Your objective is to provide high-quality, pertinent content that will engage your audience, build brand trust, and promote sales. But how can you customize your social media content to cut through the noise, benefit your audience, and ultimately affect your bottom line?
A social media plan, which is a detailed roadmap for your social marketing approach, will enable you to do that. It consists of
Setting attainable social marketing objectives that are consistent with your overall business goals
deciding on the metrics you'll use to gauge the performance of your social marketing initiatives
Including new trends and best practices in the creation of your strategy and content
This 30-day social media plan template is made to assist you in reinventing your social media management approach so that what you share is in line with your business goals.
You'll discover how to:
- Design a successful social media strategy that takes audience interest into account.
- Develop a solid content calendar and a variety of material.
- Identify the socially motivated business value.
As you work through the plan, use the social media plan template below to keep track of your progress. You may completely redesign your social marketing strategy in the next 30 days by finishing just one activity per day.
Section 1
Week 1
Establish your goals and define your metrics
Establish your goals and define your metrics
Day 1: Establish goals for social
Setting up specific goals for social media is the first step in redesigning your strategy. Clearly define the goals you have for social media. Here are a few objectives you might take into consideration:
- drive traffic to a website
- Expand brand awareness
- Increasing brand engagement
- create fresh leads
- To lead, nurture
- Create a community around your business.
- Establish your authority and industry expertise
- Enhance customer service
- brand sentiment to change
Giving meaning to your social actions is the main goal here. Your social goals should continue to be supported by the content you create and share after you've set them.
You can use a variety of techniques, such as the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method, to help you formulate specific social media goals.
The OKR approach requires you to create a broad target statement and a list of important results that show what happens when that goal is effectively accomplished. Here is an illustration of a broad objective statement backed by distinct result metrics that describe achieving the target.
Day 2: Define your success metrics
How will you gauge whether your strategies were successful? Choose the metrics that will provide you the information you need to know if social media is helping you achieve your business objectives.
In order to recognize when your social media campaigns are successful, establish clear guidelines as you identify your success measures (such as organic mentions, engagement rate, or conversions). What specific engagement rates for your social media material do you deem successful if you are monitoring audience involvement?
The metrics you track will vary based on the kind of content you create, where you distribute it, and the objectives you establish for your social marketing initiatives.
Use the Social Media Metrics Map to evaluate your team's objectives if you're unsure on what they should be.
Day 3: List out your challenges
uThe work is easy: Write out all the difficulties you have with social media marketing. Consider any obstacles preventing your social media content from having the most impact.
Write down clear explanations of how each obstacle is affecting your marketing efforts or overall business success as you outline your difficulties. To get you started, here are a few samples.
Challenge 1:Even though we frequently publish on social media, we are not getting the appropriate levels of engagement.
Challenge 2: The organic reach of our social media material has dramatically decreased.
Uncertain of the precise difficulties you may be facing? These five issues are the most typical, according to a recent Sprout Social IndexTM poll of social marketers. specific goals for social media is the first step in redesigning 
Day 4: Brainstorm solutions
your strategy. Clearly define the goals you have for Collaborate with your marketing team to come up with answers to the problems you previously outlined.When it comes time to gather resources and argue for your budget, be sure to be ready with evidence to support practical solutions.
Challenge 1 solution: We can use creators to interact with our social media material and spark discussion.
Justification: The majority of marketers (74%) expect to partner with content creators for at least a quarter of their social media investment in 2022. Creators can increase participation and maintain timely social conversations if they have devoted audiences.
Challenge 2 Solution: To execute highly focused campaigns and reach the appropriate demographic, we can spend money on sponsored social media advertising.
Justification: A majority of shoppers claim they "find perfect products by seeing advertisements for the "ideal products". Social shopping is anticipated to reach a $1.2 trillion channel by 2025. social media. Here are a few objectives you might take into consideration:
Day 5: Analyze the competition
If you're short of creative ideas, consider conducting a competitive analysis. Be careful not to copy the content of your competitors; instead, utilize your study to identify your brand's distinctive positioning.
Focus on the content that is resonating in both your own social efforts and those of your competition because your brand and its competitors have comparable ideal customer demographics.
As you assess the social marketing initiatives of your competitors, take into account the following questions:
Which marketing channels do my competitors employ, and are they effective there?
What are my rivals discussing, and are those subjects drawing in a sizable audience?
