A 30-day social media plan guides your social marketing strategy across various platforms to maximize your ROI (Return on Investment). This systematic approach allows you to optimize strategies to achieve marketing goals more efficiently. It involves establishing social media marketing objectives, defining performance metrics, creating resourcing plans and executing efficiently.
In this post, we explain how to create a comprehensive 30-day social media plan. The article will enable you to create a plan for social media publishing aligned with audience preferences, build an engaged community and leverage audience insights for delivering personalized user experiences.
What is a social media plan?
A social media plan is a strategic document that outlines the organization's social media goals, target audiences and personas, marketing objectives for different platforms and KPIs. A comprehensive social media plan also includes details on the tools required for executing the plan and the composition of the social media team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.
The social media marketing plan is an integral part of an organization's broader marketing strategy, ensuring alignment with overall business objectives.
How to create a 30-day social media plan?
We have divided the 30-day social media plan into modular four-week plans, with each week accomplishing a defined set of activities. The plan progressively advances to enable the brand to establish a credible and trustworthy social media presence.
Week 1: Establish your goals and define your metrics
Step 1: Establish social media goals
Social media goals are specific objectives that businesses want to achieve through their presence on multiple social media platforms. Some examples of social media goals are:
- Increase website traffic
- Generate new leads
- Create brand awareness
- Build social community
- Enhance customer engagements
- Improve customer service experience
Your social media goals will drive your content creation and distribution efforts and must be set in tandem to supplement your business outcomes. Setting social media goals is a multidisciplinary effort involving marketing, sales, and stakeholders from business units.
Step 2: Define performance metrics
How will you assess the effectiveness of your social media strategy? You need to identify metrics to assess whether your efforts are on track to achieve its goals as outlined in your social media strategy. The metrics should be in conformance with the goals, such as the number of likes, which is one of the engagement metrics for improving brand engagement.
In addition to classifying performance metrics, you must clearly articulate the success criteria, such as the percentage increase in brand mentions, for the goal of awareness and engagement.
Step 3: Identify risks and challenges
You may have faced challenges executing your social strategy or encountered risks such as backlash for your social media posts. Prepare a list of challenges, such as not getting enough engagement on social media posts, a drop in company followers, or a lack of resources. Similarly, you must prepare a list of risks you have encountered or companies from your industry would have faced. You must deliberate with the team to identify solutions for the challenges and plan risk mitigation strategies.
Step 4: Perform competitive analysis
Assess your competitor's social presence by conducting a social media competitive analysis to identify platforms they use for marketing. You must evaluate your competitors' content to identify the content type that resonates with audiences. You can use insights in formulating and fine-tuning your strategies and also to benchmark your organization's social media marketing.
Step 5: Determine brand voice and persona
The brand's voice is a unique communication style that enables it to establish a distinct identity and differentiate itself in a crowded media environment. A strong brand voice helps brands form lasting impressions and ongoing customer bonds. Besides, it helps to ensure consistency across social channels and platforms to enable you to deliver your message seamlessly to your target audience. The brand voice can be classified as passionate, quirky or authentic.
A brand's social media persona refers to the unique personality that it presents on social media platforms. A well-defined social media persona based on audience demographics and related criteria is essential to establishing an authentic brand image that your audience can relate to. It helps you humanize your brand and enhance social media engagement.
After determining your brand voice and persona, you must optimize your social media profiles for authenticity and consistency.
Week 2: Audit your current strategy, competitors and community
Step 1: Social media content strategy assessment
Evaluate your social media content strategy to determine strengths and areas for improvement. You can use an evaluation framework to assess the effectiveness of content strategy by grading criteria on a scale of one to ten, with one being the lowest. The assessment must be a multidisciplinary effort involving marketing, sales, and product teams to give you a broad, unbiased perspective.
Step 2: Social media content audit
You must conduct a social media audit to identify your brand's top content and best-performing social channels. The social media audit outcomes will enable you to determine the posts that resonate with the audience and help you calibrate content plans to prioritize the performing content. You can review the non-performing content and plan the corrective steps for the future.
Step 3: Optimize your social profiles
The average audience attention span is less than eight seconds, and you need optimized social media profiles to attract them in such a short time. Your brand’s social media profile should communicate the fundamental value proposition concisely and with appropriate images. You must optimize your profile with relevant keywords and maintain consistency across platforms to get discovered by your target customers.
Highperformr can help you create bios on Twitter and Linkedin.
