Posting consistent, high-quality content is the key to audience growth. But how do you stay on top of creating all that content for the weeks and months ahead?
Here’s the bad news: Building a social media content plan is hard, but there is good news:
The right social media content plan CAN grow your business!
Social media is nearly at the point of outgrowing itself. Previously, it was just used to stay in touch with friends, now it is used for news, entertainment, and keeping up-to-date with businesses and brands.
Why is having a content plan in place important?
Having a social media content plan helps to keep you on track. It’s your very own vision board of what you want to share with your followers by helping you to plan.
You can use it to:
- Draft content ideas
- See your posting schedule
- Make sure there’s a mix of content types
- Manage your workflow
- Track social media success
But there are lots of different elements that make up your plan. Copper Square understands that social media content planning can be tricky so here is the guide to our top 6 tips for success.
- Know your audience
All social media posts you share are for your audience. They want to know about your product or service and more importantly how you are going to solve a problem for them. But how do you know who your target audience is?
One way is to create buyer personas. These are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research, actual data about your existing customers, and a few (well researched) assumptions. It helps you to understand and relate to an audience that you want to market your products and services.
A second more popular way is through research research research. Once you establish where to find your audience you will then see what kind of content they are interested in.
- Look for inspiration
When you are putting together your content plan, one of the best things you can do is look at relevant niche-related content for inspiration. Search through industry hashtags and look at content on your competitors’ accounts to see what is getting the best engagement. You can then use these ideas to put your twist on the successful content and make it your own.
- Provide valuable content
It is important to provide value through your content as this gives users a reason to follow and engage with you as a business. To get started ask yourself these questions:
- What does our audience need help with?
- What questions are we constantly answering?
- What is it about our products/services that keep customers interested?
- What feedback do we get?
Take the answers you have written down and voilà, this is the start of your content planning.
- Create a content calendar
A content calendar is important to keep your content well-organised and on track. It helps you with initial brainstorming, which saves you from last-minute social media posts and helps you produce your content consistently.
Not only does a content calendar keep your channels from poorly timed posts and missing posting dates, but it also helps to identify gaps or overlaps in campaigns and prevent spamming one social network and neglecting another.
A content calendar does not need to be overcomplicated or fancy. A great place to host your content calendar is in Google Docs or Google Calendars so that you can invite other members of your team to add their ideas.
A content calendar will visually show you:
- When each post is scheduled to be published
- Which channels you are sharing the content on
- If links and tags are included in the posts
- If there are media attached to the caption
- Use a scheduling tool
Content scheduling is time-efficient. It enables you to schedule a large amount of content at the same time, freeing up your day for other activities in your business.
Using a scheduling tool means you don’t have to login and post on the spot under pressure. It allows you to write in bulk and plan when you are at your most creative.
Scheduling tools can also help you better visualise your content plan, which is particularly helpful if you have a specific Instagram theme or layout.
- Look at your insights
In content marketing, content insights are the learnings and understandings that marketing teams draw from data and analytics about their ideal audiences, their preferences in content, and the performance of campaigns they have launched.
It can be hard to maintain lots of different social channels so the best advice is to audit your accounts to see which platform has the most active audience, thus making this platform your top priority.
Account analytics can help your content planning as they display information on what posts received the most engagement. This then needs to be implemented into your content planning strategy for future posts.
Copper Square is your content planning partner in success with social media content scheduling, planning, training and smart social media content strategy. For more details on how to work together contact us and let’s grow your business together.
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