Do we outperform our competitors in any particular aspects of our social strategy?
Solutions for social analytics are an efficient approach to compare your efforts to those of your competitors. You can immediately compare your efforts to those of one or more rivals using Sprout's Analytics.
To learn more about the content that resonates most with target audiences, you might identify the days when competitors' engagement increased and analyze what was published on those days.
Section 2
Week 2
Optimize your profiles and brand voice on social media
Week 2
Day 6: Determine your strengths and weaknesses
Look closely at your social media plan to identify your strengths and potential areas for improvement.
To find out where they see success or space for development, survey your marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams.
Determine whether a particular social marketing strategy criteria is one of your strengths or weaknesses. This will assist in determining your priorities for the upcoming five weeks.
Day 7: Audit your content
Conduct a social media audit to determine your top-performing content and platforms. Spend some time figuring out what is working and why. You can determine which postings effectively appeal to the interests of your audience using your data.
Your social media content strategy has to change if your postings don't resonate with your followers and aren't interesting to them. Review the content you've posted using your audit to see which postings had the largest impact.
Your most popular posts from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest may be found using Sprout's Post Performance Report.
Day 8: Create a list of relevant keywords
To determine the keywords that are most frequently associated with your brand, use social media listening tools. Your team can use these keywords to their advantage as they develop and brainstorm content.
You can find special opportunities to connect popular conversations with your company and products by using social listening.
For instance, according to our team of experts, the TikTok sound "Corn but it becomes a song and unifies the world" generated almost 607,000 videos. The Corn Palace is located in South Dakota, and the state went all-in on this trend by inviting the star, an elementary school student, to visit the site. This video received over a million likes and 5.5 million views.
Day 9: Determine your brand voice and social persona
Consistency is important when trying to grow a social media following. You can maintain consistency across all of your social media channels by developing a brand voice and a persona.
Take this quick 3-minute quiz to learn how to describe your brand and identify the objectives for your firm. Pick the answers that best fit your goals, vision, and target audience.
After you've honed in on your persona, select three words that best describe your brand. Then, explain what those words mean for your brand. Finally, create a list of dos and don'ts to help you create content.
Day 10: Optimize your social profiles
The information on your profiles is essential to the success of your social marketing activities, even when you spend a lot of time planning and producing content.
Build up your profiles to reflect your voice once you've established your brand's character.
Your profile should speak to your brand with relevant images and compelling content when someone views it. Here are a few strategies for social media profile optimization.
1. Consistently update your profile picture
Your profile photo ought to be the same on all of your social media accounts if you manage several for your company. Most companies will use their official logo or variants of it that were created especially for their social media profiles. Opportunities for brand recognition will rise if you maintain consistency across all of your profiles.
2. Finish filling out your profile's sections.
Use the chance to share the history of your brand if there is a field for information. You should be able to succinctly and creatively explain what your company does, the services it can give, and how it improves the lives of its clients.
3. Include keywords to improve SEO
On Day 8, you put together a list of keywords related to your industry, your brand, and your products. To improve SEO, incorporate these clever keywords into each element of your profile. Their names, hobbies, and experiences should be listed in your bio copy and on your photo.
Section 3
Week 3
Find and listen to your community to better understand your industry
Day 11: Develop your buyer persona
You might need to review your present buyer personas or start from scratch if you want to change your social marketing strategy.
Buyer personas may help you better understand your present and potential customers so you can target your marketing efforts and develop services and content that will be of interest to them. Write down all the information you have about your target audience in the beginning, then conduct research to fill in any gaps. In order to create a strong buyer persona, strive to gather the following data.
- Demographics
- Backstory
- Lifestyle
- behaviors in career purchases
- Finances
- targets, obstacles, and pain points
Day 12: Listen to your audience
To improve the effectiveness of your social marketing campaigns, you can acquire insight into the thoughts of your followers by paying attention to your community.
Even when they aren't directly interacting with your company, you may discover a lot about your community via social media listening to guide a more successful strategy.
What to watch out for on social media is listed below:
- What your audience is discussing and what information they frequently share
- What the public is saying about your company, your industry, your goods and services, and your competitors
- What members of your audience post on discussion boards like Reddit or Quora
- What your audience says about creators, hot topics, and business events
Day 13: Research industry trends and topics
You need to keep up with industry trends if you want to provide relevant content and build your brand as an authority on social media.
