How does that song go again? You're never truly dressed without a … plan?
Close enough! As a social media manager, that should be our theme song. Having a plan for social media in 2024 is key to marketing success. Trying to navigate the world of online engagement while maintaining a cohesive and impactful online presence can often be overwhelming.
The digital world as we know it is in a constant state of change and is ever-evolving. Because of this, the need for social media planning has never been more important than now.
In this guide tailored for social media managers, we'll delve into the ins and outs of effective planning and explore its benefits, relevance to marketing strategy, and its pivotal role in fostering audience engagement.
So, if you're ready to unlock the secrets to optimizing your online efforts, then this article is for you.
Here's what we'll cover:
- What is a social media planner?
- 8 reasons you should be using a social media planner
- How does a social media planner contribute to marketing strategy?
- How can a social media planner help with audience engagement?
Let's get started!
What is a social media planner?
Before we get too deep into how a social media planner can help your marketing game, let's first define what it is.
A social media planner is a tool or system used to organise, schedule, and manage social media content. It helps streamline the process of creating, publishing, and analysing content and works across various social media platforms.
Every social media planner is different, but good ones all share similar characteristics. Let's take a look at 5 key components a social media planner typically include:
Content Calendar
A good social media planner should have a content calendar that shows when to post on social media. It keeps things consistent. It also ensures content is published well to maximise engagement. The right social media planner should have an easy to use content calendar that will help you stay on top of your campaigns and watch how things are progressing.
Content Ideas and Themes
Another top component of a good social media planner is content ideas, themes, and topics to guide the creation of engaging posts. This may include brainstorming sessions. It may also include content calendars or content briefs. These outline the themes and messages for each post.
Source: Sendible
Scheduling Tools
The greatest ease of having a social media planner should be the tools that come with it. Top social media planner tools allow you to schedule posts in advance and automate the publishing process across multiple social media platforms. These help save time and ensure content is delivered consistently to the target audience.
Something else you should be looking for with a social media planner scheduling tools are unique features that the platform offers. Ensure that the scheduling tools make things easy for you, your team, and your clients. For example, Sendible’s Google Chrome extension allows seamless sharing of content to supported social platforms on the go. This results in better brand awareness, presence, and engagement for your brand. So, features like these are things that you should keep an eye out for.
Community Management
Be sure that the social media planner you select has a great community management feature. The community management feature should involve strategies and tactics for engaging with followers, responding to comments, and fostering community interaction. This may involve setting guidelines for engagement and addressing customer inquiries or feedback. The key to your brand’s growth is your customers, so ensure that you always have a customer-centric approach to your marketing efforts.
Source: Sendible
Performance Tracking and Analytics
Of course, social media strategies need to be tracked. So, a great social media planner should have metrics and analytics tools for measuring the effectiveness of social media efforts and tracking key performance indicators. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement, click-through rates, and conversion rates, which help assess the impact of social media activities and inform future strategy adjustments. This part is essential to monitoring whether or not a campaign reached your target audience and resonated with them which will help you know when and where to adjust your messaging if something is off.
If you are looking for a platform with all these features and more, be sure to check us out. Our publishing features are out of this world and include everything from content scheduling to image optimization to analytics, brand monitoring, and much more.
Eight reasons you should be using a social media planner
Social media is essential for businesses to engage with their audience and promote growth. In 2024, however, it can sometimes feel hard to stand out in the noise that comes with so many people being on social media. Plus, manoeuvring through ever-changing social media marketing can feel overwhelming without a well-thought-out plan. Here is where a social media planner becomes valuable for businesses of any size.
Offering a structured framework for content creation, scheduling, and analysis, a social media planner provides numerous benefits that can enhance your brand's online presence and impact.
Let's explore eight reasons why adding a social media planner to your marketing strategy is key to meeting your marketing goals.
Source: FitSmallBusiness
#1 Increased Brand Visibility
Research shows that 81% of consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying and 77% of consumers prefer shopping with brands they follow on social media. So, one of your top goals as a social media marketer should be to increase brand visibility.
