Social Media Planning Tips
Do your research, do your homework and develop your customer personas first before investing time on a social media content posting strategy and schedule. Knowing your customers will help you right-size your use of social media in your marketing strategy. You need to be clear what percentage of your current/future clients use social media to determine how much time to spend using these platforms as one of many marketing tools available to you.
There are several free social media planning tools that you can try out and also use to determine how often and what to post to social media. This article from Zapier.com reviews social media management tools such as:
Hootsuite for all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics
Later for cheap (or free) visual social media marketing
Buffer Publish for straightforward social media scheduling
MeetEdgar for automating your social media posts
Tailwind for managing Pinterest accounts
Many if not all of these programs have a free 7 day trial. A lot of these plan for IG to have a pretty layout but the content and look is easily transferable to Facebook and Twitter.
With a content plan in mind here’s For The Win Communication's advice on social media postings.
1. Pick one day per week to block time for social media content planning.
2. Create as many post ideas / wording as you can and type them out in a google doc or excel spreadsheet.
3. Save photos or create graphics in Canva and put them all in one folder.
4. Schedule out posts for the week using the DIY scheduling feature on FB and Twitter or in one of the programs listed above.
5. You really only need 3-4 postings per week, you can do Facebook and/or Instagram stories throughout the week with 'live' and 'realtime' content if you wanted/needed to.
For The Win suggests planning one week at a time, because honestly sometimes that is about as far out as you can think when things are busy. If you have the energy to plan, create and schedule two weeks or a month of content, do it. But don't beat yourself up if you can only muster out a few ideas at a time.