How to Create a Social Media Content Plan

Having a social media presence is a necessity these days, especially for businesses, however it can be a little overwhelming. If you want to make sure you’re doing everything properly, you should come up with a social media content plan. A social media content plan should answer 5 questions.

What do I want from my social media presence?
Knowing what you want will help you gauge your success and give you something to work for. Use SMART goals to help come up with simple and realistic goals for a social media content plan. Smart goals are; specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-related. For example, you might want to aim to post 3-4 times a day, getting 30 likes on a post and 10 new followers a week. This goal gives you clear aims, constricted by a time frame and with something you can measure. They’re also attainable. You can’t give yourself the goal of 1000 new followers a day when you know you’re a relatively small account; it’s just completely unrealistic.

Who is your target audience?
If you’re a company that sells mobility products for the elderly, you’re not going to include obscure slang and memes in your content, because your target audience wouldn’t understand it. When putting together your social media content plan, you want to know who you’re tailoring your content to and make sure it’s going to be exciting and enjoyable to whoever your audience is.

What content are you going to post (and where)?
This question kind of has two parts. To know what content you’ll be posting, you’ll need to know what platform you’ll be using. If you are posting primarily on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll need two different types of content. Planning this ahead of time means you can start putting together some posts for scheduling and even prepare seasonal specific content. Scheduling posts so you know you’ll have a regular social media presence no matter how busy you get.  

Who will be creating the content?
Once you have figured out the platforms you’ll be using and are coming up with ideas for social media content, you will need to know who is going to be creating said content. For an Instagram account, you’ll be posting photographs or graphics, so who is going to be creating that? Will it be a hired photographer or just employee with a decent phone camera? It doesn’t matter, as long as they know they need to be creating the content.

How often are you going to post?
You can post content as frequently as you want but if you are trying to reach certain goals, it’s probably good you have some idea of how many times a week you will be posting. Depending on the platform, you can post a few times a day or even a few times a week. If you were using Twitter, rarely posting wouldn’t be suitable for the platform. Since you have picked your preferred platforms, you will know how often you should be posting. Come up with an amount and try to stick to it. If you feel like you need to post more or less after a while, adjust your content plan.