What is a Social Media Marketing Planner?
In this day and age, there’s a good chance social media plays a major part in the communications strategy for your business or organization. It can boost your outreach efforts, helping you grow your business, reach new audiences, and build brand recognition. One way to ensure your social media strategy is efficient and effective is to add a social media planner to your toolkit.
Why Do I Need a Social Media Strategy Planner?
A social media planner is a tool that helps you make the most of your social media outreach by helping you:
- Keep on track. Once you have developed the strategy of your social media for your small business or organization, a social media campaign planner will help you establish the steps you take to achieve your goal, while still offering flexibility for last-minute posts to be added.
- Stay organized. A social media content planner will help you map out your content to make sure you are sharing all the important information, significant dates, and upcoming events you want your followers to know about during a given time frame.
- Post consistently. Using a social media planner can help you establish a steady drumbeat of posts, which is key to making meaningful connections with your social media audiences. It will also prevent you from frantically searching for content to share if you have a gap in posts. If you identify any holes as you are planning content for social media, you can fill those in with posts that are evergreen, or that are consistently relevant or good reminders for your followers.
- Make fewer mistakes. Laying out your posts in advance gives you more time to review for typos, fact check your information, and vet the content with your team.
How Do I Make a Social Media Planner?
There are many ways to create a social media marketing planner for your business or organization. It could be as simple as a spreadsheet that outlines the type of content, posting dates, topics, copy, images, relevant links, and the platform(s) where they will be posted. There are also several third-party tools you can subscribe to, like Hootsuite, Loomly, and Post Planner. Each provide various features that help you build your social media planner through an online dashboard, including:
- A social media calendar to provide an overview of upcoming posts. It often includes the information listed above arranged in a calendar view.
- Insights on best posting times to tell you when the best times are for you to post based on the activity of your target audiences. Most management platforms on individual social media sites offer the same insight without cost, but subscription services provide recommendations in one place, giving you an efficient way to plan your timing for maximum engagement.
- Content ideas to help you fill out your calendar with high-performing posts. Some subscription services cultivate relevant content from outside sources to help boost engagement on your platforms.
- Post review that displays what your content will look like once it is posted. Some services will create a mockup so you can make sure it looks exactly as you want it to before it goes live.
- Post scheduling so your posts can post at the best time, even if you cannot be at your computer or mobile device to do it manually. A social media post planner will do it for you automatically with your pre-approved copy.
- Content libraries to store frequently used copy, pictures, links, and videos to make them easily accessible for repeat posting. This helps fill any gaps with evergreen posts. Some services will allow you to set up those posts at regular intervals.
- Engagement analysis to assess the strength and success of your social media activity. Each social media channel has its own analytics, but social media planner tools compile it in one place and can sometimes offer more details than the platforms themselves provide.
No matter how you build it, a social media planner can help you stay organized, focus on your strategy, build brand recognition, and reach your outreach goals. At Paradigm, we can help you research, plan, and create content that ensures your social media strategy is purposeful and efficient. Please contact us today to get started.
About the Author
Kaitlyn Wilcoxson, Account Group Supervisor, is a data-driven, problem-solving marketing guru who, as one of the firm’s longest employees, has worked with almost every client Paradigm has ever partnered with, and has been instrumental in their success. Kaitlyn ensures Paradigm’s clients and internal teams are positioned for growth. She manages resources, develops team members, monitors the quality of deliverables, and manages process and procedure planning. She was awarded the Gold Level Stevie® Award for Customer Service and Sales Manager of the Year in the 17th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
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