If you spend multiple days planning content for a week ahead, I am sorry, you’re doing it wrong. Unless, you enjoy it and have nothing else to do, we don’t judge here.
Be it a small team or the position of a one-man army hero. Many of us work in an understaffed marketing team, or work alone in a position, where taking care of all content-related activities feels a bit too much sometimes.
But fear not. With a few steps, you can manage your social media and make extra time for coffee breaks.
First and foremost, you always need to think strategically about your content. Thinking a week ahead is not going to help move your brand forward in a coherent way. When it comes to different platforms, such as Twitter, where being active and thinking on the spot can win you a golden goose you don’t have to stick to the plan. However, if a platform allows you to plan, then plan you shall.
How to plan your SoMe content
Know who you’re writing for
Knowing your audience is a 50% job well done. Let me give you an extreme example. Imagine you’re selling new metal band t-shirts to Justin Bieber fans. The answer would most likely be a no. But if you asked metal fans you would already have a bigger chance to get a positive reaction. This way you can adjust the language, messaging, and visuals.
There are several ways how you can figure out more details about your audience too:
- Analyze your current customer base (check successful sales, visitors demography/geography with Google Analytics)
- Define who is not your ideal customer
- Analyze how they speak on different platforms (Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc.)
Choose platforms
After you figure out your target audience, you need to make sure your content reaches them. Even if you know you want to sell metal t-shirts to metalheads, you wouldn’t find many of them at a pop concert.
Let’s start with the fact that there are dozens of social media platforms. Each country can have its own that are not popular in other countries, so keep that in mind. There are 8 platforms that have held their popular positions for a while now, so your time invested in them will be time well spent.
Set your goals
When you chose the social media platforms, set your goals and KPIs. Ideally, you should have big-picture goals and small goals that will help you achieve them. For instance, big picture — we just started and want to establish our presence and start selling on social media, small picture — we want to reach 10000 people with our posts and gain 1000 followers until summer.
Your goals need to be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
If you want to see which platform works the best, you need to test them and keep track of their performance. For that, you need to set KPIs that reflect your goals. If you want to reach 10000 people, you will want to keep track of your reach and impressions. You get the gist.
Have content pillars
After all the strategical thinking, let’s do some fun stuff. Content pillars are 3 to 5 topics that you will discuss and create content for on social media. This method will keep you on track with the type of content you will brainstorm.
A simple example of a set of content pillars, if you are an SEO content creator, can be: Technical SEO, Local SEO, Backlinks, SEO best practices, and Google Algorithms.
Schedule your posts
Having a content calendar is going to be a big help for keeping track of your content. However, a scheduler will be even bigger. One key thing on social media is time consistency. So in case you have a lunch at 1pm but need to post your newest piece at 1:30pm, you can set it up in advance.
Schedule yourself
Now you have laid down the foundations. The next thing to align is yourself. It can be tempting to spend too much time creating the content and figuring out different methods. But there needs to be time and space for it.
Book a time for yourself when you will be working on creating new content and making a routine. If you spend too much time here and there you can quickly burn out or create a situation where you will need to create content on the spot — and it will not align with anything you’ve planned so far.
