Social media continues to play an important role in turning a user into a customer, and it's easy to think that the best way to get the attention of these potential customers is to post all over social media, all the time.
Of course, if everyone did that then social feeds would be even more competitive that they already are, and this is why you need to plan what content you're going to post and when you're going to post it.
Social media companies use computer systems to figure out what to show and when, so you need to know how to work with their systems to get shown to potential customers more often and a social media plan brings a chunk of benefits.
What is a Social Media Content Planner
You might have heard people taling about social media content planners and have wondered what exactly they are, well here's our honest opinion.
Social planner vs social calendar
The word 'planner' is the key difference for us when considering the difference between a planner and a calendar.
In our opinion, a planner, whether for social media or otherwise is a tool to help you plan your content. Not only does it tell you what's coming up in your schedule, but it also helps you evaluate the performance of your previous content.
On the other hand, a content calendar is simply a list of date bound events which tell you what to post when, but doesn't help you understand why, or the impact of your posts.
How to build your social media content planner
If you're just starting out on your social media journey, you might think that a social content planner is overkill, but trust us, it'll pay off in the relatively short term by, well, helping you to plan better.
In this example we're going to use Google Sheets as it's free (just like our digital marketing tools), so head over there and create blank sheet.
Key information for a social media planner
For your social media planner to work effectively, there are some key pieces of information you need for every post. Remember, this is a social media content planner not a draft of all your posts, so we're not adding space for the actual post content.
The columns you need are:
- Campaign
- Target Post Date
- Actual Post Date
- Platform
- Audience
- Purpose
- Content Type
- Topic
- Link to Post
- KPI
- Target
There are also some additional columns you can add to this and why not add anything else that you find valuable too! Some examples might include
- Image content
- Written content
By having all of this data together in one place, it's much easier to see trends across certain post, platform or audience types.
The idea is that your social media planner should help you understand what has and has not worked previously, so that you can make better decisions to plan future social media content.
The Upshot of a Great Social Media Planner
The benefit of this is that by making informed choices, you can create content that audiences engage with and when audiences are engaged, they're more likely to buy form you!