You want your brand to be seen and heard by your current audience and a greater audience that will engage with your brand. With a social media planner, you can strategically schedule posts to ensure your brand maintains a consistent presence online, increasing visibility among your target audience.
#2 Enhanced Brand Awareness
Suppose you frequently try to brainstorm what you should post on social media that day but don't have any great ideas. So, you end up crafting a mediocre post that gets little engagement. If this is the case for you, a social media planner is the right route for you. By planning and curating content in advance, you can craft cohesive messaging that resonates with your audience, which may boost brand awareness and recognition.
It’s understandable that crafting daily, industry-specific social media content can bring on creative blocks.
Plus, having multiple clients brings on a whole other set of challenges. With Sendible’s content library, you can rest assured knowing you have great content scheduled to go out. It is your solution to drafting and saving content when inspiration strikes. That way, you have things planned out ahead of time, and you focus on other areas of marketing.
#3 Improved Customer Engagement
A social media planner allows you to schedule interactive content, respond promptly to comments, and participate in conversations. With a good social media planner, you can see incoming messages and comments on social posts and instantly assign them to the correct team member.
Instead of having to screenshot comments and craft an email, a social media planner will have the tools to simplify what used to be a much longer process. By providing immediate responses and consistently replying to your audience, you can help foster deeper connections and increase engagement levels.
#4 Targeted Advertising Opportunities
Take advantage of a social media planner's scheduling tools to focus on particular demographics, interests, and behaviors. This will help enhance the impact of your advertising efforts and connect with the appropriate audience.
If you know your audience's age and have a small budget, use targeted ads to max your resources. Instead of offering your product up to everyone out there on the world wide web, you can ensure that your message is getting shown to the right people who are more likely to invest in your brand.
#5 Insightful Analytics
You will never really know how a social media campaign did if you aren't tracking analytics. That's where a good social media planner platform comes into play. Track your social media performance. Use the analytics from social media planners. It can help you gain valuable insights.
You'll learn about audience behavior, content preferences, and campaign effectiveness. If you know what your target audience wants to see, give them exactly what they want! Focus your content creation on what you know works, and focus your time and effort on fine-tuning messages you know will work.
#6 Cost-Effective Marketing
Sadly, most marketers are limited by budget. If marketers could have their dreams come true, it would be to have a completely unlimited budget. Unfortunately, the sky is not the limit for most businesses.
So, the next best thing is to focus your efforts on the most cost-effective choice: social media. Plan and schedule content in advance which will streamline your social media marketing. This saves time and resources and maximises your campaigns' impact.
Plus, if you or your customers are looking for an easy way to share content, ensure that the social media planner you select has some next level features. For example, Sendible has an awesome share button that empowers you and your clients to easily share content they find on your website. With a quick click of the button, you and your team can use the share button to easily share top-notch content on social media outlets.
Source: Sendible
#7 Opportunities for Community Building
Consistent and thoughtful engagement facilitated by a social media planner can help nurture a loyal community around your brand, fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging user-generated content and advocacy.
If you haven't ever tried your hand at creating a content calendar, then now is definitely the time to start. Once you have a plan in place for social media, the never-ending stress of having to think of posts consistently goes away.
With the help of a social media planner like Sendible, you can set aside a day or two to create a solid content calendar and schedule it for your social media platforms. Plus, if you have many platforms, Sendible's planner will help you tailor content for each.
Understanding how each social media platform works is also a key part to community building. Although they are all social media, each one has a certain focus to it. The most popular content published on social media platforms are generally:
- Facebook: Posts that start conversations and get people engaged in the comments
- Instagram: Inspirational photos with short captions, short form videos and stories
- Twitter/X: Short snippets and thoughts to spark conversations among followers
- TikTok: Short form videos mostly for entertainment
Instead of copying the same information for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, each message can be tailored for the different platforms. That way, you can ensure that you are crafting the right message for your target audience on each different platform. By investing in a social media planner, you have set yourself up for success with a unified platform.
