Happy Bank Holiday Monday everyone!
Today we wanted to talk to you about the dreaded "Social Media Plan"
We know a lot of small businesses that find the idea of planning out their content daunting and don't really know where to start.
If you type "Social media content..." into any search bar, the sentence auto-complete looks something like this:
Social Media Content Calendar
Social Media Content Planner
Social Media Content template
Social Media Content plan
Social Media Content strategy
Social Media Content ideas
These are the most common searches for anyone using that phrase and that shows up that almost everyone struggles to plan & schedule their social media content.
So, lets start off with planning.
Planning your social media content
To keep your content engaging and relevant to your business goals follow this pattern:
Monday: Inspire (Quotes, Finished projects, Mood boards)
Tuesday: Educate (Tips & Tricks, How-to's, Q&A's, Behind the scenes)
Wednesday: Promote (Advertise Products, services, sales & promotions)
Thursday: Entertain (When things go wrong, Chit Chat Sessions, Share GIF's & Memes that relate to your business/industry)
Friday: Educate
Saturday: Promote
Sunday: Connect (Follow new accounts, start conversations with other businesses, Ask your audience questions, learn about your followers)
Now, contrary to popular belief, you don't need to post on every platform, every single day to keep your audience engaged - you just need to be consistent
Unless we have a big event, sale or launch coming up where we need a bigger reach, we tend to stick to the every other day rule. For example:
Monday: Instagram & LinkedIn
Tuesday: Facebook & Pinterest
Wednesday: Instagram & Pinterest
and so on...
This gives us the chance to post on multiple platforms each day without coming across as a copy and paste fanatic.
You might also use platforms such as TikTok or Twitter too so don't forget to add those into your mix.
Using the "every other day" rule also gives us the opportunity to "recycle" content more regularly. For example, if we share some tips & tricks on our Facebook page on Monday, we can then use the same theme for our Instagram post on Friday or further down the line.
Speaking of recycling your content, you'll want to make sure that even if you're using the same content that you optimise it for different platforms.
As you can see the examples above are the same content but one is optimised for the sizing of Instagram and the other for Pinterest with a slightly different colour scheme to keep the two separate.
Scheduling your Social Media Content
The temptation of creating and manually posting all of your content each day is a strong one. We tend to think that it's only 20 minutes to put content together and post when the reality is that by the time that you're happy with your layout and caption and managed to escape being distracted by that social media scroll, you're more likely looking at 30-45 minutes each day.
We always recommend putting aside a few hours or a whole day if you can to plan, create and schedule your social media for the next 2-4 weeks.
There are some fantastic tools for pre-scheduling your social media content such as: Canva, Hootsuite, Buffer & Later that give you the ability to set the date and time you want your posts to go live.
Even if you don't want to use a scheduling tool, having your social media posts in a tracker/ timetable so you can immediately open it up, copy & paste the caption (and hashtags) and upload your already created design is a massive timesaver.
Keep the habit
Ok, so now we have somewhere to start from, we just have to keep at it until it becomes habit.
Make sure you are scheduling time to plan your social media content, although it feels like you are sacrificing a lot of time to start with, it benefits both you and your business in the long run and streamlines your social media.
Don't forget!
Group your ideas into Inspire, Educate, Promote, Entertain & Connect
Decide how often you would like to post and make the most of each piece of content.
Pop everything into your timetable or scheduling tool
Let us know how you get on with your next planning session!
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