How to Build a Social Media Plan

Most businesses approach social media by jumping right in and forgetting to plan. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe!" This works just as well in launching your social media campaign. Before jumping into the heavy traffic of social media, you have to know where you want to be in the end. When working with clients, we first establish a set of goals and what it is that they hope using social media for marketing to achieve. How do you want to expose your business? Are you going for awareness, sales, leads? What do you hope to learn or get out of using these social mediums? You can then evaluate these set goals and have a better understand of what to monitor and measure. Knowing your audience is important in creating an effective social media plan. Who are you trying to target? What are they interested in? What gets them excited? And where are they online? These are the necessary questions you need to ask yourself in developing your strategy – you need to know how to attract potential clients! If you really know your target audience you can create a content plan that is meaningful to them. What do they REALLY care about? How can you connect with them by talking about things they are interested in? What things, related to your product, are they really passionate about? Your content social media marketing strategies should be relevant to the psychographics of your audience. Based on your marketing objectives you should be able to develop calls to action – action that you want someone to take that will ultimately lead to business value for you. This might be getting their email address, having them call you, a direct sale online, filling out a contact form, etc. Knowing your call to action or ultimate goal will help you really drive value from your social marketing.

How to Build Social Media Into Your Content Marketing Processes

For a time, social media and content marketing may have seemed interchangeable, but they are actually quite different. Though there can be quite a bit of overlap, the easiest way to think about their relationship is that content is needed to drive social media, while social media is most essential during two key content marketing processes. You need to have a reason to be on every channel on which you decide to publish content. “To gain followers” is not a viable reason, social media marketing manager in and of itself, but “to gain followers on Facebook to drive brand awareness and traffic back to our website” can be. The important part here is that your content on the channel will serve as a means to convert the viewer into taking the next step in your desired purchase process — i.e., move them from Facebook follower to website viewer, email subscriber, event attendee, or whatever conversion goal you choose. As mentioned above, for best results, you need to have a dedicated plan for every channel you intend to distribute social media content on. Just because you can share something on every channel there is, doesn’t mean that you should. Customize the content you distribute on each channel. Consider what messages are appropriate for each channel and create a message you think will resonate with that specific audience. Think about the kind of informational needs marketing with social media people in this channel have and how you can help. Will you primarily publish text, images, or video? Check out last week’s post for more guidance on choosing the best topics and formats for your audience.

What is the ideal velocity?

It’s a smart idea to understand how often you want to publish content in each channel. How many posts do you want to publish per day/week? What time of day is best? You’ll have different cadences depending on if you are sending/responding to tweets, updating your Facebook status or publishing a new SlideShare, for example. Our team has found that posting on Facebook once or twice a day, monitoring Twitter all day, and spending time each day social media marketing software on LinkedIn works best for CMI. But every company is different, so you will want to spend some time determining the schedule that’s likely to work best for you and your customers. Let your goals dictate the decisions you make in regard to social media content. For example, if the goal of your content marketing plan is to increase email subscribers, would it really make sense to broadcast all your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter? What reason would readers have to subscribe to your email program if they can get the same information on the social channels they already visit regularly? Think about how to use social media for marketing how you can tweak and repurpose the content you share on your social networks, both as it applies to your goals for the channel and to your overarching business objectives.