HOW TO CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT PLAN
More often than not when people come to us with Social Media overwhelm it’s simply because they don’t have a content plan in place.
Having a Social Media Content Calendar is essential for achieving great results for your Social Media goals; it helps you save time, put out your best content, ensures every piece of content is serving a purpose and helps you grow!
Simply put your content plan will help you create, organise and schedule content across every one of your platforms that engages and drives your business forward. Yet, sitting down and creating a social media content plan seems to be one of the last things businesses do.
Posting on the go everyday is sure fire way to get Social Media burn out and creating a sense of feeling that you aren’t achieving any results.
We can’t shout loud enough about ensuring you have a plan in place. If you want to stay on top of Social Media and be able to implement other key activities that drive growth such as engaging with your audience, you need to have your content set out so you have the time to do them.
HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?
If you have been using Social Media for a while, using your insights will be a key place to start on planning your next month’s worth of content. Check across all your platforms which posts are gaining the most engagement and what your audience is responding to. Check which platforms are driving the most amount of website traffic. What platforms are the most engaged and which content formats are driving your audience to take action.
Set your Social Media content goals for each platform you are using. Social Media feeds off consistency and you need to stick to a consistent content plan to help you thrive. This isn’t about doing what you think you should be doing because your competitors are. Or trying to keep up with them. This is about creating a schedule that is realistic for you. So layout how many Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin posts, daily stories, Pinterest etc you can stick to. And that will help you form your calendar.
Then create a list of content ideas that align to your business goals and fit within your content pillars and also based on the content you know your audience wants to see based on your insights.
PLANNING YOUR CONTENT
When you have your content ideas and your schedule, it’s time to map it out and identify what content is going out where and when.
There are a few tools you can use to do this, and there are no right or wrong answers. It is really down to a personal preference.
- Pen and paper
- Google Sheets or Google Docs
- Project management tool such as Asana or Trello
We personally map out all content plans in Asana. We do it weekly creating a list of content that goes out across Facebook, our Facebook group, Instagram, email, blogs and Linkedin. This works well if you have a team as you can collaborate on the plan and get things signed off. However, if you are a solopreneur fashion biz owner, writing it down on paper and then scheduling may be another option.
SCHEDULING
Using a scheduler ticks so many boxes and again time saving hacks and producing your best content plan, it’s almost essential to. A scheduler will help you batch your posts and set them to publish automatically so you can remain active on the platforms while not having to spend so much time on your social channels each day!
We use Later. For our own scheduling and our clients. There are of course many others and it’s worth trying a few free versions to test which one you prefer the best.
Once you have a scheduler set up you can then write out and create your content for each platform knowing that you have some awesome content being sent out to your audience at the right time on the right channel.
And just for good measure, here are some of our other content planning top tips:
- Block out time from your calendar for content planning days. Make it an essential part of your business growth activities.
- Try and block out the same day and same time each week/month for planning content days so it gives you the focus.
- Have a place readily available to you where you can note down any content ideas you think of at any given time. So when you come to your content planning days you can come back to the source of content ideas. This is usually your phone as let’s face it, it’s never really that far away!
- Use an app such as Pocket to save any articles, industry topics etc that you can also refer back for ideas when it comes to content planning days.
Don’t forget to keep coming back to your insights and checking the results on your content. Test, measure and refine is the key for building successful strategies. But if you haven’t created a content calendar before for your Fashion Business, we seriously urge you to take action with this. You will soon be a content planning genius and nailing those Social Media content goals!
So…
- Check your insights and make a note of your top platforms and your most engaged content on those platforms to help create a winning content plan for the future.
- Make a list of content ideas, based on your insights, industry topics, content pillars and what your audience NEED from you.
- Set up a content plan either using a tool or good old fashioned pen and paper!
- Set up a scheduler and set all posts up for auto publish…. try and aim for at least two weeks worth as a minimum.
- Sit back and feel the content planning overwhelm disappear!
You can also come follow us on Instagram and join our free facebook group where we help and empower fashion businesses daily with their Social Media and Content Marketing!
Love Verity and Kate x ⚡️x