Global industry professionals believe social media marketing’s top advantage is increased exposure. This exposure enables business owners, freelancers, content creators, marketers, and influencers to leverage social media’s billions of active users as an advertising audience.
Like other digital marketing approaches, social media marketing requires hard work to increase your exposure—making social media management paramount to this practice. However, many marketers may struggle with social media planning.
Social media planning involves complex processes, including topic research, content planning, image creation, scheduling, and posting. They are typically repetitive, mostly when done manually. Fortunately, digital advancements have provided tools to make social media management tasks faster and easier.
Among these tools are social media planners. But how can you efficiently use them to streamline your social media strategies and optimize your social media content successfully?
Key Takeaways
- Social media planners are tools or systems that streamline your social media management processes.
- These planners can enrich productivity, enhance teamwork, track progress, and provide data-based insights.
- They can also automate posting schedules to save manual scheduling and publishing time.
- Before creating marketing campaigns in these planners, understand different social networks, identify your goals, and determine your content pillars first.
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Understanding a Social Media Planner
Social media planners are management tools or systems with automation integrations that can facilitate your strategy development, content planning, and posting schedules. They can publish social media posts automatically and manage your content performance through data analytics and metric insights.
Some planners are project management software solutions, while others are simple and free templates, checklists, or tables. The simplified versions include creating documents and templates on Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
Contrarily, social media planning solutions are more comprehensive platforms with functionalities like automation, data analytics, performance tracking, and social listening. They also have multi-platform management that handles content strategies across multiple social networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Examples of social media management tools include Archive, Hootsuite, and Canva. These platforms can elevate your marketing efforts and promote better workflow management.
The Advantages of Using a Social Media Planner
Social media planners formalize the process of content planning, creation, and posting by providing a structured timetable to work with. When used correctly, it can help you increase your brand awareness on social media.
But social media planners are more than just improving your brand awareness. Let’s examine the other benefits you can get from using one below.
Enriches productivity
Social media planners can give you more time for other tasks by enabling you to create, schedule, and post content in advance. Using one is also advantageous when busy or juggling multiple responsibilities.
For instance, you won’t need to manually log in to publish social media posts while managing another project. The established schedule on your planner will automatically publish the posts without logging in.
This forward-thinking approach helps your team members focus better on other significant social media marketing aspects and business growth projects, enriching your workflow productivity.
Moreover, multi-platform management offers the convenience of managing different social networks in one database. Rather than toggling between various social profiles and accounts, a social media planner can consolidate activities from each channel in one dashboard.
Consequently, this dashboard reduces time spent on manual management, which maximizes productivity and establishes efficient content distribution.
Enables regular content posting
Growing your followers and audience isn’t as simple as posting content whenever you want. Posting consistency is among the factors that push specific posts across social media channels. You generally have better chances of reaching the forefront when you post regularly, which is achievable with a significant active social media presence.
Using a social media planner can boost your presence by helping you post content regularly. The tool helps you maintain content visibility through outlined calendars with comprehensive plans and schedules tailored to your organization’s workflow. This way, your social profiles remain active even when you’re busy, offline, or unavailable.
Remember that regular posting doesn’t mean posting daily. It prioritizes the days and times your content performs well on social media platforms. These social media posting schedules could be once or twice a week.
Promotes and maintains workflow organization
Social media planners are project management tools that promote and maintain workflow organization. They help you save time by keeping all the content ideas, plans, strategies, and scheduled posts in one calendar.
This calendar provides a structured overview of content strategies, enabling you to plan, create, and schedule posts efficiently. It also helps you track previously published posts to see what topics, themes, or niches haven’t been covered yet.
Having a social media planner also lets you create content in advance once you have the whole picture of how the workflow will go. It lets you thoroughly review draft copies before scheduling and publishing to mitigate potential errors that could compromise the content quality.
Enhances communication and collaboration
Communication and collaboration are crucial in every business operation, including social media management.
These factors promote coordination, making the team members more engaged, connected, and efficient. As such, the social media management team can provide better problem-solving, content ideas, and marketing strategies that will contribute to the success of your social media campaigns.
A social media planner can enhance these aspects by allowing database access and full calendar view to multiple team members, making it easier to share management responsibilities.
A central dashboard lets you and your marketing team send and receive real-time updates without opening other platforms. This way, you won’t need to toggle between multiple internal messaging apps. Concurrently, it can also ensure that the marketing efforts are on track to prevent oversight of significant details.
Delivers progress and performance tracking
Social media planners offer progress and performance tracking that lets you know what’s working on your marketing campaigns. This system also provides data analytics with metric insights on adjustments or areas of improvement. Such information delivers data-driven analysis that’ll help you make informed decisions.
Suppose your social media campaigns are divided into two strategies: paid ads and organic content. Your social media planner with progress tracking will monitor content performance on both strategies. Then, it will analyze what’s driving more growth in your reach, visibility, and engagement. This way, you’ll know which one is worth investing more in, ensuring efficient and effective marketing efforts.
Improves online reputation management
Online reputation management (ORM) involves managing the public’s perception of your brand. It includes responding to comments, engaging with reviews, and tracking brand tags or mentions.
