If you’re tired of posting without generating any engagement or leads or feel you’re just spinning your wheels when it comes to your social media marketing efforts, then what could be missing is a carefully put together social media marketing plan.
In fact, most businesses manage their social media inconsistently, with random posts at random times, without any clear goal in mind. In time, not following a social media marketing plan usually leads to frustration and above all, no return on investment. Only a very small percentage of business owners have a carefully crafted social media strategy plan.
By having a social marketing plan, it will enable you to bridge the gap between where your business is at now and where you want it to be.
A social media campaign strategy could be the difference between getting no results or accidental results at best and actually experiencing an increase in business with real evidence behind it.
This is why you shouldn’t do anything on social media before putting a social media strategy plan together.
A social media campaign plan is simply the summary of everything you plan to do and achieve for your business using social networks.
In order to put together a social media marketing plan, it is important to follow a specific set of steps.
Step 1: Audit your accounts
Before even thinking about what you would like to achieve thanks to social networks, it is important to know where you are at on social media. In other words, identify how many social media networks you have joined to market your business, make sure the usernames for each account is the same across all social networks so there is a certain level of consistency, identify how large or small your audience is for each account, notice the level of engagement on each, check when they were last updated and if the branding is congruent across all social networks and up-to-date.
Step 2: Identify your competition
What is great about social media is its transparency: the ability to know at all times what your competitors are up to. By simply looking at their profiles on social media and where they are at in terms of engagement and audience size as well as seeing what is working for them or not, you then have a clear road map of what you should be focusing on and what the easiest and fastest ways are to achieve your goals.
Step 3: Set goals
Goals are a very important part of any social marketing plan because goals will shape the social marketing plan you will implement.
Goals can vary from business to business depending on how competition is performing and what the business needs to achieve to turn social media into an important marketing channel.
Once goals have been set, step 4 is: Create a content plan
Having a content plan, also known as an editorial calendar will enable you to easily execute your tactics to reach your goals, and also allow you to identify the resources you will require in terms of staff, time, tools and budget.
To put a plan together, start by listing all the different types of content you can publish within a month and allocate the ratio for each type of content so your editorial calendar is balanced and multi-dimensional.
Then, create a table with columns and rows like the one here, that lists the posts that will be published each day, including the hashtags and links to include in each post if applicable.
Once you’ve outlined your content plan, step 5 is: Tracking
Depending on the goals set prior to creating your social media campaign strategy, there are a variety of tools you can use to track your progress to see whether you’re getting closer to achieving the goals outlined in your social media campaign strategy or not. For example, if your main goal is to increase the number of clicks to your website from Twitter, you can use clickmeter.com as a tool to monitor clicks generated from Twitter in general, or from individual tweets. Should the goal of your social media campaign plan be to increase the size of your audience on Facebook, using “Facebook insights” will help you monitor your progress. There are of course many social media tracking tools that are very effective such as sproutsocial.com
Remember, a social media campaign plan is never set in stone and evolves as your business goals change and should be adapted based on the results generated.
