6 Essential Tips for Creating Awesome Social Media Marketing Plan

Published on March 30, 2015

If you are promoting your products and services on social networks, you need to do it smartly, following a strategic plan. Social media marketing campaign is not as simple as being present on social networks and updating your social media profiles. It’s about what you post, how often and how well you do it.

Creating a plan for social media marketing campaign is a must do. For making a great plan, put on the list the following data: the time when to post, the frequency of postings, the consistency of your campaign and certainly, the resources for sharing for each social networks that you use.

Let me help you create your social media marketing plan with the following 6 basic tips.

Create social media objectives and goals. Before you join a particular social network, figure out your objectives and goals, i.e. what you expect from that particular network and what type of content are you going to post there. You do not have to waist a lot of time creating profiles on every social network, it is important to determine which networks you want to join and what you can get from them.

Treat each channel as an individual thing. For example**,** your Facebook and Twitter campaigns should not be the same. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc, every network requires a unique approach and you should consider that when creating a SMM plan. For example, on Facebook, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts. And what fuels engagement on Twitter? For example, #hashtags receive a 16% boost on Twitter, while it is not the same on Facebook.

Determine the best time. When creating your SMM plan, it is important to determine the best time for your social activities. You can use social analysis tools like Followerwonk for Twitter, to find the most active hours of your followers and try to share your content at that time. SumAll has even published a timetable for the right hours to post on the social networks:

  • Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays
  • Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays
  • LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday
  • Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays
  • Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweetspot at 6pm
  • Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best
  • Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

It’s not only about sharing the right resources at the right time. You should also stay active for a while to engage your fans. Time is one of the most valuable resources and it is necessary to know how much time you can devote to your social media activity. Plan more time in the beginning and once you get some targeted audience on board, tools like Hootsuite, Buffer can help you save a bit of time. While social media automation is not bad, I personally think that there should be more of real engagement rather than social media automation.

Prepare your resources. If you do not have enough content/products to share on social networks and keep your audience engaged, you can post other’s content, if you find them quality but it is very important to develop and share your own unique content as well. It is fine to share the same content several times on the same network. For example, if you wrote a blog post, you can share it more than once. Use this social calendar to plan your sharing activities. Show people what you do rather than only sharing other people’s content or saying who you are. This is one of the great ways to boost your social media marketing campaign. Sharing properly quality content made by you and others will bring you success.

Ideal frequency. Amazing content, the right resources, the correct timing, and the last point to make this social media marketing campaign consistent is the ideal frequency. How often should you post on social media networks? It’s a never ending topic that everybody likes to talk about and there are so many sources giving advices.

Buffer has collected a number of studies on the best frequency for the top social media sites.

  • Post to Twitter at least 5x a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be even better off.
  • Post to Facebook up to 2x a day.
  • Post to LinkedIn 1x per day.
  • Post to Google+ up to 2x per day.
  • Post to Pinterest up to 2x per day.
  • Post to Instagram 1.5x per day

The ask rule. Now that you are doing all of the above-mentioned steps, you should ask yourself these questions in order to see if you have done all in the right way. Do your customers think about your company the way you want to? Do you get enough engagement from the social networks? Have you built the image that you wanted?

Hope this post will help you create a plan for your social media marketing campaign.