How to Create an Effective Social Media Plan

Social media has become one of the most vital platforms for digital marketing in recent years. With such a large portion of the global population on one platform or another, it is key that businesses of all sizes develop a social media plan and online presence. Internal business conversations on social media have changed from “should we build a social media plan?” to “how can we develop our social media strategy to optimise performance?”

Developing a social media plan can seem daunting, but the benefits of social media marketing are worth every effort. There are various influencer agencies that can provide influencer marketing services to developed or developing businesses.

Developing A Social Media Plan

A social media strategy is a summary of your goals, ambitions and steps on social media. These guide your actions and let you know whether you are succeeding or not. Social media strategies need to be specific; the more specific, the more effective. In addition, by keeping your steps specific, you are creating a more trackable and measurable process. This will allow you to analyse data and see where improvements are needed.

Before you continue building a social media plan, it is vital to have your aims and objectives confirmed. Having these goals set means you can consider whether every step of your plan will help you achieve these goals. If not, it’s not worth your time or money. 

Without further ado, here are our key steps to developing an effective social media plan.

Step One: Assess Your Current Social Presence

Before deciding where you need to go, you need to know exactly where you currently stand on social media. You should check which platforms you are active on, whether these are optimised with complete headers, bios and relevant URLs, which platforms your target audience most engage with and how you’re looking compared to your competitors.

Step Two: Know Your Audience

Making assumptions about your target audience is a huge waste of time. You need to know who you’re targeting inside and out. You need to know their age, location, job titles, disposable income, pain points, the most used social media networks and any hobbies or interests. In knowing these, you are able to create a buying persona. This will help you answer any tricky questions about your customers.

Once you know who you’re looking to target, you can gather data around these customers. Finding out which networks they’re on and when could be a deciding factor that puts you ahead of your competition.

Step Three: Identify Key Metrics and KPIs

Social media strategies need to be data driven. This lets you determine whether your social media marketing efforts are successful and generating sales. Focusing on key metrics rather than vanity metrics will help you develop the most effective and efficient social media marketing strategy.

What are some examples of metrics to track?

– Conversion rates

– Time spent on profile or website

– Reach

– Brand mentions

– Sentiment

– Shares

– Organic and paid likes

This list is vast, but is it vital you narrow down the key metrics to the ones that really matter. A truly effective social media strategy is rooted in numbers. However, those numbers alone aren’t enough. They need to be analysed and put into context so you can work out what to improve on to meet your goals.

Step Four: Create and Curate Engaging Content

On to the fun part. By knowing exactly who your audience is and which metrics are most important to meet your goals, it should be easy for you to begin creating and curating content. There are many types of content available, and not all will be suitable for every brand. You should only use content that aligns with your brand voice and messaging and your audience’s demands.

Types of content to consider are: images, videos, blog posts, infographics, whitepapers, eBooks and interviews. 

To keep track of all your upcoming content, you should create a content calendar. This will help you figure out how often you need to post to each platform, and what topics you are covering.

Step Five: Track, Analyse and Optimise

This is arguably the most important step in any social media plan. A lot of the time, developing a social media strategy relies on trial and error. Tracking your results, analysing the data and making tweaks will ensure you have the most optimised social media strategy possible.

Each previous step should be evaluated after you’ve analysed results, and let the data drive you to improve. Go against what your personal wants, and listen to the data. You might think Instagram might be the best route, but if the data says it’s Twitter, you know where to invest. 

Social media strategies aren’t set in stone – they are a constant work in progress. As your audience grows, so will your data. The main trick is getting started, and see where the data takes you. 

Our Influencer marketing agency and Social agency are located worldwide, with our agency network based in the USA, UK, UAE and China.

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@ Socially Powerful

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