Step 4: Create audience persona
You must create and continuously enrichen your audience persona to personalize their social media experience. The primary dimensions used to create your audience persona are age, gender, location, interests and hobbies, lifestyle, preferred content type, motivations, and desires.
You must revisit the criteria used to create the persona and assess your current data practices. This will help you identify any lacuna in social media data collection that, once addressed, can enhance the persona development process.
Step 5: Perform secondary research for content
To establish your brand authority on social media, you must be updated on industry trends, product landscape evolution, and technology innovation. You must be knowledgeable to produce high-quality content that aligns with your target audience.
In addition to online searches, you can subscribe to newsletters, attend webinars, perform industry research and join groups or communities on LinkedIn to build your subject matter expertise.
Step 6: Gather primary intelligence on your audiences
The client-facing sales team is a storehouse of information about customers. You need to collaborate with the sales team to get primary data on the target audience's business problems and challenges. You can also get firsthand information on their content preferences. Other client-facing teams, such as product and customer services, can also provide valuable insights into your audiences that you can leverage to drive your social content strategy.
Step 7: Decide on the content types
You must decide on the content type and the platform based on your target audience preferences and your resources. You can publish a blog post, white paper, or infographic or create a video. Additionally, you can conduct online polls and contests or organize webinars or live sessions. You must ensure that you add value to your audience, whatever content type you decide on.
Step 8: Plan resources
After you have established social media goals and defined the performance metrics, you need to plan the technology and human resources required for your social media initiatives. You will require social media scheduling tools, graphic designers, analytics professionals, and social media marketers to execute the plan, assess the performance, and leverage insights for follow-up actions.
Week 3: Prepare your social content calendar
Step 1: Plan a content schedule
Your posting schedule will depend on your business segment, social media platform, audience, and campaign objectives. There is no universally accepted rule about post frequency, but you can follow a standard schedule suitable for your organizational requirements and populate your social media content calendar accordingly.
Highperformr offers you post insights you can leverage to decide on the frequency and time of the post. You can schedule posts in advance by using a social media calendar.
You can analyze the audience engagement rate of your posts on different platforms, and based on the metrics of the top-performing posts, you can plan the content schedule accordingly.
Review and finalize content for your social media accounts
First, determine the interesting content you want to share with your audiences. You can translate real-world business stories into engaging content pieces. You can also leverage audience insights to determine the content that resonates with your social media audiences and generates engaging conversation within the community.
You can use the Highperformr analytics module to identify the top-performing content and the media format that generated the best engagement.
Step 2: Organize the team
During the resource planning stage, you identified the skill set required for executing the social media plan. Now, you must decide on the specific creative skills needed to produce and publish the content, organize the creative team, and define the responsibilities for content production.
Step 3: Develop the content
As you assign content product responsibilities, you must ensure that the content follows the brand guidelines and content style. It must speak in the brand voice and align with the sensibilities of your target audience persona.
Step 4: Optimize your content for visibility and discoverability
You must optimize content using relevant keywords, hashtags, and images. You must also be able to repurpose content to deliver it through your different social media accounts across multiple social channels.
Step 5: Guide audience to next step
The quality content has managed to get your audience engaged. What do you want your audience to do next? If you wish to direct them to additional content on the topic on your website or download a white paper, you need to include a CTA(Call-to-Action). If you want to generate leads, then filling a form can be your CTA.
Including CTA on a social media post depends on social media objectives and business goals.
Step 6: Leverage your employees to expand your content reach
You can amplify your content reach by leveraging your employee to enable more users to benefit from your content.
Highperformr’s employee advocacy features provide your employees across the organization with educational content they can post on their personal social handles so you can amplify brand voice collectively.
Step 6: Promote content
Some of your content has performed exceptionally well, and you would like to reach a larger audience through organic and paid promotions. You can leverage platforms such as Quora to promote your content organically, or you can use paid promotions through the platform whose users resemble your audience persona.
The question is how to identify your top-performing posts. Highperformr provides insights on top-performing posts that you can use to decide on the content that you would like to promote.
Step 7: Engage with community
You must engage with audiences interacting with your content through social media accounts or discussion forums like Quora. You must respond to your audience within a reasonable time period, but no longer than 24 hours; otherwise, you risk losing their interest in your content.
Besides, you should moderate the community discussions around your content to advance it meaningfully and enable your audience to derive maximum benefit from their participation.
