Social media marketing can be daunting, but there’s one thing that successful brands have, and that’s a well-defined social media plan.
With so many platforms, post types, and tools to choose from, it’s important for businesses take social media planning seriously, and avoid posting to “just get something out there”.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to develop a complete social media plan that will set you on a path towards consistent growth.
A free social media plan template is included at the end of this guide: scroll down and grab your copy!
Craft, schedule, & auto-post content to all your social channels, then track analytics and manage interactions from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
A social media plan is a comprehensive overview of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on social media, including your:
It includes the following sections:
A social media plan is essential to ensure the success of your overall social media marketing efforts. There are many benefits of using a social media content calendar. Here are a few of the reasons every brand needs to incorporate social media planning into their content strategy:
A social media plan ensures that you’re able to produce content regularly, which is essential for maintaining a strong social media presence. By planning and scheduling content in advance, you’ve ensured a consistent flow of content without scrambling to develop ideas.
A well-executed social media plan enhances your brand’s image and reputation. Through consistent and strategic content creation, you can shape and reinforce your brand identity across social media platforms. Your plan should outline the visual elements, tone of voice, and key messages that align with your brand’s values and objectives. Maintaining a cohesive and recognizable brand presence establishes trust and credibility with your audience.
Additionally, social media provides an opportunity to showcase your brand’s personality and personally connect with your target audience.
Social media planning enables you to create content that resonates with potential customers and encourages meaningful engagement. A well-planned social media strategy encourages likes, comments, shares, and mentions, whether through thought-provoking questions, polls, contests, or interactive features.
Increased engagement boosts your brand’s visibility and provides valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, opinions, and needs.
A social media plan is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. By strategically sharing links to your website’s content, blog posts, product pages, or landing pages, you can attract qualified visitors and increase the likelihood of conversions. Your plan should outline the frequency and timing of these promotional posts to ensure maximum visibility and engagement.
Furthermore, social media platforms often offer advertising options that allow you to target specific demographics and interests, driving even more traffic to your website.
A social media plan allows you to track and measure the outcomes of your social media efforts. By setting clear objectives and KPIs, you can evaluate the success of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions. Analyzing metrics like reach, engagement, website traffic, and conversions helps you understand what works and needs improvement. Measuring results also allows you to compare performance against competitors and industry benchmarks, showcasing the value of your social media activities.
Now that you understand the importance of having a social media plan and what you should include in it, it’s time to dive in a little deeper and create one by following these seven simple steps:
The first step is to set your business goals, target market, brand identity, and editorial line.
Always set your business goals to measure your success and return on investment (ROI).
Some examples of social media goals and objectives include:
But these goals must help you achieve your overall business and marketing goals. For example:
Once you have decided on your goals, add some specific metrics so you can measure their success. For example, if you were using Instagram to increase followers and engagement, you might use:
Next, you’ll want to define your target market. Knowing who your audience is and what they like determines what type of content to create.
Research your audience demographics and your competitors so that you know:
Here are a few key considerations and steps to follow when defining your target market.
Maintaining a consistent brand identity is crucial for a successful social media plan. Your brand identity encompasses the visual elements, messaging, and values that differentiate your brand from competitors. Here are key considerations for maintaining your brand identity on social media:
One place you can maintain brand identity is in your social media profiles. You can create the same identity on each social platform. For example, look at how Nike uses the same handle, colors, and logos:
You can craft your editorial line by answering a few simple questions:
The second step is all about planning your content ahead of time so that you can tell a consistent brand story. The last thing you want is to rush around at the last minute, desperately searching for something to post. That won’t work.
Planning your content also ensures you keep a regular schedule. It’s better to publish one high-quality post each day rather than going berserk with five posts one day, nothing for three days, followed by another couple of random posts. Your audience knows when to expect your next post when you publish regularly.
You can plan your content in a tool like Airtable, a spreadsheet template, or a professional, dedicated calendar like Loomly.
Editorial calendars are typically set up on either a monthly or weekly cycle:
Choose the cadence that best fits your team’s requirements. You can also read our in-depth article on building a social media calendar for more information about the topic.
Your social media workflow should cover the process of reviewing and approving content before it’s published to make sure the right post gets published at the right time, in the right place, by the right person.
When deciding what social media channels to use, you need to consider which ones will help you achieve your business goals and which networks your target audience uses.
Hint: You don’t have to be on every channel!
A useful starting place for a side-by-side comparison of social media demographics is Pew Research data:
Next, you’ll want to decide how often you’re going to publish content.