Become a part of discussions centered on hot subjects. Make sure your content is current and relevant to your community by conducting continual research. These resources can help you with your research and will be listed below.
Newsletters
Research is one of our most significant skills as social marketers. It's simple to streamline research by subscribing to a variety of newsletters rather than endlessly looking through content, searching through countless social accounts, or conducting endless Google searches.
Information about the state of the market, technological advancements, social network updates, and new trends as well as best practices are provided in newsletters.
Social media marketers should add the following newsletters to their list of resources:
- Link in Bio features expert interviews from industry-leading social media managers. The newsletter shares actionable advice and relatable experiences to inspire their community.
- The primary goal of Social Media Today is to share original evaluations of current social media events. Their platform-specific information offers social marketers tips on how to adapt new features and areas where other brands are succeeding.
- Leaders in the field of social media marketing can join org as members. The Shortlist, their weekly email, features member stories as they discuss what they're working on and what they're paying attention to in the industry.
Webinars
Through the creation of fresh leads and prospects, the development of current connections, and the display of subject-matter expertise in our industries, webinars can significantly influence social marketing strategies. In order to respond to queries and maintain the online dialogue during webinars, several companies will live-Tweet alongside their users.
We can learn from webinars as well, which can help us come up with new ideas for content as we brainstorm. Webinars tailored to social marketers are widely available on Social Media Today. The library of on-demand sessions is available, or you can sign up for forthcoming webinars.
Forums
Marketing professionals can use forums to find the subjects that generate the most online discussion. Quora is a fantastic site for finding interesting topics, asking questions, and participating in discussions that are relevant to your brand. Forums can be used as a brainstorming tool for social media marketers to create social content strategies that respond to issues that users are already raising.
Blogs
As well as providing you with the most recent news, Adweek (and journals like Digiday and Marketing Land) outline the hottest, most inventive campaigns. For thought leadership and to get a pulse on our industry and its visionaries, The Mission (and Medium in general) are fantastic resources.
Day 14: Connect with other departments
Make connections with various organizational departments while you continue to explore industry trends and subjects for inspiration for your content.
With departments throughout the company contributing to strategy, social is no longer only for marketing. However, fundamental social teams will need to change as a more varied group of stakeholders become involved. As social strategies become more complex, it becomes necessary to handle issues like determining who owns what and whose skills are required across teams.
For instance, try speaking with your sales team; they frequently serve as consumers' first points of contact and can offer insight into their wants, difficulties, and accomplishments. This knowledge can be used to produce material that meets these needs or celebrates achievements.
Insight into ongoing employer brand activities can also be obtained through your human resources department. Investigate, in conjunction with HR, how current and future employees are interacting with your brand on social media. Their knowledge of your employees can assist you in determining which material is most suitable for this significant stakeholder group.
You may handle cross-functional projects and organize your efforts with the aid of a social media collaboration tool.
Day 15: Choose your content types
Consider the content types that will enhance your brand the best and keep your audience interested.
If you want to decide whether a Twitter discussion or an Instagram Live event would perform better than an image referring to a blog article, go back to the buyer profiles you built. When deciding whether to scale back your efforts and produce an infographic from the same content instead of a high-quality how-to movie, take into account the resources at your disposal.
To keep your audience interested and achieve the best outcomes, diversity your content. Your readers will soon lose interest if you consistently upload the same kind of content on your website.
You can start including the following content types in your social media marketing campaigns:
- Memes
- GIFs
- Infographics
- How-tos
- Polls
- Contests
- User-generated content
- Photo and video
- Live streaming
- Audio
Determine what your audience genuinely like before you start looking for stuff to publish on social media. Looking at previous social media posts to determine which ones performed best is one approach to achieve this.
Utilize a platform like Sprout Social, Twitter Metrics, or Facebook Insights to collect all of your individual social media analytics. Here's an illustration of how to use Sprout to browse your published posts (available with a free, 30-day trial).
Be careful to arrange your postings according to the measure that matters the most to you, whether it be clicks, reactions, or overall reach. You can go to the following stage once you have a general notion of the finest kind of material.