Step 8: Co-create with your audience
You need to involve your audiences in content generation and promotion. You can invite suggestions from your audience on content ideas and reward the best submission. You can extend the collaboration by inviting your audience to co-create content for your account and highlight it within the community to generate interests and boost engagement. You must ensure that user generated content follows your brand voice and content guidelines.
Week 4: Report on your social media results and celebrate your success
Step 1: Assess content performance
You can track your content performance through Highperformr analytic module. You can monitor performance at an aggregate level on a daily basis and also track individual post performance.
Step 2: Analyze audience insights
Listening to your audience's conversations through a social media listening tool can help you gain insights about them. The analytics module in Highperformr can also help you derive valuable audience insights, such as the content topics that your audience is talking about or the most shared content types. You can use your audience persona to source data from different platforms and generate insights for a better-informed marketing strategy.
Step 3: Review goal achievement
You must compare your content performance against your goal set in the first week of social media planning. If your goal was to increase awareness then you need to assess by analyzing percentage increase in organic impression, new followers gained and increase in profile visit. What does the metric indicate? Whether you have achieved the goal or missed the target?
Step 4: Share the achievements
Social media analytics tools and reporting are the top features desired by social media managers. A social media report showcases your content performance across platforms by highlighting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics. It lets you share your achievements with your social media marketing team and senior management helping you make a case for more budgets, resources, and involvement of teams from other business functions.
Step 5: Recalibrate strategy
Even the best strategy may not go as planned because it has to face the test of real-world uncertainties. You may have diligently prepared your social media plan, but the execution would have led you to discover shortcomings based on the mismatch between goals and outcomes. Besides, the social media landscape is constantly evolving, and you need to revise your social media marketing strategy and plans to factor in innovations and new developments.
Step 6: Recognize and reward team members for success
The best way to celebrate your success is recognizing team members who have contributed to the creation and execution of social media plans. It will motivate your team members to excel and consistently work to improve the results.
Best Practices for Implementing your Social Media Plan
You have laid a good foundation by creating a social media plan, but now you have to focus your efforts on putting the plan into action, which will determine success.
Identify the right tools and technologies
While drafting the social media plan, you should identify the primary tools and technologies as part of your resource planning. After finalizing the plan, you must review the initial tools list to assess whether you need to add or change any tools.
Social media management platforms like Highperformr AI are essential for any team that’s executing a full-blown social media plan. They help you manage every aspect of social media, such as scheduling and publishing, team collaboration, analytics, and employee advocacy.
The use of AI-powered tools like Highperformr AI can significantly enhance content strategy. For instance, Highperformr’s Social AI enables you to formulate content calendars using the endless stream of content ideas the AI curates and generates. It also allows you to automate scheduling, approval workflows and tweak your posting times and content themes based on AI-based analysis of your account’s performance.
By analyzing user engagement and behavior patterns, AI can suggest content themes and optimal posting times that resonate most with the target audience. This integration not only streamlines workflow but also ensures that the content strategy is consistently aligned with overall business goals, driving better ROI and strengthening online brand presence.
Create Workflows
Create well-defined workflows to streamline critical activities such as research, content and creatives(creating campaigns, writing posts, etc.), analytics and reporting, and more. You must define roles, set up quality checks, establish deadlines, so your workflow streamlines your everyday tactics effectively.
Businesses can automate repetitive tasks such as posting at optimal times, segmenting audiences, and triggering specific actions based on user engagement.
How Highperformr can help in social media planning?
Highperformr is an AI-powered social media management platform, built to help businesses elevate their social presence. The tool provides cost-effective end-to-end social media management capabilities.
At the heart of Highperformr is the Social AI that helps you implement social media plans by addressing the challenge of creating relevant content consistently. You can configure the tool to the content you want to create – the topics you write about, your writing style and tone, your target audience, websites or new sources you track regularly, etc. It will help you plan your social media content calendar, generate post ideas and suggest the best times to post leveraging AI insights. It can analyze trending topics on discussion forums like Reddit, Quora and other social platforms and suggest compelling post ideas.
The analytics module provides insights on user engagement, followers gained and lost, profile visits, and other audience insights. Based on the engagement rate, it suggests optimizing profiles or content topics to focus on, which you can leverage for creating your social media campaigns.
The team collaboration feature allows you to coordinate with your team in real-time. It helps execute social media plans by allowing you to work with team members to edit or review post drafts, add comments and suggestions on drafts, and share posts with others for approval before posting.
