What is a Social Media Plan? It is a business plan template created to help you strategize your social media marketing. Try our social media marketing plan template, and discover how to become more organized and effective in your business. Learn how to create your own social media plan with this free social media marketing template.
Our social media plan helps you get started with your social media strategy and plan, with easy to follow formats that you can use and adapt to your business. It gives you all the tools, tips and advice to make social media work for you.
What is a social media plan?
A social media plan outlines what you want to achieve on social media and how it supports your overall marketing strategy. It helps you determine your target audience, the social networks to join, and the type of content to develop and share. Once you have a plan outlined, you can get to work refining your content and cadence, analyzing follower engagement, and building deeper relationships with your audience.
Nearly every business has a social media presence. But succeeding on social networks takes more than just posting daily updates. Do you know what your goals are and who you are trying to reach? Do you understand the type of content that your audience truly cares about and why they would want to engage with you? Answering those questions and moving beyond ad hoc social presence requires a strategic plan.
How do I create a social media plan?
Most marketing teams build and refine social media plans a few times per year. This likely happens alongside other team-level and company-level planning. You might also build separate social plans for special launches or campaigns — these would also support the broader social media strategy. Follow these steps to build a plan that drives real results:
Define social goals and KPIs
The first step to an effective social media plan is reviewing your broader marketing goals and initiatives. Your social goals should ladder back to top-level marketing goals — these objectives inform your social strategy.
Social media goals typically fit into the following categories:
- Increase share of voice
- Gain new followers
- Drive traffic to your website
- Generate new leads or trial sign-ups
- Boost community engagement and loyalty
- Triage customer support requests
How to create a social media marketing strategy in 9 steps
- Choose social media marketing goals that align to business objectives
- Learn everything you can about your audience
- Get to know your competition
- Do a social media audit
- Set up accounts and improve profiles
- Find inspiration
- Create a social media content calendar
- Create compelling content
- Track performance and adjust your strategy accordingly
What Tools Will I Need To Plan And Execute My Strategy?
Before we jump into planning, let’s make sure your toolbox is complete. We recommend using the following types of tools:
- Social media calendar. Planning and executing your strategy on one central calendar makes it easy to see all your social media posts alongside your other content and projects. You can use a spreadsheet-based calendar template or an app like CoSchedule.
- Curation tools. These make it easy to curate content and fill gaps on your calendar. If you’re a CoSchedule user, our Chrome extension makes this easy.
- Google Analytics. You’ll use this to gather data on your social media referral traffic to find where your audience is most active.
- In-app analytics. Each of the top social media networks features robust analytics full of useful audience and performance data. CoSchedule also includes automated analytics and reporting tools you can use as well.
That’s all you need to put this post into practice. Now, let’s get started.
How do I create a social media plan?
Most marketing teams build and refine social media plans a few times per year. This likely happens alongside other team-level and company-level planning. You might also build separate social plans for special launches or campaigns — these would also support the broader social media strategy. Follow these steps to build a plan that drives real results:
Define social goals and KPIs
The first step to an effective social media plan is reviewing your broader marketing goals and initiatives. Your social goals should ladder back to top-level marketing goals — these objectives inform your social strategy.
Social media goals typically fit into the following categories:
- Increase share of voice
- Gain new followers
- Drive traffic to your website
- Generate new leads or trial sign-ups
- Boost community engagement and loyalty
- Triage customer support requests
Depending on the size of your team, you may want to pursue more or fewer goals. For example, if you do not have a team member from customer support available to monitor social media, you may not want to provide in-depth customer support on social networks. Instead, direct support requests to email or a help desk.
Next, you are ready to align social goals with relevant KPIs. If your goal is to drive website traffic, for instance, meaningful KPIs would include click-through rates on social content and referral traffic from specific sites. Many teams make the mistake of tracking every metric available on social networks (e.g., followers, influence scores, post reach, shares, and likes). Lots of data can be useful but it is often simpler and more effective to trim KPIs to those that directly correspond with intended objectives.
What are the main social media marketing strategies?
- User-generated content
- Product lifestyle shots
- Video marketing
- Livestream
- Influencer marketing
Don’t Miss These 10 Details to Ensure a Successful Social Media Plan
Baseline Metrics
Even if no one is interacting with your Facebook fan page and only your employees are sharing your content on Twitter, it’s important to establish a baseline. Sometimes the sole reason for establishing a baseline — as bad the numbers may look — is to set up the applause for when those numbers improve.
And don’t worry: If you don’t have reporting and analytics tools yet in place (or if IT is still conducting its months-long needs analysis), it’s OK to simply open up a spreadsheet and start keeping track of some social media metrics.
Competitor Benchmarks
You’re not doing this to be a copycat. It’s best practice to do this for the same reason you gather baseline metrics in #1 above. It’s not always easy to identify what success looks like with your social media program, and competitors make an easy (and fun) target.
Whatever you do, don’t assume that because a competitor seems to have their act together that they actually do. Follower counts and engagement and a well-designed presence are often the result of pure longevity and not the implementation of unique ideas.
You might also consider adding a kind of per capita calculation to your benchmarks that accounts for relative competitor size, such as dividing by number of employees, or — if you happen to be, for example, a physicians group — number of locations. Or another example may be a B2B healthcare technology company considering entering a new market against larger or more established competitors. Take that into consideration when figuring out the best way to compare apples to apples.
