Life’s hardest truths hit you at the strangest of times. During my previous fishing expedition, I realized that angling at a popular fishing spot doesn’t guarantee success.
Similarly, over 60% of the world’s population uses social media. This doesn’t guarantee success. It would help if you had a solid content plan, developed well in advance, to build and nurture your audience.
Earlier, my motto was to figure out the content, each morning, one day at a time. My failure to attract and build an audience on social media platforms was not a reflection of the quality of the content but of poor planning.
Regardless of the hours and hours spent in front of the computer, I was losing ground to my competitors. Finally, I turned the tide by planning my social media content in advance. Here are six steps that worked for me, and can pave the way for your social media success.
How to Plan Social Media Content in Advance
Sun Tzu’s quote, ‘Every battle is won before it’s even fought.’ This isn’t restricted to the battlefield alone.
A little investment of time upfront can improve your chances of success even on social media. If you’re wondering, ‘how to’ or ‘where to’ begin, then follow the below-given steps:
Decide Content Themes Based on Audience Preference
You can create social media content on any topic, from kittens to sports, and from celebrity gossip to politics. But, will the content benefit your target audience or help you achieve your business goal? No.
Make a list of all the topics that will benefit the audience. In addition, these topics must help further your business goals. Don’t overthink about topics. Note down everything that would attract and interest the audience.
For example, if you’re a content entrepreneur, then the following topics should be on the list:
- How to build an audience, monetize content, and scale your business?
- What are the challenges that content entrepreneurs face? Share your personal story or interview other content entrepreneurs.
- How to create compelling content, and edit and optimize the content?
On the other hand, if you’re a YouTube video editing service, then create social media content on the following topics:
- What is the ideal YouTube video length?
- What are the best YouTube video formats to use?
- How do you optimize YouTube videos?
This is just a glimpse. Your list of topics would be a much longer one. Avoid creating social media content on topics not on the list.
You can update the theme or topic list every 3 months. You can also categorize the list based on content themes, social media platforms, content types, etc.
Create the Rough Drafts for Each Content Type
With the topics list in your hand, create a rough draft for each content type and social media campaign. This could include a rough draft of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts, rough scripts for your YouTube videos, rough text to be included in your image assets, etc.
Just write down the most important points that come to your mind. It need not be good or even grammatically correct. You can whip them into shape later.
At this stage, the rough draft of your social media content must satisfy only two conditions:
- The content should be about the topics that are part of the list.
- It must help achieve your marketing goals.
Creating lots of posts and content ideas for social media is tough for anyone. Churning out content that could last months is difficult. You can brainstorm ideas over multiple sessions and days.
Take inspiration from the content you have created for your website or even social media. Alternatively, research your competitors to learn what’s working for them.
Offer Variety to Your Audience
Your social media content offering is not much different from a local fair. It needs to offer variety to attract and grow an audience.
Imagine, instead of a variety of games, amusements, animals, goods, competitions, and plays, a visitor seeing only juggling of balls or knives at every stall at the fair. The fair will neither attract nor earn the patronage of the local people.
People crave variety and you need to decide the content mix to keep the audience interested. A long, long time ago, say about a decade and a half ago, content mainly referred to text.
Nowadays, you need to give equal importance to text, image, and video content. Bear in mind, that whatever the content mix, they need to fit into and help achieve your marketing goals.
With creative editing, you can use the same content on multiple platforms — for example, slicing YouTube videos into short clips for Instagram, X, and other channels using social media video editing services.
Additionally, creating social media content in bulk is hard work, even for super-creative individuals. You can try a mix of original and curated content to nurture the audience.
This is also helpful for a specific niche. For instance, providing content that addresses your audience’s practical needs, such as updates on CTP greenslip insurance or other industry essentials, can help build trust and drive engagement.
Make sure that the curated content is connected to your chosen topics, relevant to the audience, and helps further the marketing goals.
Decide Who Does What and When
Social media marketing is too big a responsibility for one individual to shoulder. You need assistance from others for research, content creation, editing, scheduling, performance analysis, and more. Now is the time to prepare a content calendar and assign responsibilities to the right people.
Everyone involved with your social media campaign must be in tune with your marketing goals and larger business vision. You can ensure everyone working on the campaign is on the same page by sharing the business proposal and content style guide along with the necessary instructions.
A marketing project management software like Nifty can help define and allot who does what. It can be used to share documents and instructions, assign deadlines, and monitor progress. A well-organized content schedule helps avoid confusion. Plus, it streamlines and harmonizes the content creation and publication process.
Prepare and Review the Social Media Content
Give content creators enough time to prepare posts, videos, images, etc. The social media content should be ready even before the campaign kicks off. This strategy ensures everyone involved in content creation has enough time to research, create, and review their work.
The content preparation process may throw up new ideas. Creating content in advance gives time to run new ideas through proper channels and incorporate them into your social media marketing campaign.
Last-minute rewrites and edits are common in marketing campaigns. Just before going online, a post, image, or short video, fails the final review. You panic and try to conjure up something to fill the space. This last-minute fix may not conform to the marketing goals and can affect your campaign. Planning your content helps avoid last-minute glitches.
Schedule the Content and Decide the KPIs
A major reason for planning your social media content in advance is to give yourself the freedom to focus on other areas of your business.
Once the content is ready, you shouldn’t be wasting time posting them on various platforms, every day. Put your campaign in autopilot mode by scheduling the content.
There are plenty of scheduling tools, both free and paid apps, which allow you to automate content posting. You can distribute posts, images, and videos to all major social media platforms from one place.
Your social media marketing campaign will generate hundreds of metrics. You can’t and don’t need to track them all.
At the content planning stage, you need to identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll help track progress and measure the success of your campaign. The KPIs for your campaign will depend on the marketing goals you have set for yourself.
Focus on metrics that measure engagement, reach, audience growth, and conversions. Furthermore, use native and third-party analytics tools to measure the metrics such as visitors to your landing page from social media, newsletter subscriptions, etc.
Final Thoughts
Growing your social media community needn’t be stressful at all.
Our little guide on planning your social media content can help you fulfill two key attributes of success – consistency and providing value.
Planning helps provide valuable content and stay consistent with your content offering. Both these attributes will enable the client or customer to know, like, and trust you more.
Use our guide to start planning your social media content today, avoid unnecessary experimentation, and reap rich rewards in the future.
