Social media seems to be a necessary evil when it comes to business, especially if you rely heavily on the Internet to generate warm leads. With all of the various social media applications available, it can be a challenge to manage them. That’s where a social media schedule becomes a handy tool to plan what to share and when.
Here is how to create a social media content schedule:
1) Existing social media presence.
Inspect what accounts in social networking sites you already have and what content they have. Which of them are beneficial? What can you do to enhance them? Are there any social assets that turned to be totally useless? Decide whether to work on improving them or leave them out.
2) Content types
Understanding what content you are going to use to promote your business is a crucial point of scheduling your efforts. Excellent content should be compelling and relevant to your products and services. Be realistic about costs you can allow for content creation.
3) Tracking tools
Analytics implementation is a must for any social media marketing campaign, allowing to measure the results of your activity. Take some time to research what tracking tools fit into your strategy best. It’s up to you what platform you choose, just keep in mind your business needs.
4) Priority channels
There is no need to embrace all existing social networking sites. Analyze the demographics you want to reach and content types you can produce; this will help to choose only several platforms for this item of your plan. Set your subgoals for each of them, results you want to get and metrics you are going to use to estimate success.
5) Actions
Define your future activity for each of the platforms of your choice. In addition to posting your content, social media makes it possible to communicate directly with your consumers, professional communities, and trendsetters of your industry. Answer questions, express your opinion, comment relevant posts to prove your expertise and trustworthiness.
6) Schedule
Planning the frequency of your social activity, remember that too many posts annoy users. Scheduling your actions, try to keep users informed and not to be too obtrusive. Promotional posts should alternate with entertaining and informative ones.
7) Time
Be realistic; social media marketing is time-consuming. Trying to perform your social media marketing campaign flawlessly, you can find yourself spending hours on social sites. You can avoid that if you set the number of hours a week for implementing this plan and keep it.
You may want to include some milestones into your schedule. Monitoring your progress, you’ll be able to see what works good and what you should improve to make social media a better marketing tool for your business.
