One of the best ways to approach social media marketing is to create a plan. While it’s tempting to go ahead and create an account and start posting content without purpose or structure, there is much to be lost in taking this hap-hazard approach. A simple social media plan can go a long way, so it is worthwhile to take the time to determine the fundamentals first:

1. What are your goals/objectives?
2. Who are you trying to reach and where will you find them?
3. How will you reach those goals?
4. When will you know you’ve succeeded?

1. Goals & Objectives

Just like when you are creating a marketing plan, it is critical that your social media plan has clear objectives that support your organization’s overall business goals. Your stated objectives should also follow the SMART framework:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable (or Attainable)
• Realistic (or Relevant)
• Timely

Social media objectives might sound something like this:

• Communicate the brand’s personality to establish a deeper connection with customers
• Provide customer service interactions and dialogues with customers
• Reach and attract new customers
• Drive traffic to online retail site (or physical retail site)
• Communicate special promotions
• Attract talent and recruit employees

Objectives must be reflected in the content that is being created and posted as well as the metrics: measuring your objectives is the only way to determine if they’re actually being met! Each social media channel/platform has specific metrics and analytics that help a marketer determine how well their efforts are paying off.

2. Audience & Channel

Conducting a thorough audience-analysis is typically already fulfilled when you created a marketing plan. You should already have a detailed summary of who your audience is and the best way to communicate with them. Psychographic segmentation gives us a better understanding of our target audience because it tells us:

• their media consumption habits
• their media engagement behaviour
• the best way to reach them through social media channels

Based on your target market analysis, you would therefore know which social media channel (or platform) is most valuable in reaching consumers or prospected consumers. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. all have different features and different ways that users engage with content. While it’s tempting to be “everywhere” it’s also a careless way to treat social engagement: pick the channel(s) where your audience is both present and ready to engage.

3. Content

Establishing a framework for posting content will help you determine what kind of content is resonating the most with followers. Good content marketing is well-planned and highly structured! The content can be divided and organized into categories that reflect on the stated objectives.

Questions to ask when organizing content:

1. How much of the content should be promotional vs non-promotional?
2. What kind of promotional content should be created and shared?
3. How does the promotional content align with objectives?
4. What kind of non-promotional content should be created and shared?
5. How does the non-promotional content align with objectives?

Promotional Content

This kind of content features and centres the brand and aligns with objectives that focus on sales, traffic, growth, and other business or marketing objectives.

Examples of promotional content might include:

• Contests
• Sales promotions (e.g., BOGO, Blow-outs, Free Shipping, etc.)
• Themed posts and brand celebrations
• User-generated content (features products/services)
• Job postings

Non-Promotional Content

Content that isn’t intended to immediately drive sales, traffic, or growth, but instead convey (brand) personality, communicate values, and create meaningful and authentic connections and engagements with customers is considered non-promotional. If you’re content is pushing a sales message, it’s promotional. If you content is showing the “human-side” of your brand and not intended for instant ROI, it’s non-promotional. Sometimes this line is blurred and it can be difficult to distinguish between the two, but this is why defining non-promotional content for your business will be helpful.

Examples of non-promotional content might include:

• Lifestyle photos or videos
• Inspiring images and quotes
• Memes and “fun” content unrelated to the brand
• Big picture content, such as information related to environmental or social justice causes
• Content that provides utility (useful and purposeful)

4. Metrics & Measurements

Every social media channel/platform comes complete with metrics and analytics so a marketer knows what to measure and how to measure it. Capturing “raw” data such as the number of likes, comments, shares, etc. provides insight around the popularity of a post and it’s relative engagement. As the saying goes, “measure only what you can manage” — in other words, don’t seek to collect data if you don’t plan to use it! Almost all decision-making can be “data-driven”; so make a plan to collect the data that is more relevant and useful for your decisions.

And of course, make sure you are measuring your stated objectives. If your social media objective is to increase sales, then measure sales. If the objective is to increase engagement, then measure engagement. If the objective is growth, then measure that.

For this reason, I like to create a social media plan “snapshot” using a table format, instead of writing a plan in a document.