Social media plays an integral role in an effective marketing strategy for small businesses. And with so many social media platforms to manage and publish on, it’s important to have a plan for when and what you’ll be sharing.
Having a plan for where you’re going with your social media content is essential to keeping organized and on track with your marketing goals. Here are some ideas for building out an effective social media content plan.
Create a Social Media Content Calendar
As a small business owner, you’re busy. You have to meet with customers, do your bookkeeping, and a score of other business-related tasks. Posting to your social media on a regular basis can slip through the cracks and just not get done.
Successful social media strategy requires posting on a regular basis and engaging with followers to see positive results in your brand recognition, SEO, or lead generation.
A social media calendar will help you get organized. With a calendar, you can plan out posts for weeks or even months in advance. This way, you’re not wasting time every day searching for content to share. You should still plan to toss in posts about breaking news in your industry.
A social media calendar helps you customize posts for each social media platform instead of using the same messaging on them all. That’s not a bad thing to do some of the time; just not all of the time.
Calendars also let you plan for holidays. Not just traditional holidays, like Halloween and Christmas, but fun holidays like National Donut Day or Red Wine Day. Researching these fun holidays in advance allows you to tailor your content to the holiday and engage with a wider audience.
Schedule Your Posts
Now that you’ve got your content written for a few weeks (or even a month) out, schedule the posts so you don’t have to go in every day.
Facebook really wants you to schedule from their platform. Your posts will perform better if you schedule directly on Facebook.
For your other social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, give a scheduling tool a try.
Two scheduling tools we use are Buffer and Hootsuite. A free Hootsuite account will allow you to post 30 times a month to up to three platforms. You may have to go in every two weeks to schedule posts, but it’s easy and less time consuming to do it this way than trying to post to each platform separately every day.
Of course, there is a paid version for each of these scheduling tools that allows for unlimited posting, so if you don’t want to schedule posts every two weeks, consider investing in the paid version.
Create a calendar and start scheduling your social media. Share videos, links to relevant information, new products, and case studies. There is so much information you can share, you just need to be organized with a calendar to get it out there to your target audience.