Often, social media and marketing experts will push video creation and a daily posting schedule. Those are great tips for large companies with products sold online. However, those rules don’t translate well for small businesses for whom cultivating a consistent presence is challenging.
We find this to be particularly true for those who secure new business through building relationships or responses to proposals. As a result, it’s not where they’re dedicating the bulk of their resources. For those companies, social media is a tool best used to increase brand awareness, aid in recruitment and position themselves as thought leaders. Their plan should reflect that focus and leave time for other marketing tasks.
In this article, we share our approach to creating simplified social media plans. We’ve found the greatest success in maintaining a balance between planning and flexibility. Below, we walk you through our process.
Creating a Social Media Plan
As always, the first step we recommend is identifying your goals. Determining what you’d like to use it for and the audiences you hope to reach will help you dial in your approach. Then, it’s important to identify which channels work best for your business and the frequency you can routinely keep up. For some of our clients, posting five days a week is feasible. For others, shooting for two per week and adding more as needed is more realistic.
Next, it’s time to talk through the kinds of content you’d like to share. Often, this falls into a few categories. Some of these might include project spotlights, thought leadership, employee news, firm news, and recruitment. See each of these categories through the lens of your brand, adding your unique perspective and point of view to each. Additionally, we recommend adding unique topics that relate back to your company. Maybe they highlight your firm’s vision or showcase your community engagement.
With a loose plan in place, it’s time to consider how you’ll be posting. This will drive where you create your calendar. Manually adding posts to your social media accounts works well for some organizations, but is cumbersome for others. In this case, a simple Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet will work. However, there are advantages to using a paid scheduling platform. It allows you to post easily – even when you’re not working and simplifies the approval process when multiple stakeholders are involved.
Then, you’ll want to begin building a loose framework for your calendar. For some clients, we do this the month before, while others prefer a plan that covers the entire year. In both cases, we start by identifying holidays, as well as awareness days, that relate to the firm. Those go on the calendar or in a master list, along with any tradeshows or events that are planned.
When considering whether or not to post about a holiday, the key is authenticity. Only participate in the social media holidays that resonate with your business. For example, posting about Earth Day might make sense if your company is committed to sustainability. Or, you might take a week to join an industry organization in their social media campaign. However, if there isn’t an obvious connection, it can fall flat – like sharing a post on Veterans Day, although you don’t have military members on staff.
With the timely items in place, you can begin filling in the rest. Use the list of categories you compiled to create placeholders. Make sure there are a variety of post types within a week.
Having a year-long plan takes the guesswork out of posting. However, it’s important to evaluate your framework and get more specific with your topics the month before. For example, you may have won an award that you’d like to spotlight, so that will take the spot of something else less pressing. Or, a project post might be pushed out, because it hasn’t been completed yet. Reviewing your calendar and making changes allows you to keep things fresh and timely.
Let’s create a personalized social media calendar for your business. Contact us for more details about our approach and how it could work for your organization.