How to Create a
Strong Social Media Content Plan

Considering your target audience

Who are you trying to reach with your content plan? If you don’t know your audience, your campaign won’t get very far. Before you begin creating your content plan in earnest, you should be able to ask yourself and clearly answer:

• Who am I marketing to?
• What problem(s) does my product or service solve for my customers?
• When are the best times in which to reach them?
• Where are my followers or customers located?
• Why should my customers buy my products?
• How can we continue to support our campaign moving forward?

Remember: each platform you choose to use may require different answers to these questions.

Buyer personas

Creating personas is a great way to simulate potential followers, try to get inside their heads, find out what makes them tick, and what they want to solve. Buyer personas are a series of hypothetical customers that are likely to use your product.

For example: A gym is opening a second location and is trying to attract new clients. They create a small group of hypothetical members featuring basic demographics based on their targets, website visitor data and social media followers. Their marketing team thinks of six ideal clients including:

Buyer personas can be made extremely granular, but most only require basic information to be useful and effective.

The creation of detailed, comprehensive buyer personas can take time and effort, and can involve a lot of different metrics, interests, and other sociodemographic details that are intended to create a complete picture of the ideal buyer. We've gone into much more detail about creating buyer personas for social media here in this article. Take a look!

Each of these personas in our example has reasons to look for a new gym. It is the social media team‘s job to create a campaign that includes content that can appeal to each of them. You can construct these personas by taking existing data from your marketing efforts, checking website data, and even speaking directly with your customers.

Tools such as Google Analytics can be used to monitor demographics and track the buyer journey from entry to your website.

Executing your dynamic content campaign plan

Now that you’ve established all of the items above, it’s time to put your plan in action! Let‘s develop a basic campaign from start of production to finish.

1. INITIAL CONCEPT
This selection of brilliant post ideas is just a giant vat of inspiration. Anyone on your team can toss ideas into the pot. They can then be discussed, and the best ideas can move forward.

2. YOUR TO-DO LISTS
Using your initial concept board, your team selects the most suitable content for your social media campaign. One powerful way is to use a spreadsheet that weighs the potential cost/benefit ratio of a given post.

Separate individual tasks into their respective spaces and assign them to the team members best equipped to manage them. These sections can be broken up by text, image or video production, review, and more. Depending on your industry, your social media team will probably require a different workflow. For instance, a health supplement company might require legal or medical reviews of some posts before they can be scheduled.

4. CREATE A SCHEDULE
Depending on the strategy that you’ve created, it‘s time to make a posting schedule. You can do this by assessing the amount of content you can produce, how often you wish to publish, and what the upkeep process will look like across each of your chosen platforms.

5. UPKEEP
After your content is public, it requires community management and ongoing assessment. Take note of performance across various KPIs such as user engagement, customer service interactions, web link clicks, likes, follows, and anything else. These KPI metrics will allow you to fine-tune your campaign as it progresses.

SAMPLE

A health supplement company is releasing a series of “premium” protein bars aimed at middle-class men in their 20s. Their social media marketing team is made up of four people: a writer, a graphic designer, a community manager, and a supervisor. The team is focusing on Instagram and Facebook, where their visual content stands to shine.

Their campaign plan follows the above formula.

Step 1: Concept

They throw together some ideas onto their brainstorming board:

• A glamor video featuring a model with a protein bar
• An announcement with a couple of product shots
• A landing page featuring a launch coupon
• Targeted influencer campaign

Step 2: To-do list

The team focuses on the announcement and the landing page because they are less material-intensive and they want to get their campaign rolling as quickly as possible. The other two projects can be put on the back burner and used in a couple of months.

Step 3: Task assignments

Each person tackles their responsibilities. As each step is finished, the post moves on as though it were on an assembly line at a factory.

Step 4: Publishing

The team uploads their finished content into their scheduling tool and makes sure that everything looks great. Supervisor approval is then requested. For many companies, the content could then simply be approved and published.

However, in this example, the team has more to do! Because it‘s a supplement company, additional approval from both their legal and medical departments is required before any claims about their product’s health benefits can be made. Communication between departments is an essential part of this team’s social media strategy.

