Benefits of Planning Your Social Media

Thanks to Claire Solomon from ClaireSolomon.com for this guest post.

Every business needs to connect and build trust with their audience. Within the broader marketing strategy, one key way to do this is through social media.

The great thing about social media is it’s quick and easy to set up a profile and get started. And of course, it’s free.

But the real problem with social media starts to become evident when you’re running more than one type of social media. When you’ve got 5 different profiles begging you to post each day, but nowhere near enough time to do it, overwhelm can set in.

If you’re struggling to keep up with the demands of your business on social media, read on!

“All your activities on social media should come back to your plan and goals.”

As your business grows, you have to learn how to do things smarter. You need to squeeze more results out of the same time. You have to create systems and processes or you quickly run out of time before you even get into serving your clients and customers (otherwise you won’t be able to make money!)

WHY YOU NEED TO START BEING STRATEGIC WITH YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media is just one part of your broader marketing strategy. And too many business owners approach their social media without any strategy. They post when they feel like it, ad-hoc, in the moment. If they ever made a plan, they haven’t looked at it for months.

It’s draining trying to think about your social media marketing and content each week, let alone each day. Jumping into that creative zone takes time and energy you don’t have.

BENEFITS OF PLANNING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

You need to get strategic about your social media and put a plan in place for your content. This gives you focus and purpose so that:

• You know why you’re doing it in the first place
• You feel motivated to follow through
• You don’t get side-tracked from your actual goal

4 STEPS TO PLANNING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

• STEP 1: SET YOUR GOALS: what exactly do you want to achieve through social media? Awareness, Education, Enquiries?
• STEP 2: IDENTIFY A STRATEGY: What strategies are you going to use on your chosen social networks to achieve your goals from step 1? It’s also important to recognise and acknowledge the purpose and audience expectations of each network.
• STEP 3: CREATE A CONTENT PLAN: To succeed with a solid social media plan, it’s ALL about categorisation. It’s significantly easier to batch your content and organise your mind if you’re thinking in categories rather than ‘topics’.
• STEP 4: POSTING TIMES: In terms of working out the ideal posting times for your categories/content, this will differ on each social network and be dependant on your unique audience and their expectations of your biz.

Need a help getting a plan together? Here’s a FREE Strategy Template from Claire Solomon – Automation Maven here>>

The important thing is that with a strategy and plan in place, you’ve got the focus to nail down your tactics. All your activities on social media should now come back to your plan and goals. This should decrease your chance of distraction and increases your chances of success.

BATCHING YOUR CONTENT

The biggest benefit of planning your social media is that you can now see what content you need to create all in one place. You can start batching it up ahead of time. There are loads of different techniques you can use to batch your content. But the main idea is to create it all at once. Get into that creative headspace, get into a flow, and pump it out.

It’s a relief knowing that your social media marketing can take care of itself for a few months if you get too busy and imagine what you could do with all those extra hours!

Claire Solomon is an automation specialist, working with business owners to apply proven time-saving strategies to take their online presence to new heights. Claire is a trusted ideapro social media partner and together we work with our marketing ProPackage clients to get their social media flourishing. To work with us, please contact our team here.