Section 4
Week 4
Fill out your social content calendar to increase reach and engagement
Day 16: Develop a posting schedule
- TikTok: 1-4 times per day
- Instagram: 1-2 times each day
- Facebook: 4-5 times each day
- LinkedIn: No more than once daily
- Twitter: three to four times every day
- No more than once daily on Pinterest
The size, expertise, and authority of your social media team will likely determine how frequently you post, so don't feel like you have to produce subpar content to adhere to these rules.
You can choose your ideal posting frequency with the use of your brand's data. You may check how frequently you publish on each social network using a service like Sprout, then compare that number to the amount of engagement you attracted within that same time frame.
Look for trends between publishing frequency and audience participation. The aforementioned screenshots are from our Facebook Page Report, but you can also do this for posts on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Day 17: Brainstorm content ideas
Gather your ideas and prepare content that you know will appeal to your readers right away. Put yourself in the mentality that inspiration can come from anyplace to conduct good brainstorming.
Consider how you can use the strengths of your company to create interesting content. See if you can repurpose or restructure some of your earlier content for a different channel by going through it.
How can you contribute to the conversations your audience is having based on the topics you've found to be popular? The most popular content categories for 2022 are listed below.
Video
The majority of consumers (around 66%) say that short-form video is the most interesting type of social media material overall, followed by live video (37%), and long-form video (24%). Don't discount video even if you lack the funds to hire a videographer. Using programs like Canva and Biteable has made creating more accessible to everyone. Any member of your team, even those working remotely, can produce polished, brand-consistent videos.
Images and text-based posts
Even in the age of video, social media users still find photographs and text-based messages to be powerful. In actuality, 61% of customers believe that the most interesting social content is visual. These posts are important components of cutting-edge content strategy, from Twitter threads to Instagram carousels.
User-generated content
In order to promote goods and services, raise brand awareness, and exploit the idea of digital word-of-mouth to foster customer loyalty and boost sales, marketers have been able to amp up user-generated content. In fact, 39% of customers prefer it when brands publish real customer demos or customer feedback. find special opportunities to
Day 18: Gather resources
Start gathering your resources once you've identified which content kinds are most appropriate for your company and have chosen a publishing schedule.
Recall the content categories you choose to include in your social media strategy and the tools you'll need to make them happen. As you begin gathering your resources, take into account the following queries.
- Have you chosen the types of artistic resources you'll use and how you'll store them?
- Who in the organization needs to be involved in the creation of this specific piece of content?
- For the visual components, do you require any kind of creative assistance?
- Do you already have guides, e-books, or blog posts that can be quickly repurposed for social media? connect popular conversations with your companyand products by using sociallistening.
Day 19: Draft your social media plan calendar and create your content
It is time to begin working. Set realistic completion dates for the project and begin the content creation process.
Build social media content that speaks to your target audience personas, keeps loyal to your brand voice, and can be easily included into the posting schedule you've created.
Day 20: Optimize your content
You must optimize your content as you create it if you want your efforts to be seen by consumers in their congested social feeds. You should be able to reuse any piece of net new material you produce in the future.
Think about your video plan. Short snippets, quotation graphics, still images, and other formats can all be used to segment a video. While creating content, consider your possibilities so you can later fill your calendar with less effort.
Here are some additional strategies for improving your social media content to broaden its audience and boost engagement:
- Include hashtags
- Shorten links
- Include images
- Adapt content for various social channels
Section 5
Week 5
Supplement and boost your social media content calendar for the best results
Day 21: Create a call to action
Not every piece of content you post on social media should entice users to take action. You can even discover that some of your most well-liked postings just represent your brand's personality or make your audience smile.
Take The Sill as an illustration. Their TikTok videos give their community advice on how to take care of plants with a humorous spin that seems true to their brand. They go above and beyond the typical product content by showing their brand in entertaining and unique ways that follow platform trends.
Day 22: Connect to more resources
By introducing your audience to more resources, particularly ones that they own, you are building your brand as an authority in the area and encouraging them to participate more. Their likelihood of converting increases as they become more familiar with you and continue to interact with your brand.
For our readers to learn more about social networks, effective marketing methods, and hot issues, Sprout frequently shares links to some of our favorite blog pieces.
Day 23: Amplify your efforts
Consider how you may amplify your ideas to reach a wider audience once you've begun advertising your material on social media.
To broaden the audience for your work, have a look at these quick tips:
- Give incentives to customers to share your content on their social networks by utilizing your employees and the Employee Advocacy platform from Sprout Social.