#8 Real-Time Feedback and Market Research
With a social media planner, you can track conversations about your brand in real time. If something seems to go awry in the comments, you can jump in and engage with them quickly.
Plus, a social media planner can help you gather feedback from your audience and help you do market research. This will keep you informed about industry trends and consumer preferences. So, this is an aspect that will be highly beneficial to your social media plan in the long run.
How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar for Your Agency Clients
How does a social media planner contribute to marketing strategy?
A recent study found that 53% of surveyed marketers were working towards improving their content and making it more valuable in 2023. The reasons behind those responses involved a myriad of explanations, but a trending reason is that it is getting harder and harder to reach target audiences.
Thankfully, you can do several things to find your target audience. A key way to do so is to invest in a social media planner so you can focus on other parts of your marketing strategy.
Let's take a look at the top 3 ways a social media planner can contribute to your marketing strategy.
Strategic Content Scheduling
A social media planner can help you with the methodical planning and scheduling of content. That means that you can maintain a consistent brand identity across social media platforms and guarantee regular communication with your target audience by creating a content calendar that represents essential messages and campaigns.
Optimal Resource Allocation
Using a structured social media planner can help improve efficiency and make better use of resources within your organisation. Establishing clear content production, scheduling, and publishing protocols within a planner helps streamline workflows and empowers you and your team members to work more productively.
Having a centralised system in place allows you and your team to efficiently coordinate marketing campaigns by aligning priorities and timelines. This helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and avoids any confusion or conflicting instructions, promoting a unified strategy for campaign implementation.
When you streamline processes into one standardised framework, you reduce miscommunications and discrepancies, which fosters accountability and clarity among your team. This not only fosters teamwork but also nurtures a feeling of empowerment among you and your team members. Using a social media planner can significantly boost organisational growth and success, benefiting both individual team members and the team as a whole.
Performance Monitoring and Optimisation
Social media planners offer metrics and tools for tracking social media campaigns. They track their effectiveness. Through the monitoring of key performance indicators like reach, engagement, and conversion rates, you can evaluate the efficacy of your tactics and pinpoint opportunities for enhancement. This data-driven approach helps. It lets you save resources and improve targeting. That way, you can meet your goals.
How can a social media planner help with audience engagement?
By using key tactics, a social media planner can greatly increase audience engagement. A customised content strategy is crafted to perfectly match the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, guaranteeing that your content connects powerfully. You craft and oversee a content calendar to ensure a steady stream of posts. The posts are necessary for captivating your audience.
Leverage the power of data analysis so you can pinpoint the perfect posting times to boost visibility and expand reach.
If you know when your audience is most active, this will be a huge help in knowing what time to post is best to reach your audience.
For example, if the prime time for most of your brands is 6:00 p.m., but you notice that one of your brands tanks at this time, you can look at the data to find what time your target audience is most active and schedule your posts for then.
Plus, a social media planner oversees many social media platforms. They ensure swift responses to comments, messages, and mentions. They also foster engaging interactions with the audience. Customers and prospects like to feel seen and heard. So, the ability to give quick, thoughtful responses should be a key strategy for your social media content.
A social media planner can also help you spark community-building initiatives. These include user-generated content campaigns and live events. They create a strong sense of belonging among followers. Refining content plans and strategies based on audience engagement data continuously enhances your social media presence through the analysis of performance metrics. Planners add multimedia and interactivity to social media. This raises your profiles. It creates a captivating experience and boosts engagement.
By implementing strategic approaches, you can significantly boost audience engagement and drive success with the help of a social media planner.
Final Thoughts on a Social Media Planner
The importance of social media planning cannot be overstated in today's digital world. It's not just about scheduling posts or analysing data. It's about fostering real connections and engagement with your audience.
Taking a strategic approach to social media management can boost your brand message. It can help grow loyal communities and drive real results. The guide is for both seasoned marketers and beginners. It shares insights and strategies that will help you navigate digital marketing.
Ready to be empowered by top-notch social media tools? Learn how with Sendible's incredible publishing features!
