Having a social media plan ensures that your online presence is cohesive, strategic and impactful. While most businesses understand the importance of producing social media content, many still have a scattergun approach. Not having a clear plan can harm your brand awareness and means you are unable to measure campaigns and identify what works.

There are many different tools you can use to produce a social media plan, and they largely share the same characteristics. A social media plan is not only a tool you can use to organise and schedule your social media content, but also to make sure it is the right content aimed at the right people. Essentially, your plan is a way to ensure your content is created, published and analysed in a strategic and controlled way, to maximise its effectiveness.

The Benefits of Having a Social Media Plan

So, what benefits does having a social media plan bring? Here we will look at how your business will benefit from social media planning and how it can work alongside a wider marketing strategy to drive key customer engagement.

• Content Calendar

An essential element of social media planning is creating a content calendar. This enables you to plan entire campaigns over any length of time, across multiple platforms. You can then use the calendar to analyse their effectiveness and ensure that each campaign remains fresh and is consistent with your brand identity.

• Ideas

A social media planning tool enables you to accumulate ideas and brainstorm in a controlled way. You can play around with themes, formats, objectives and target audiences to ensure that creativity is at the centre of everything, and that new ideas have space to grow and achieve some substance. At the same time, this content journey is recorded, is open to input from different parties and can evolve in an organic way.

• Scheduling Tools

Scheduling your social media posts ensures your content reaches key demographics at the right time. You can use different social media platforms to reach the right audience by scheduling automated posts in advance. This ensures consistency of branding and messaging, and maximises your content’s effectiveness.

• Management

A social media planning tool usually has a feature that allows direct engagement with customers, which is an important way to build communities and respond to feedback. Community building enables your brand to connect with customers and helps build your online personality. This in turn helps to build trust, respect and authority in terms of your position in the marketplace.

• Performance Analytics

Being able to measure the success or failure of social media campaigns is essential, so everything you post should have metrics attached which work towards key performance indicators. You need to know what is working, what improvements you can make and whether you are publishing content to the correct target audience. Analytics tools can also drill down further to show you which campaigns resulted in the most sales conversions, or the most click-throughs on websites. This can then inform what you do for future social media campaigns based on platforms and target audience.

Social media planning helps you coordinate a campaign so that it works for your business, which should therefore result in more engagement and bigger sales. If you need help and support with social media planning, our team of social media management experts can work with you to ensure your online content is aligned with your business goals and objectives and is an effective tool to boost your brand awareness. So contact our team today.