A new year has just arrived and if you're looking to recreate, renew, or even just begin a new social media strategy from scratch, you've come to the right place!
Let's talk about how you can structure the social media editorial ideas you already have in a better, more efficient way, while keeping your strategy up to date with current social media trends and features.
Building an effective social media strategy for your business
What's true of any kind of content campaign is no less true for social media. A predetermined, well-structured editorial is essential for generating the ROI you're hoping for this year and every year to come.
So, what do we mean by social media strategy and how much work does that have to be?
Social media is a team sport
How often has your social media manager been held up in their content creation workflow due to a lag in communication with other stakeholders, subject matter experts, or others whose approval or input are essential to a post going live?
A social media strategy that is prepared well in advance of your content's publication dates helps give your team time to collaborate constructively and ensure that content is top-quality before it comes to crunch time.
Be prepared for unexpected absences and interruptions
It can be frustrating when an important social media campaign or post relies on one person. In the same spirit as the last point, a social media editorial allows a team to know and understand what's coming. If a team member is unavailable for any reason, the rest of the team always knows what's coming and what needs to happen.
Identify resources for social media content creation
Not all content is created equal. Sometimes you're tweeting a sentence or two about a product update, and other times you're creating an epic documentary featuring drone footage and celebrity cameos.
If you've got major content projects ahead with big budgets and many moving parts, so to speak, planning is key to ensuring that your ducks are in a row and your masterpiece is ready for the silver screen.
Or TikTok.
Social media stakeholder management
Nothing is worse for a social media manager than pouring your heart, soul, and budget into creating awesome, grade-A content, just to have a C-suite member come along and kill the project because they either don't understand it or know something nobody thought to tell you earlier.
With a social media editorial, you can avoid these surprise disappointments and setbacks by getting stakeholder buy-ins before someone takes an axe to your plans for a comedic video series.
If you are that stakeholder, ensuring that your social media team is on board with your company's goals and requirements ensures that you don't have to crush their dreams at the last minute.
You can get that out of the way now!
Don't forget things!
The goal these days for just about every business everywhere is to be unavoidable online. This means spreading your marketing efforts to every corner of the Internet that you can possibly touch, and for many businesses that means juggling "all the social media networks".
Since there are a lot of them, it's easy to forget something somewhere. Certain formats work better for TikTok than they do for LinkedIn. You can't always share this or that in this other place. The aspect ratio is off for Facebook, and it's going to look bad when you post it. Etc. Etc., so on and so forth.
With a social media strategy defined beforehand, you can avoid forgetting platforms and ensure that everything is ready to go well in advance.
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Keep on top of your most important social media KPIs
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are how your team decides whether your social strategy is even working at all, and by monitoring and analyzing them properly, you can find whether you should stay the course or make changes.
If you've got your content planned from the start and identified your KPIs early, you can save a bit of analysis headache later. It also gives you time to do a bit of competitor research, and benchmarking against your existing content.
Staying on top of your social media KPIs is an essential part of any strategy, and social is no different. Hopefully by this stage you know why you're on social, so keep an eye out for the most important things.
How do I create a 2023 social media editorial plan?
Embed the editorial plan in the content strategy!
Within your plan, predetermine which topics should be published on your website. The first step is always the search for suitable topics, which should of course be as relevant as possible to your company's business goals and corporate identity.
These topics then must be planned and often written by a separate content team of writers, videographers, designers, and any number of other personnel– so figure out how your social media editorial fits into your general web content editorial. These teams – if they are separate – should coordinate their efforts during the planning process.
Which content makes it into your editorial plan depends on your strategy for social media and content in general. If your main concern is to report on current events in your industry, then you should better plan with news.
However, if you want to position yourself or your company as an expert in a specific niche, then you need content with more depth that stands for a greater and longer-term benefit for your users. Such topics usually produce more traffic and are often shared more than average.
Assign precise responsibilities
Ask yourself:
- Who handles creating, approving and publishing the content?
- Who watches the processing status of current topics?
- When should content be published?
- Where should fresh content be published?
- Who handles the follow-up and community management?
These won't always be separate people. At smaller organizations they may even mostly fall to one person. But assuming that's not the case, it's important to know this in advance so you don't experience any speed bumps later.
Post regularly!
An editorial implies a calendar. A calendar implies dates and times. Stick to your editorial calendar like glue and ensure that you can publish content regularly! Your editorial plan helps you to build up a structure and to present it openly to your followers.
Humans are nothing if not consistent – we follow pages because we like regularity and we unfollow them when we realize we haven't seen or read something cool lately.
The exact frequency of publication also varies from company to company, and unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a certain sweet spot for all industries. Social media platforms such as Twitter often perform better with frequent content, with top creators publishing multiple times per day.
However, since we realize that's a difficult frequency for most organizations to keep, we recommend posting new content at a minimum of once or twice per week.
But don't overdo it. If you post too much content, especially if it's similar content or overly promotional, you run the risk of pushing followers away.
Create a template
We've covered the method behind the social media strategy, but we'd be remiss not to tell you how to make it.
Each company and team will likely find its own tools and resources to create an editorial that suits them. This can be anything from an Excel sheet or Google Doc, to fancy pre-made templates and calendars.
Your editorial needs to include dates and times and should also include information about resources and responsibilities if possible. It doesn't have to be fancy or complex, it just needs to get the job done, keep everyone on the same page, and tie your business's social media content strategy into a perfect little package.
One more thing before you go: video!
If you really want your content to stand out in 2023, you'll need to jump on the social media video bandwagon. We know, it sounds like a lot of time, effort, and money, but it doesn't have to be!
Let us show you why. To give you a hand, we've created a super detailed free guide to short-form video content with everything you need to get started with – or improve – your video content, whether it's for Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or even Snapchat!
It's an epic read with a ton of detailed info, so take your time, pace yourself, and discover new ways that you can turn your social video strategy up to the next level immediately. Check it out here!
