A large part of the work we do for our clients is helping them to make the most out of their social media presence. This often involves developing creative campaigns and achieving reliable results.
While it is important to create content that resonates with your audience, it is equally important to publish content in an efficient and effective way.
Content planning enables you to map out and schedule your posts in advance. It gives you time to consider its relevance and means you don’t have to manually post every day.
Whether you want to raise awareness of your brand, change a behaviour or invoke an action (such as clicking on a link) – good content planning enables your brand to reach your audience with relevant and engaging information that can help you to achieve your goals.
But where to start? We’ve created a handy guide…
Planning and posting frequency
You might post three times a week but plan it in weekly, fortnightly or even monthly chunks. Whatever frequency you choose should suit the needs of your brand or organisation.
When considering what times and days to post, you should use available in-platform analytics to find the optimum times. However, always create content to fill a need, not a space. Whatever pace you choose should be consistent and not sporadic
Even when content is planned in advance, it is important to review it regularly and make changes based on trends, current events or topical issues. Social media moves fast so you need to be agile to keep things relevant.
Use a scheduling tool
Using a scheduling tool when planning your content will help you to visualise the spread of your posts across platforms. It can also help you to make sure you cover key dates or events.
Your scheduling tool could be as simple as a spreadsheet or an online tool such as Sprout Social. We’ve provided a link to download our content planning spreadsheet at the end of this post.
Using a scheduling tool can also give you access to further analytical information and could give you a greater understanding of how your audience interacts with your brand’s content.
Make your content meaningful
Social platforms prioritise content that is topical and meaningful to their users. To make sure you reach your audience, you should tie your content into relevant discussions, hashtags and current events.
By doing this you are creating relatable and topical content that your audience is more likely to interact with. However, you should stick to relevant topics for your brand to keep your message meaningful.
Be responsive
Social media is an interactive medium. Having a clear plan for when and how you respond to comments and messages on your channels can help build a relationship with your audience.
If you’re posting regularly, but not responding to comments, your audience may feel ignored and could switch off from future posts. Even if the content is scheduled in advance, it’s important to monitor the response and engage with when you can.
Measure and mould
Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you can use as part of your content planning process. By reviewing which posts and content perform best against your objectives, you can mould your future content that your audience will be interested in and will engage more with.
Each platform takes a slightly different approach to analytics, calculating metrics such as engagements using their own definitions, so taking the time to understand what you’re measuring will also help ensure future success.
Paid content
Whilst organic content is important, social media has become a pay-to-play model. Organic content on Facebook reaches an average of 5.20% of your page’s following. Supplementing your organic posts with boosted posts or adverts can drive engagement not only with paid content, but also have a positive effect on your organic content too.
If you’re looking for more ways to enhance your brand’s social presence, we’ve got a team of experts to help you with everything from content planning, asset creation, video production, animation, paid advertising and content monitoring – contact us at sayhello@dtw.co.uk
Or if you’re ready to get started with your own social media content plan, you can download our free planning template by entering your details below.