitive, and achieve ambitious and measurable goals.
In this quick guide, we will discuss how to use a social media planner effectively. Every task you will face should have its own schedule and to-do list. When planning your imagery, for example, it is important to make it as eye-catching as possible to stand out from your competitors. For outstanding and effective images, you may want to consider using tools that can make image transparent and add photo effects. These tools will help your images look professional and make them exclusive to stand out.
What is a Social Media Planner
A social media planner helps with the design and scheduling of your brand’s social media content. This allows you to remain consistent in your approach and voice, helping to develop a familiarity with your audience. Moreover, planning is an effective tool to control and monitor the outcomes and adjust the content to improve the process. All in all, the progress is what you want to achieve with your social media campaigns.
The format of the planner can be anything you feel comfortable using, from a spreadsheet, a simple word document, or even bespoke online tools, like the ones provided by Hootsuite. Whether you choose one of those formats or find a different one, you should opt for the best one to meet your needs.
What are the Benefits of Social Media planning?
The key benefits of using a social media planner to build your marketing campaigns are:
- Establish measurable goals
- Strategically plan posts around key events
- Target specific audiences
- Create unique content for different platforms
- Highlight areas of your business that need more attention
Keeping them in mind, you should adjust your goals accordingly.
How to use a Social Media Planner
In this section, we will outline a step-by-step process to use a social media planner, from setting initial goals to testing. Follow this plan to achieve your goals and overall control of the process.
- Set your social media goals for the year to help keep you focused and ensure you stick to the overall plan to guarantee its success. This can be done with a simple checklist.
- Set monthly goals too, in addition to your annual plan, as this can help to diversify your content and push specific products and services. You can quickly create a calendar of posts that will help to give you a clear direction for the next 12 months.
- Create a To-Do List to make sure your great ideas aren’t forgotten about. You can also prioritize each item based on which social media platforms or content types need the most attention.
- Decide on themes for each week or month so your messaging can remain consistent and you have a clear focus. For example, if you run a fashion business, you may want to build up a key event you are attending to encourage your followers to attend.
It is always a good idea to pay attention to what hashtags your competitors are using. Tools such as Hashtagify can also help to make this process much easier. - Identify hashtags that can help to increase the visibility of your content by creating a well-researched worksheet of hashtags that apply to your industry and niche. This may vary from platform to platform, so it is recommended to include multiple sheets that are specific to each (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).
- Track events and holidays to schedule content that will be delivered on select dates, making the most of trends and popular hashtags. They don’t necessarily have to be related to your brand specifically, but anyone can get involved with Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc.
- Integrate your influencer marketing strategy so you can shortlist relevant influencers who can promote your brand and speak to your target audiences.
- Build an A/B testing log to keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Factors such as what times posts receive the most engagement on various platforms and which formats work best for different audiences and topics.
As you can see, social media planners can be a fantastic tool for ensuring your social media campaigns and achieving success. They help you target proper goals and develop your strategy for the year ahead so that all planning posts will reach the set tangible goals.