Social Media Goals and Objectives
This is often the most difficult piece of the planning process, because your return on social media is not — and may never be — as cut and dried as something like a PPC campaign. Therefore, you will find yourself trying to justify some goals that feel “soft” and others that may seem unattainable.
My advice: Keep your goals relatively simple to start, use both soft and hard goals, and don’t be afraid to put goals into buckets or categories. For instance, you may have goals for awareness, engagement, followers, SEO, and even prospecting and sales benchmarks.
Naming Strategy
This is a seemingly minor detail, but how and what you name your social media properties is almost as important as the domain you choose for your organization’s website. If your organization has a unique name, this is relatively easy. If yours is not a unique name, be prepared for a process that involves brainstorming, searching, brainstorming again, searching again, consensus-building and finally selection.
In the early days, the name of the game here was consistency across platforms: but as more and more companies have entered social, getting your exact URL, brand name, and social handles across all the platforms you’re on is increasingly impossible. But this is an opportunity for companies to consider how they should be adapting their brand each platform.
For example, Twitter values brevity: is there a shorter version of your name that might work better for the Twitterati? Facebook is less formal, more friendly. LinkedIn is (for the time being) still business-formal. We’re past the days where every name across every platform has to match perfectly, so take this as a chance to loosen up the brand Bible and lean in to the particular quirks of each platform.
Staffing Plan
You are going to need people to execute your social media plan. That’s right. People, not person.
Even if you are a small business just dipping your toes in the social media water, it will take the efforts, influence and direction of more than one person to make your plan come to life. You may only have one person doing “the work” of writing and posting but any successful social media plan relies on a group, not an individual, to carry the weight of the plan. You cannot successfully execute a social media strategy without ideas, support, and resources flowing from throughout your organization.
Content Calendar
No content, no social media. No content marketing strategy, no social media marketing strategy. If your social media plan does not revolve around some type of content calendar, your message — and your social media plan — will fall flat at best and fail at worst.
But what information goes into a content calendar? At Right Source, we manage content calendars in a two step process: Step 1 is to build out the content calendar in a spreadsheet (download a content calendar example template from Google Sheets).
To start, the content calendar should include the obvious: details like publish date, author, and title. If you can, however, you should get more sophisticated in your planning. We also include content type, target audience, buy cycle stage, and in some cases topic area focus.
To make things go a little faster, make use of Google Sheets’ “Data Validation” feature to add drop-down boxes in the fields which can be standardized. If you decide to use our Content Calendar template, you can change what’s in the drop-downs by clicking “Data,” choosing “Data Validation,” and editing the fields next to the “List of Items” box.
Step 2 in our content calendar management process is to add the content that stakeholders have all agreed on to a project management tool. We use Asana, but virtually any project management tool will work fine. Airtable is also a good option if your social media planning demands high volume and multiple platforms — they have a content calendar template that allows you to easily group social media posts related to your content pieces. It’s a great example of what we refer to as content-driven marketing: marketing which has content at its core.
Partner Integration
Can you guess what every single one of your partners – investors, technology partners, VARs, and others – wants to do? Expand their social media audience and engagement.
Can you guess what your brilliant social media plan will do for them if done right? Expand their social media audience and engagement.
Use this plan to present some true win-win scenarios where you and your partners can cross-promote content and campaigns, link to one another’s content, build one another’s domain authority, and share one another’s most compelling posts.
The Ideas!
If your plan revolves around only tweets, updates, followers, friends, and day-to-day tactics, it may be organized, but it won’t be special.
Special comes from social media campaigns, not the day-to-day tactics. If you’re trying to reach a particular audience, build an entire campaign to find and engage that audience. If you’re trying to stand out from the crowd, consider using a customized campaign that is anchored by a contest, sweepstakes or special offer.
Social Media Success Examples
At some point, you’re going to have to sell this plan to supervisors, investors, colleagues, or all of the above. Chances are that most will not grasp the business case for social media and will question whether your plan makes sense as a priority compared to other corporate initiatives.
Hands down, the easiest way to conquer these objections is to show examples of how similar organizations have used an organized social media plan to achieve specific goals and objectives. If you’re a television show, use “The Voice” as your example. If you’re a retailer, use Zappos as your example. These examples are easy to find, and will mean far more than your own proclamations about why social media can have an impact on your organization.
Reporting and Analysis
“How are we going to track our progress and return on investment?”
If you don’t get this question multiple times during your social media planning process, then people either think you have the Midas touch or they simply don’t care.
First, based on your goals and objectives, decide what you want to measure. Of course, if you’ve ever been in a large enough meeting about social media KPIs, you understand this is easier said than done. But roughly speaking, most organizations want to measure and report on two things: audience size and audience engagement.
You can get endlessly bogged down in trying to compare apples to apples across platforms, so we recommend not trying. What is important is to decide which social media platforms make sense for your goals, and then focus on overall trends while looking for clear indications of the kinds of content that are resonating and which are met with crickets.
Conclusion
Well-planned social media activities can help create better awareness of your product or service’s competitive strengths. An effective social media plan should tend to bring its priority in line with the business goals of its creator.