Every company will employ a unique workflow when determining inter-departmental cooperation.

Step 5: Upkeep

The team experiences mixed success with their strategies. A member of the company‘s customer service team takes over the community management so the rest of the team can focus on analyzing and making more content. Their posts perform well on Facebook and Instagram, but not nearly as well on LinkedIn and Twitter, and those latter platforms are set to lower priority. The team adjusts their future content to provide more of what people like and less of what they do not.

Adjusting Your Content Campaign!

It’s hard to know for certain what people will and will not react to online. Your business’s social media campaign never really finishes and the careful tending of content throughout its lifecycle is paramount to its continued sustainability and success. As time goes by, certain things about your social media content will come into focus, and changes will have to be made accordingly.

It is inevitable that some social media platforms will outperform others, and "flop" posts can happen - hopefully without dire consequences. As you continue to publish content, take advantage of your metrics to try to see where the weak points are, and devise a list of tweaks with which you can try experimenting.

Experimentation is key to keeping a campaign optimized and moving forward. Experimentation factors can include, but are not limited to:

Macro adjustments

• Using different social media platforms
• Posting diverse types of content
• Geotargeting

Granular adjustments

• Color schemes
• Publication times
• Age, education or income demographics
• Affinity categories

A/B testing is the process of taking a meaningful selection of your target market, around 20%, for example, and splitting that segment into two smaller groups of 10% each.

Each half receives a variation of an experimental metric. A high-end jeweler looking to sell more necklaces could run a test that aims certain posts at followers between the ages of 30 and 39 (Category A) and 40 and 49 (Category B). The goal of the experiment is to determine which age group buys more necklaces due to social media influence.

After that experimental campaign concludes, the jeweler determines that Category B performs better. The company then adjusts its marketing efforts to capitalize on this demographic at a larger scale.

Due to the whimsical nature of social media, these tests are essential, and can become extremely granular in their focuses. Because these platforms are always changing, innovation and awareness in your team will be an ongoing process.

Maintaining your content plan

A solid content strategy of any kind does not end on publication day! Maintaining your well-developed strategy and content editorial, and the community management that comes with it requires ongoing maintenance and constant review. As time goes by your team will inevitably notice areas of strength and weakness, and it's crucial to act accordingly. 

The biggest killer of a solid content strategy - whether it's SEO writing, podcasts, or social media - is the development of apathy and a lack of coherent project organization. To this, we suggest ensuring that you're documenting your progress in a single, easy-to-access location that the entire team involved with your social accounts can find and work with.

You can do this by creating a hub or another internal company system that helps let you leverage your entire company to share, comment, and otherwise boost your content. It also allows for the pooling of fresh ideas and insights, and keeps things interesting. 

Do not let your social media content plan stagnate! Often, results are hard to see immediately, and months can go by without significant changes. This is to be expected, but it is often the point at which many teams give up on social. Continue producing regular, high-quality content that speaks to your audience in a meaningful way. Keep engaging with your followers, solving their problems, and tracking your KPIs closely for areas of improvement. 

facelift can help

A smart social media content plan can be managed with a spreadsheet sheet and a bit of love, but it could be so much more! At facelift, we've made it our mission to simplify the entire social media management experience across the full lifecycle of your content, and with it you can put virtually everything in this guide into practice in a single place. 

This means not only helping you plan and schedule your posts across all of your social media platforms in one place, it also means helping you ensure that the content you're creating is having the effect it should.

Furthermore, facelift allows you to access competitor benchmarking, so you can see what's working or not working for others in your space. This can help inspire your content plan with fresh content ideas.

We love making these guides for you - but as happy as we are to provide them, there's no real substitute for digging in and getting your hands dirty. Your best bet at building a robust, lasting social media content strategy, and seeing everything this guide talks about put into action, is to give facelift a shot for yourself.

And you can do that for free for two weeks! You don't need a credit card, and it takes no time at all to get started. So take a few minutes to sign up for a trial and see what facelift can do to help make your social media management easier.