Here’s a brief overview of how many times you should post on different social media platforms
Here are key tips to help you define your publishing frequency:
In general, more posts are better to keep your audience engaged. But, as mentioned earlier, we highly recommend focusing on how many high-quality posts you can commit to posting every week or every month.
With your editorial cadence and publishing frequency defined, you can start filling your calendar with post ideas:
Start by listing events that are important to your brand and your audience, such as:
After you’ve added fixed dates, you need to consider the best days to publish your other content.
Based on proprietary research, third-party studies, and, most importantly, your own experience, select the best publishing days per social media channel.
Finally, fill in the remaining gaps with evergreen ideas. For example, you could:
Loomly Tip: You can leverage Loomly’s built-in Post Ideas feature to fill your social media calendar. From Twitter Trends to RSS feeds, date-based events, and evergreen advice, you’ll never run out of inspiration.
The next step in your social media plan is allocating time and resources to create content. You’ll also need to allow time for customizing content for each of your chosen social networks.
You’ve already decided on topics and dates for your content, but the final tweak is to select the best publishing time for each social network. You can base this on your previous publishing experience, proprietary research, and third-party studies.
For example, you might decide it’s best to publish on Facebook at 09:00 and on Twitter at 12:30 and 17:00.
When crafting the copy for your social media posts, you’ll need to consider a few core components, such as words, links, mentions, hashtags, and emojis.
You’ll also need to customize each post to fit each social network’s technical limitations, community best practices, and audience expectations.
For example, if you plan to post the same content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you could have a base version for Facebook, a short and snappy version for Twitter, and a longer, more formal version for LinkedIn.
Loomly Tip: When creating a post in Loomly for multiple social networks, you can define some generic content that’ll be applied by default to all channels and customize that generic content for each platform.
Alongside the copy, you’ll need to create your visual assets, such as:
All of these visual assets could be original material, user-generated content, or stock images. But either way, plan to store them in a central repository for your team to access now and in future posts.
Loomly Tip: You can store, organize, and use photos, videos, notes, links, and post templates in Loomly’s built-in Library Asset View.
Your social media plan is taking shape, but before any content gets published, you’ll want to ensure it’s been reviewed and approved.
The size of your organization will determine who needs to be involved in the review and approval process.
For instance, you might have a cross-functional team involving professionals from all departments in the company:
Whatever size team you use, make sure everyone knows what tasks they’re responsible for and allow ample time for reviewing, approving, and potential editing.
Reviewers need to have a clear preview of the post — including text and visuals — as it’ll appear on each social network, so they can confidently sign it off.
Here are some key things to look out for during the review process:
Loomly Tip: Loomly automatically generates Posts Mockups for you and your team before you hit publish.
Approvers need to check your posts for:
Ideally, you want an approval system that allows you to keep track of team feedback, save post changes, and make collaborators accountable for their actions.
Loomly Tip: Loomly offers an end-to-end collaborative review workflow including approval statuses, commenting system, and version history.
Once your posts have been reviewed and approved, you can schedule them for the planned publishing date and time.
Scheduling your posts in advance ensures they get published at the correct time. Instead of constantly checking your calendar for notifications and prompts, you can focus on planning and creating quality content for your next cadence.
Loomly Tip: Loomly includes a built-in scheduler that allows you to automatically schedule your posts once they’re approved and saves you copying and pasting from spreadsheets.
Having planned, prepared, and published your content, it can be easy to miss this next step.
But social media is all about dialog. No other marketing channel allows you to engage in direct conversation with your prospects and customers. So make sure you build time into your social media plan for interacting with your community.
The more open and transparent your interactions are, the more customers trust you.
The final step is to measure the response of your audience to the content you publish.
Tracking performance metrics helps you identify what did and didn’t resonate with your audience so that you can fine-tune your content next time.
It also gives you a way to determine whether you’re achieving your business goals and objectives.
Some of the most important social media metrics include:
Whether you use each platform’s built-in analytics or a dedicated analytics tool, you should get pointers about:
Loomly Tip: Loomly’s Advanced Analytics features provide you with Account, Post, and Link metrics to measure your brand’s performance.
Measure what content your audience likes (and dislikes) and leverage those insights when planning new content in your next publishing cycle. Your social media plan should be based on a cycle of continuous improvement where you plan, execute, measure, and fine-tune your content to achieve your goals.
It can come in a variety of shapes and forms:
Social media planning is essential to any successful social media marketing strategy. It helps businesses establish a clear roadmap for their social media activities, ensuring that you consistently produce high-quality content, engage with your audience, and track progress towards your marketing goals.
Investing in a well-crafted social media plan is vital whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional.
Loomly offers you the tools and templates to create a solid social media plan. Start your 15-day free trial today to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and achieve your marketing goals.