How to plan out your social media to better reach your customers
A powerful tool in succeeding in social media is to make a habit out of planning and scheduling.
We know that being on social media is one great way to promote your website or online shop. Do you plan out your social media? If being consistent on your social media channels is one of your goals for your business, planning it out a week, a month, or even a quarter ahead is what you need to do!
Planning it out helps with the following:
✅ It saves you time. You can spend 30 minutes to an hour per week and you can have all of your posts done for the next week.
✅ It helps you to stay consistent. Your posts are already done, so no more trying to figure out what to say on the day you need to post and throwing something together just to post. When you plan it out, it's easier to be consistent with your messaging and create posts that are part of your brand strategy. You know what topics you want to talk about, if you have any sales or promotions coming up, and can plan those posts out instead of throwing together something on the day of and possibly forgetting something you want to highlight. It also allows you to have the time to think about your posts. Once you are consistent with your posts and take the time to plan, you will start to look at what is working and what isn’t. Posting on a regular basis gives you more opportunities to interact with and learn from your customers. Read their comments, take note of the posts they “like” the most, and keep track of the number of shares. When you are active on a regular basis and engage in conversations, you are able to listen to and learn what your customers want. With this insight, you can more easily understand which content to continue to create and share (eg content that leads to increased engagement and followers) and which content to avoid (eg those with the least engagement and those that cause users to drop).
How do you plan it out? There are a couple of ways to do it:
1️⃣ You can use an online scheduler like Later, Planoly, or Tailwind. These options, some of which are free, are great because you can add in your picture and caption and then schedule your posts for the optimum times. Then it will either post it for you automatically, or send you a notification when it's time to post.
2️⃣ You can plan it out on paper. There are so many printable social media planners (we have one in our shop!) that can help you write out your ideas and gather your thoughts. You can even simply take a piece of paper, write down the days of the week, and write down your ideas.
How do we handle planning and creating posts for ourselves and for our clients?
Over here at R + R Creative Co, when we first start working with a new client, we go through an onboarding process that helps us to understand their goals, their brand and their ideal customers. In all cases, we then provide insights and advice on topics and scheduling. Then, depending on our clients needs, we either take care of everything for them (creating posts, images and captions) or, if they don’t need full-service social media management, we help them by advising them about their content.
When we go to create posts, we are old school in our appreciation of both paper and digital technologies. We use a combination of paper and a digital scheduler for ourselves, as well as for our clients posts. We like to write out our thoughts and ideas on paper first, see how they can fit in with each other, and then finalize those posts in a digital scheduler. The schedulers that we use allow us to add in our images, captions, and hashtags and from there, we can schedule our posts for the optimum times. It is also a great place for our clients to be able to review the posts we have created for them and approve or make any changes needed before they are posted. When it is time to post, we get a reminder and can quickly manually post it or it can post automatically.
It may sound like it takes a lot of time, but we promise, once you’re using these tools regularly and are taking the time to plan out your posts you will be done before you know it. You will be so glad you don’t have that task on your to-do list everyday!
SUCCESS = PLANNING + ENGAGEMENT + CONSISTENCY
