We all want our social media efforts to yield great results, but most of us realize it isn’t as easy as “tweet it and they will come.” Like anything else in your business, you’ll need a plan. But don’t worry!
Creating a social media plan for serious success is easy and doesn’t take a ton of time, which, if you are anything like me, is one of your most precious commodities!
In this article, I will outline five steps for a social media productivity plan: Create Reasonable Goals, Formalize Your Plan, Measure Success, and Repeat!
1. Create Reasonable GoalsSocial media marketing benefits just about any other marketing strategy, including brand awareness, customer relationship building, influencer and blogger outreach, etc. And yet, all of these results are hard to quantify.
You need easy, tangible goals to reach on a regular basis.
It’s one thing to say, “I want more social engagement!” or “I need more likes.” But try to quantify it. How many likes would be really helpful? Is it more important to focus on shares and retweets?
For example, you can focus a lot on shares because social is a huge part of an inbound marketing strategy. Consider your business and what is necessary to see some real value.
2. Formalize your PlanYou have your goals, but how you are going to reach them is another story! This is a step that, if not executed correctly, could be a large time sink. My team creates a monthly social media calendar, so we can focus on execution once the month starts. Some things to consider putting in your plan are:
Upcoming Events: Live events are fantastic for social sharing. Make sure to create or find out the event hashtag to get additional sharing power around it.
Content Calendar for social sharing: This includes thinking about calls to action (like a banner at the bottom of each post) to maximize retweets and shares.
Press Releases: Do you have any news to share? Formalize it in a release. The format is pretty straightforward, and you can have ChatGPT write it for you. It is perfect for tasks like this.
Monthly themes of what are sharing: For example, August could be focused on “Social Productivity,” and everything in the sharing plan has that underlying theme
I found that Google spreadsheet is often the best way, so I can share it with my team and make the planning collaborative.
3. Use the Right ToolsPlenty of social media tools make you and your team more productive. But there’s an important balance here: Too many tools can be distracting, so you need the right amount while still being able to add new tools that use new technology.
My social media tool suite is pretty minimal but I am always ready to add new ones if I come across something that offers new ways to accomplish old tasks. Here are the tools I use daily:
Agorapulse for social media scheduling and social media listening
Tweetdeck for Twitter chats. It is pretty much the only free Twitter tool that was left to us after Twitter made their API paid-only
Text Optimizer which uses AI to create long-form content for video descriptions and social media captions.
All of these tools have pretty solid collaborative features allowing your whole company to contribute their effort to the social media strategy. There are also quite a few business phone apps allowing you to integrate your social media insights into the customer support strategy.
4. Measure SuccessWas your goal 60 followers in four weeks or a certain amount of clicks on shared posts? Check in regularly and make sure you are tracking toward your goal so you can make tweaks as you go.
If you aren’t seeing your following grow, perhaps you need to focus more on your engagement outreach strategy, perhaps you need to retweet more of other people’s content to get noticed. These regular check-ins help you avoid having to make a major shift in strategy and keep you productively working on the right stuff to reach your goals.
One example of a tweak that worked was when we started introducing more photos into our social sharing calendar. Posts with photos immediately got more clicks and shares than our text-only-based posts, so we shifted mid-month to put a higher percentage of visual posts.
5. Repeat!See how the first month goes, adjust, and start the cycle over again. By being realistic about what you want to achieve, organizing and formalizing a plan, and staying focused on success, you’ll never risk burning cycles on social without the results.
Source: Small Business Trends LLC
Original Content: https://shorturl.at/hltNU
