How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan in 5 Easy Steps (Free Template)

Are you wasting countless hours just thinking what to post on social networks?

Or you don’t even know where to start.

That’s why planning is the key.

With so many outlets like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, you may be spending 50% of your time to put every action you take on social media. Not cool, right?

So what you need right now is a social media marketing plan.

First off, let’s define social media marketing plan.

A social media marketing plan is a template that is something you can refer to and adjust as you forge ahead towards meeting desired goals.

In this article, you’ll learn what a social media marketing plan should be and build the ultimate social media calendar that will save you time and stress in just 5 simple steps.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan in 5 Easy Steps

Plan your social networks

Most business owners proceed to the second step but I believe knowing which networks should you be on is the first step to any social media marketing plan.

Should you create an account for every social media networks? Let’s find out.

Know where your audience is.

You should be on the same networks as your audience. It cliché but it’s true.

Write down two to three networks that are clearly popular with your audience. Start small because remember you have to maintain content on these.

Plan your goals

Having objectives in place allow you to gauge your success and prove your return on investment. Without these goals, you won’t be able to execute your strategy.

Here are the examples goals you might want to achieve:

• Drive more traffic to your blog
• Increase social followers
• Increase sales
• Grow email subscribers

Write down at least three social media goals to start with.

For example

For Instagram, we will share photos that communicate our product values. We will do this by posting 2 photos a week that will achieve 20 likes plus 5 comment each.

Plan what you will create

I think this is the most exciting part of the planning. This is where you can get creative.

In this step, you’ll plan and create the actual pieces of content. It could be visuals, videos or longer text posts depending on the social network.

To help you with planning, here are the following content ideas you could come up with:

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. According to a study, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text and 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.

In that case, images are worth it to post.

So you need to plan to include some. If you don’t have someone who can create great images, or you’ve determine that you cannot create imagery by yourself, you can use Canva.

Season-themed campaign

Events, holidays, and promotions are part of our daily lives. You can incorporate these to your social media campaigns too.

Curated content

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a particular theme. What you’re going to do is to regularly share outside from publications and influencers. Caveat though, you must stick to your topic!

Plan when you will publish

Once your content is in place, you can set up a social media publishing plan to fit your desired outcome. You can use the most popular social media scheduling tool like Emerge Postmany.

There’s no standard frequency of publishing you should follow. But for Twitter, posting more than once a day is the best approach. For the other social networks, observe the engagement (comments, likes, or shares).

Plan what you need to evaluate and measure

Do you have idea what to evaluate and measure after you scheduled the posts?

Measuring the performance of your posts is as critical as finding the social networks that will best work for your business.

If you’re managing a Facebook page, you can track the following metrics:

• Page Likes
• Page Comments
• Post Shares

If you have a Twitter account, you can measure the following metrics:

• Mentions
• Followers
• Retweets

These metrics you’re going to measure depend on your goal and the social network.

There are analytics tools available on each platform to gauge user reactions and continually develop your strategy. To measure the performance of Facebook posts, take a look at Insights.  Twitter Analytics offers summary and detailed report about tweet impression, followers, mention and profile visits. With Pinterest Analytics, you can see what people like from your profile and what they save from your website.

Conclusion

As new social networks emerge, there’s an adjustments needed on your existing social media plan.

The key point I hope you take from this is you ask yourself about what you want, how you think you should get there and what success you want to achieve. Write it down. Plan it out. Good luck on your social media journey!

Bonus: Free Social Media Template

There’s tons of social media templates out there in the internet but ours includes the basic structure you need to build up your own strategy document.

You’ll notice that each platform is separated from each other. The reason here is your Facebook strategy is different from Twitter.

One of the most important features of this template is the ‘topic’ column. If you are in the real estate industry, you can have topics including Monday Motivation, Featured Model House, Curated Content, Featured Community, TGIF quotes, and many more.

You should come up with new and exciting things to post so by making your template organized can cut down on the amount of time wasted.

Remember that this template is not final. Feel free to add your own columns or remove in which you think is not necessary. Don’t worry, it’s okay with us!