Whether you're a sole trader like a builder, running an SME with more employees or even a larger business with a dedicated marketing team, having a social media plan or calendar is an essential tool to help you make the most of the social platforms you're active on.
You might think it's overkill and another thing to do, but there's a whole host of reasons why creating a social media plan can help your business.
What is a Social Media Plan?
A social media plan is, in its simplest form, a document where you list all of your up coming post ideas for your social media channels. You can keep them as simple as you like, but we often find the more detail you put into them, the more value you get out of them.
Great social media plans also serves as a record of what's been done and what you're doing next, helping you and colleagues to plan workload and raise questions ahead of time. This allows you to resolve problems in plenty of time.
Why Does my Business Need a Social Media Plan
If you're asking yourself why you need to create a social media plan, you may well not be alone. Afterall, everyone uses socials in their personal life all the time, so what could be that different?
There's a whole host of important reasons why any business needs a social media plan or calendar and we've covered the key reasons below.
Helps you post content at the right time
It can be easy to lose track of what you want to post on your business social media channels, especially when you're busy trying to run a bsuiness. We know because it's something we've done loads of times before too.
Having your social content ideas in a planner or calendar gives you a visual reference of the content you're meant to be posting and when.
Prevents over-posting
By recording what you're posting when, you can also see how much content you're intending to share on individual social media platforms.
This is important as social media platforms work on algorithms which choose when and how your content is shown to users. Posting too much or too little can affect how often you're posts are seen by users.
Document results
It's so easy to post and forget about it in a world where everythign is instant, but a great social content planner will also help you to document the performance of a social post.
Taking time to understand what content performs well, and less well, will help you to create more of the post types that users engage with. In time this helps to create more high performing content.
Delegate social media tasks
Knowing what's on the horizon and just over it helps you to plan the workload associated with creating your social content.
If you know you need images or videos for a post, you can pass these tasks on to your team, or set aside time to complete them early so your content is ready at the time it's needed.
Improves post scheduling
One of the great features of socials is the ablity to schedule your posts, meaning you get get everything in place the week before and schedule everything to go live the following week.
Having a firm plan of your social content means that you can take advantage of post scheduling and prepare all of your posts in your quiet time.
Why not check out our guide to scheduling a post in meta business suite.
Keep content ideas fresh
Perhaps the biggest benefit to using a social content planner is to help keep your ideas fresh.
Yes, you can see historic posts in the various social platforms, but if you're posting across multiple platforms, seeing everything in one place can be difficult.
A good social plan will include all posts from all platforms and give you an overview of what you've shared recently. Having this overview means it's easy for you avoid posting the same or similar content all the time.
Next Steps: Creating a Social Content Plan
Hopefully by now we've convinced you of the benefits of having a robust social media plan. Before we get into how to create a plan, it's worth understanding which social media platforms you actually need to post on which we've written about previously.