- Utilize creators to increase the audience for your content
Day 24: Invest in your best content
You might immediately find that some types of content perform better than others in terms of engagement and conversion when you promote and amplify your content.
Increase the audience for these effective pieces by using paid advertisements. You may build your customer base, acquire qualified traffic and leads, and target a very precise demographic.
It is becoming more crucial to invest in paid to give your content a chance of being discovered as social networks like Facebook and Instagram's algorithms are starting to favor paid content over organic content.
Your decision on which social media platform to use will be influenced by three crucial factors:
- where the majority of your target clients are located
- where it is easiest to reach your target audience
- where your target audience interacts with adverts the most
Give your audience a clear next step if the main
Day 25: Engage with your audience
Approximately 80% of consumers anticipate significant interactions between brands and businesses on social media.
It's important to interact with and address your audience. Having a two-way conversation with your audience increases brand trust and adds authenticity. You can learn a lot about the success of your content by keeping an eye on how your audience responds to it.
Read the comments on your social media posts and reply to inquiries and knowledgeable remarks. For social marketers looking for feedback, the comments section is a great resource. It may even provide inspiration for ideas for new pieces of content.
Section 6
Week 6
Report on your social media results and celebrate your success
Day 26: Track your content
Tracking your content's circulation across social media channels and gauging interaction are both highly beneficial.
With the Sprout Social Post Performance Report, you can keep track of all of your content. Use the Post Performance reports to examine published material to the level of the individual post and comprehend how it performed with your audience.
Using Sprout, you can see an illustration of how to view your cross-channel post performance (available with a free trial).
Day 27: Compare results to goals
Recall the goals you established for yourself at the start of this 30-day period.
To increase brand engagement, for instance, you would need to see a 20% rise in likes, shares, mentions, and comments by the end of the fourth quarter.
You may check if you are on pace to achieve your social media marketing objectives by comparing month-over-month interaction for each of your social profiles using a social media analytics tool.
Day 28: Report out
Inform your leadership and marketing team of the outcomes of your social marketing efforts. Here is a collection of tools that can assist you in developing a regular reporting system, whether you are new to reporting or simply need to brush up on best practices.
This is your chance to highlight the objectives you've set and how far you've come. Reporting on the effectiveness of your social marketing efforts should be based on hard data, such as the information you've collected from listening and analytics.
Day 29: Revisit and readjust your strategy
The most smart marketers are aware that marketing tactics are constantly changing. Based on the facts you've gathered, revisit your approach, update your marketing objectives, and make adjustments.
Day 30: Celebrate your transformation
Congratulations! You've completed the 30-day social marketing transformation program successfully.
Honor your new approach and the effort you put forth to improve your social marketing.
Section 7
Plan with Sprout Social
Create your social media marketing plan with Sprout Social
This social media strategy was developed to assist social marketers in improving their tactics. Our objective is to give you practical advice on how to change your social marketing tactics so that you can produce content that serves a purpose, is interesting to read, and ultimately yields tangible commercial benefits.
Remember that improving your social media strategic planning doesn't stop after these 30 days; keep identifying obstacles to your goal, research your competitors, find ways to improve your content and social accounts, and always review and tweak your plans as necessary.
Want to find out how Sprout Social's features and services can make your social media strategy even better? To test Sprout for yourself, request a demo or begin a no-risk, 30-day trial.
objective of your social marketing is to generate new leads and direct individuals into your sales funnel. On the posts you use to encourage action, provide clear CTAs (calls to action).
Check out this article on powerful social CTA words for text inspiration. For instance, according to our team of experts, the TikTok sound "Corn but it becomes a song and unifies the world" generated almost 607,000 videos. The Corn Palace is located in South Dakota, and the state went all-in on this trend by inviting the star, an elementary school student, to visit the site. This video received over a million likes and 5.5 million views. Optimize your profiles and brand voice on social media
driv traffic to a website
Expand brand awareness
Increasing brand engagement
create fresh leads
To lead, nurture
Create a community around your business.
Establish your authority and industry expertise
Enhance customer service
brand sentiment to change
Giving meaning to your social actions is the main goal here. Your social goals should continue to be supported by the content you create and share after you've set them.
You can use a variety of techniques, such as the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method, to help you formulate specific social media goals.
The OKR approach requires you to create a broad target statement and a list of important your goals
