How to Successfully Plan Your Social Media Content

We've all been there, when you're stuck in a rut when planning your social media there's nothing worse. Here are a few hints and tips to help you get started when planning your content and ensure you're nailing your brand awareness, traffic, and conversions.

1. Keep to a 2 week timetable 

When planning posts, always looks at it from a two-week rota point of view, this way you can clearly see if you’re being too repetitive, pushing certain products too much or not posting enough customer content. There are dozens of platforms you can plan these out on, I personally love Google Sheets, it’s simple, easy and best of all: free. 

Stuck on what to post? When creating your timetable look at the content you already have, from blog posts to videos and testimonials, depending on what you're goals are, post each category 1-2 times a week.
Ready-made content:

• Blog posts
• Landing pages
• Website pages
• News announcements
• Videos
• Infographics
• Photos
• Customer Testimonials.

2. Schedule, Schedule, Schedule!

Compose. Schedule. Publish. Relax.

Maintain a consistent posting schedule across your channels by posts as far into the future as you can, the more you can schedule the better. There will always be posts that are spontaneous, these are often the most effective posts, just check you’re not going to clash with your scheduled posts first. 

Find Your Own Best Times To Post On Facebook

Click into Insights on your Facebook page and find the Posts tab in the left-hand section. You will be able to see a clear idea of the times your audience has engaged most with your posts.

3. Tarnish the typos 

Planning your posts ahead means that you can remove the risk of typos in your posts. Take advantage of the copyrighting queens to check over your work in bulk before they go live. A social media calendar is a great way to get your team members to check any typos or double-check any wrong info going out.

4. Schedule your time 

This is one of the most important tips - schedule your time! Whether you take a whole day out every two weeks to plan and schedule your content, or an hour every morning or review your posts, schedule them and reply to comments, whatever works for you, just make sure do it. 

5. Get others to help

We all struggle on content from time to time, when this happens, get someone else to do the work for you... Not literally. Ask colleagues, customers, shareholders etc to provide a quote, create an infographic and you’re good to go. You can even get colleagues or influencer to do a ‘Tuesday Takeover’ for your account so you get a whole day worth of free content. 

Below are 8 steps to creating an effectively plan your social media:

1. Audit your social networks and content
2. Choose your social channels
3. Decide what your calendar needs to track
4. Make a content library for your assets
5. Establish a workflow
6. Start crafting your posts
7. Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve
8. Start publishing/scheduling

Best platforms 

GIMP - A free open-source image editor pretty much the free version of Adobe’s software.

Canva and Info.gram are some of the best graphic design platforms for beginners.

Unfold  app that helps you create beautiful templates for Instagram stories.

Tweriod is a free tool to determine when your Twitter followers are most active online.

Hootsuite allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time.

Later is a drag-and-drop calendar to plan and schedule your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest posts.

Written by Alice Mutch