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6 steps to successful content planning for social media

Efficient content planning for social media will make sure everything is smooth sailing.

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While content planning for social media might seem like a simple matter of writing a few captions and scheduling posts ahead of time, there is actually much more to the process than you think. Documenting your content and setting a clear plan for it allows both influencers and businesses to make sure that all of their marketing efforts on social media platforms will eventually translate into rewarding results.

To help you plan exceptional content, we’ve put together 6 steps you can follow to keep your accounts up and running perfectly.

1. Content planning for social media starts with setting your themes

Great; you’re willing to set a monthly calendar for your posts but you’re not sure where to start or what to talk about. This is when you should consider choosing the topics that would be interesting to your target audience, who most probably followed you for engaging and useful content.

While you’re working on your content planning for social media, create topics that go in line with your industry, add engaging posts that push your customers to give their own feedback, include a few entertaining posts (yes, they can be memes), and even consider working on a giveaway every once in a while.

Content planning for social media
Photo credit: Post Planner

2. Brainstorm ideas for both campaigns and posts

Once you know which topics you’d like to focus on, it becomes time to come up with creative ideas that should be connected to your marketing goals. However, it’s not always easy to find new concepts but there are definitely a few tricks you can use to help you generate interesting content.

First, you should consider taking a look at your competitors’ pages to find out which ideas are going viral in your industry. Second, you could also take a look at your past posts and campaigns and identify the ones that were most successful, ask yourself why they were successful and attempt to replicate a similar strategy to your current post.

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Photo credit: Clever Clip

3. Identify the best times to post

Content planning for social media is never complete without identifying your posting frequency and the best times to post on each social media platform. While some posts can only be published on a specific date, such as your product launch date or a holiday, others can be posted any time of the week.

This is exactly why you will need to experiment with your content planning for social media and determine how often you want to post every week, how many posts per day, and around what time of day.

Photo credit: Envision creative

4. Assign tasks

This tip is especially useful for brands who designate an entire team to handle their social media pages. These teams often include marketing professionals, writers, graphic designers, community managers, etc. who should all have a clear idea of what is expected of them to set your content planning for social media process on the right path.

5. Write captions

More often than not, having your captions ready before sending your calendar out to your selected graphic designer can be extremely beneficial, seeing that they will be given more context to design visuals and understand the purpose of the post or campaign they will be working on.

To add to that, if you don’t have a professional copywriter to help you with the creation of creative captions, you could always rely on AI-powered writing tools that can check your grammar and make sure your captions are optimized for SEO.

Photo credit: Onlypult.com

6. Schedule your posts in advance

Last but not least, all those efforts you just put into content planning for social media should you lead to this very last step. Scheduling your content in an organized, efficient and strategic way will give you plenty of time to work on next month’s batch, interact with your audience through the comments section and take a look at analytics to improve your page’s performance.

Photo credit: PostPlanner

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