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5 Social Media Plan Tips

5 Steps to a Ridiculously Easy Social Media Plan

Communicating over social media can feel overwhelming and tedious for brands and companies, but this is often a symptom of disorganization or inexperience more than anything else. Lack of clarity on how to setup or consistently publish your social media marketing content can be a factor that truly helps or hinders your overall performance online.

Whether you’re a solopreneur launching your first project or starting to scale up a small business, chances are that you are handling social media marketing in-house. And chances are that this is the first place where time and budget resources get cut as business picks up.

But being competitive in social media doesn’t mean needing quantity over quality. Quite the opposite! Here are five tips to help you create and keep up with a simple social media plan.

Goal Setting

The very first thing you have to be crystal clear about is what your actual goals are for your online presence. How you communicate to drive conversions of leads or sales will be quite different than how you communicate to gently raise brand awareness. If your goals are to increase your website traffic and subsequent transactions on your site by X%, use that to help you plan content with language or campaigns that encourage just that. Be honest and be realistic.

Competitor Scan

Once you’ve set your goal for your social media marketing, it’s important to gut check it against competitors to get a sense of what potential customers are also seeing. If one competitor religiously promotes sales every week while another hardly discounts their products, it is critical to understand how the prospective customer will interpret the social content from your competitors (and in turn how you fit in). For example, if your goal was to increase site traffic and transactions by X% but you realize your competitor is doing constant sales, you may want to consider talking to the customer in a different manner that helps you stand out.

Optimize Profiles & Content

With clarity on why and what you’re communicating, you can easily update basics like your profile copy and images to help reflect your plan in a consistent way. Remove any old images that are off-brand or contradictory to your new direction and be strict about reviewing future posts and images with this in mind.  

Create a Content Calendar – & Stick to It

With newfound direction comes the need for new content. Working on a content calendar can be the easy part, sticking to it can be the true challenge. Getting into the habit of working well ahead of schedule not only helps to protect your time and workload – but it also helps to protect the consistency you’re striving to build with your social media plan. Don’t overdo it and try to publish 12 pieces of original content in a day. Find something reasonable and do-able to commit to – that may be once a day or a couple of times a week. But staying consistent (rather than vanishing offline for six weeks) will have an immeasurable impact on your brand perception and trust factor.

Be Open-Minded

As you go along the social media marketing journey, it is always most helpful to keep an open mind to review and analyze your content’s performance. You may be surprised by what you find, or it may validate exactly what your instincts were with your audience base. Sometimes things work, and sometimes they don’t. The advantage of digital marketing is that you can change and adapt fairly quickly, dropping things that aren’t working in favor of content that performs better. Plus, keeping abreast of what competitors continue to publish can also help you to plan your content so that your brand stands out.

 

Organizing and executing an easy social media marketing plan is absolutely doable and an incredibly fun part of the digital marketing mix. Need some help getting going? Give us a holler and we can talk social media and marketing.

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