Creating a social media plan is essential for any business that wants to reach a wider audience and create more leads. However, many businesses find it difficult to create a social media plan that attracts more followers.
In this article, we will outline tips on creating a social media plan that helps you achieve your marketing goals.
Overview
How to Create a Social Media Plan
If you want to grow online, your best options are organic search traffic, pay-per-click ad campaigns, and social media marketing. If you’re already investing heavily on the SEO front, and have a limited budget for Google ads, then the other place you can optimize it will be your social media presence.
There are several key elements that you need to include in your social media plan to make it successful. This will ensure that your plan is tailored to your business goals and that you use the most effective social media marketing strategy.
Before we go into the details, we must discuss the basics of creating a social media plan. The first step is to set your goals. What do you want to achieve with your social media marketing plan? Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads? Once you know your goals, you can start creating your plan.
Once you know what your goals are, you can then start to create content that will help you achieve these goals. Remember, your content should be interesting, engaging, and informative. People are more likely to follow and share your content if they find it interesting and useful.
In addition to creating great content, you also need to make sure you are promoting your content effectively. This means sharing it on your social media channels and making it easy for people to find. You can also use paid advertising to promote your content to a wider audience.
Finally, you need to measure the results of your social media plan to see if it is working. This means looking at how many people engage with your content and how many leads or sales you generate. If you are not seeing the results you want, you may need to make changes to your plan.
Following these tips, you can create a social media plan that helps you achieve your social media marketing plan and goals. With a little effort and planning, you can reach a wider audience and generate more leads.
Which Sites Are Best for You?
It will make little sense to focus on a platform with which your target demographic rarely interacts. While most ages are well represented across social media platforms online, there is a regional and generational divide between the major social media networks.
Consider your target demographic’s general age, as well as their location on the world map. Certain platforms are bigger in some countries than in others. TikTok is undoubtedly the place to be if you’re targeting younger people.
Demographics aren’t everything. For example, you will want to consider which platform hosts the most discussions about your relative niche. Where do your target customers spend the most time gathering to discuss their hobbies and interests? Another quick hack is determining where your competition spends the most time doing social media advertising. Provided they’re successful at it, it should give you some clue as to which platforms are worth your time and which aren’t.
Some platforms are also much harder to advertise than others because they aren’t built specifically for self-promotion content.
Reddit, for example, is a platform that is generally fairly hostile towards branded accounts outside of their own “subreddit”. Self-promoted posts are usually quite transparent, and users without an extensive posting history are viewed as suspicious.
But subreddits, or individual communities on the platform, can be a great way to gather fans of a product, grow a community and pool information for future reference.
Meanwhile, Twitter can be difficult to advertise on but is a much easier place to promote and share content, including information about your brand and products and your web content.
Find Your Own Voice
Once you have determined where you should be posting, it’s important to figure out what you should be posting.
Your first step in answering that question shouldn’t be to immediately start compiling content ideas, viral tweets, and blog titles but to figure out what kind of voice you want your social media marketing plan and brand to display over social media. If your content was anthropomorphically represented, how would you picture them? What would they sound like, say, how would they interact with your customers – especially your diehard core – and what qualities would they specifically embody to engender themselves to potential leads?
For example, it makes little sense for a smaller company to take on a corporate air and address its audience only indirectly or in a formal, unfamiliar language. Meanwhile, it’s seen as “cringe” when larger companies try to appeal to customers with insincere and overly familiar voices. What image and voice best suit your business, product, and audience?
What Kind of Content Should You Create?
The answer here will always include video content, especially in this day and age. Most businesses simply cannot get around it anymore – it is by far the best way to drive engagement, and it makes sense in nearly any industry.
Do you do auto detailing? Show off your work. Are you a copywriting service? Create a short video showcasing your tips and tricks for optimizing the content on WordPress. Are you a construction business? Aerial shots and interior before-and-after pictures in a video montage. The list goes on.
Yet, in addition to video content, consider what other content would best appeal to your audience. What do you care about? Long-form text posts? Infographics? Short updates? Weekly community threads?
Stick to a Schedule
Social media marketing isn’t very useful if you do it once in a blue moon or if you post erratically – such as five posts in a row on one day, followed by radio silence for a week.
Instead, create a realistic digital content strategy and share your posts during peak user hours for the time zone you’re most likely catering to.
Follow the Data
Social media is one of the things you shouldn’t manage with a gut feeling alone. Thankfully, nearly all major platforms offer extensive tools for you to study the engagement on each and every post.
Use that to study what kind of content sees the most engagement and views and follow that data. Improve and iterate – try new things out, but keep a growing list of what works best, and refine it over time.
One social media marketing strategy may differ from platform to platform, and it would be impossible to cover all of it here. Your best bet? Work with a pro.
Grow and Listen to Your Following
As your engagement improves, more and more people flock to your content to write comments or share questions. Use those opportunities! Everyone views public comments, so by answering one, you aren’t just satisfying the curiosity of a single customer but addressing the concern of anyone reading the comment with a similar query.
The ability to interact with individual buyers across thousands of miles in a public forum is one of the great strengths of social media and something you must take advantage of to maintain and further expand your following online.
Conclusion
Now that you know what kind of content to create, how often to post, and how to study your data, it’s time to put all of this into a plan.
Figure out the best days and times to post based on where your audience is and when they’re most likely to be active online. Make sure you have a healthy mix of different types of content (videos, images, text content) so your followers don’t get bored and unsubscribe.
Gauge the reaction to your posts and adapt as needed. As always, keep in mind the importance of interaction with visitor comments – it helps foster customer trust and loyalty.
If you need help with your social media marketing plan, the social media team at Sachs Marketing Group can help – click here to reach out.
Please let us know in the comment section below if you have any social media questions.
