In an increasingly more digital world, social media plays a huge part in how companies communicate with their target audiences. It’s also a great way of promoting new products, assets or services, as well as sharing industry knowledge to your audience.
It’s important to make sure that the content being shared on social media serves a purpose, and the best way to create valuable posts is to plan ahead. Here’s our guide to creating an effective social media plan:
1. Choose your channels
With such a variety of social media channels available, it’s important to make sure you’re optimising those that work for your business. Not all social media channels will work for every type of business, so picking the right channels for you will make sure you don’t waste any time reaching out to non-responsive audiences.
Think about where your audience interacts with you the most as well as how big your following is on each social media channel – targeting the channels that generate the most engagement and user activity will be the most beneficial for your campaign.
2. Create a time plan
Once you’ve picked the social media channels you’re going to use, the next step is to start to put a schedule together for a set time period. Ideally, you don’t want to look more than 6 weeks ahead – the digital world is a versatile place and things can change quickly, so you don’t want to only to have to re-do the schedule part way through.
Gantt charts are a great way to map out the 6 week schedule, so start by plotting the social media channels on the left-hand side and adding the week days across the top of the chart. You can then pick where you want to share content on each day to make sure you’re achieving the frequency you need, for example:
3. Plan your messaging
When you’ve decided on the number of posts you want to make per week on each channel, it’s time to make a more detailed schedule – this will save you time when it comes to sharing the posts, and you’ll be able to check you’ve included all your key messages.
Begin by setting the key message you want to deliver with each post, including any URLs you want to link to or keywords you want to use. It can be hard to write the full posts in advance, but if you want to go a step further, try prepping the full social media posts, hashtags and tiny URLs included – that way, when it comes to sharing the post, you’ll just need to copy and paste the message.
Top tip: Try and mix up the wording from channel to channel so you’re not sending out the exact same message. Different social users will respond to different wording and sites like Twitter have wording limits, so adapting the post to deliver your key message in different ways will engage as many people as possible.
4. Research your peak engagement times
Every company will be different, but putting some time in to research when the best time to reach your followers is will be a great help when planning your posts. Tools like ‘’ for Twitter and ‘’  for Facebook are great options to gain an insight into when your audience is most active. These times can differ from day to day, so plot the key times down next to each post you’re planning so you’ll have a clear schedule of dates, times and messages.
5. Think about paid posts
If you have a budget for the campaign then it’s always worth considering paid-for posts. Each social media channel has different options when it comes to paid options, and on the whole you need to set up the paid campaign schedule.
Twitter gives the option of setting an overall campaign budget for multiple posts, and if one post is performing better than others it will automatically target more money towards the most successful post.  Facebook has a great option to ‘Boost’ a post after you’ve shared it, so if you notice a post is doing well you can add some budget to it to up its success!
Top tip: You can create audience groups based on interests that will help to target your campaign to the people you want to reach.
6. Pick engaging images
No post is complete without a high quality, relevant image to accompany it. Whether you’re using Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Instagram, the perfect image choice can really improve the chances of people interacting with your post. Start your image search now with our great image categories!
7. Monitor the progress
Once your campaign has started, remember to check the engagement levels regularly so you can see which posts are working and which ones aren’t doing as well as you’d hoped. This will give you a chance to reallocate budget if it’s a paid post, or re-jig the wording of future posts to make sure your audience will respond to them.