ORM is critical in establishing trust, building authority, and generating more sales. Many social media planners have ORM integrations to help you manage your followers and audiences’ perceptions of your business, particularly on negative reviews.
For example, the ORM feature enables you to respond accordingly to unfavorable reviews. It will help you create the best response that addresses the concerns and provides actionable solutions.
It’s best to engage with these kinds of comments professionally so that potential customers know you value feedback and are dedicated to providing optimal customer support.
Furthermore, ORM can provide social listening that monitors and analyzes what online users say about your business on forums, groups, blogs, or comment sections. It enables you to refine your products or services and provide the best treatment to yield positive recognition.
Fosters real-time engagement
Real-time engagement focuses on interacting with users at the right moment. It is non-intrusive and provides added value to the user experience. A social media planner can enable you to respond faster by displaying all the comments, mentions, and inquiries from different social networks in one database.
With quick responses, potential customers will appreciate your attentiveness to address their questions. You also ensure you won’t miss opportunities to engage and interact with a broader audience segment, fostering more customer relationships and connections that can generate sales.
Strengthens content uniformity and consistency
Another advantage of using a social media planner is it can strengthen your content uniformity and consistency. It means that your social media posts have content with uniform designs and consistent messaging that aligns with your brand and style.
With uniform and consistent content, you can provide a seamless user experience, whichever social network users use to navigate your profile. This makes your social profiles neat and organized so visitors can quickly find their required information. Consequently, your profiles will always be familiar and comfortable to browse on different social media channels.
Moreover, your followers and potential customers can recognize your business even without visiting your social media accounts. This brand recognition can make you stand out amongst your competitors.
How To Streamline Social Media Strategies With a Social Media Planner Efficiently
Achieving the benefits of social media planners doesn’t happen overnight. Just because you’re using one doesn’t mean you can instantly create successful social media campaigns. Driving more conversions means using your social media scheduling tool efficiently.
Here’s how you can streamline your content strategies with a social media management tool:
Understand your different social media channels
Social media platforms are not identical. Each platform has its own algorithms, features, target demographics, and interactions. For example, one content strategy on Instagram may not work on TikTok, and vice versa.
Understanding each network is essential in creating the most suitable targeted content for your followers and audiences. Here are the types of content generally published on the following social media channels:
- Facebook for conversation starter posts
- Twitter for microblogging
- Instagram for images and videos
- TikTok for short-form infotainment videos
- LinkedIn for articles about thought leadership and job postings
Identify marketing goals and target audience
Once you understand your chosen channels, it’s time to determine the most significant details of your social media campaigns. These details include identifying your marketing goals and target audience.
When identifying your marketing goals, remember these questions:
- Who are you, and what is your brand?
- What is the brand identity you want your audience to remember?
- What do you do, and why are you doing it?
To determine your target audience, you should analyze your current customer base. Understand their buyer personas, preferences, interests, and transaction histories. Additionally, you should conduct market research to stay updated with the latest industry trends.
Performing competitor analysis also provides insights into competitors’ strategies and their lacking aspects. This analysis allows you to re-engineer their marketing efforts and fill the gaps that aren’t working for them.
Determine your content themes and pillars
After setting your goals and target audience, determine your content themes and pillars.
Content themes are broad topics relevant to your brand, while content pillars are specific subtopics under the themes. These aspects can help you plan and organize well-defined content ideas that align with your brand messaging. Examples include industry humor, testimonials, inspirational messages, and blog promotions.
Besides these, content themes and pillars provide the following benefits:
- Consistent messaging, tone, and style
- Establishes a unique attribute of your brand identity
- Efficient and productive content creation
- Ensures you publish social media posts with relevant content
- Makes it easier for you to measure your content’s effectiveness
- Delivers clear and understandable information based on your target audience’s search intent
Curate social media content in batches
Another tip is batching your content creation, which refers to planning your content calendar in monthly batches. You’ll create a monthly content calendar, noting the significant holidays, company events, and posting frequency specific to each month.
This technique saves time on daily logins, toggling between platforms, and manual scheduling and posting by establishing comprehensive content plans in one go. It also lets you brainstorm content ideas beforehand, diminishing the need to develop topics at the last minute.
Batching your content strategies also helps you keep your branding consistent. A whole month’s worth of content plan can facilitate social media campaigns that align with your goals and target audiences.
Remember to include various content formats—photos, videos, infographics, and blog posts—to keep your feed visually appealing and engaging.
Repurpose long-form content into short social media posts
As a business owner, marketer, content creator, influencer, or freelancer, you may already have a collection of published long-form content. You can repurpose them into short social media posts.
Repurposing can minimize constant brainstorming and allow you to extract more valuable information from the existing long-form content.
For example, you can make an Instagram carousel post from a how-to article that provides tips. Summarize the tips and create infographics for each. You can also make a long YouTube video shareable on Instagram reels and TikTok by making it short and straightforward.
Apply the 80/20 rule and the rule of thirds in your social media content creation
Posting similar types of content can save time, but it’s not the best strategy. You may lose your followers because they no longer find your content valuable. Visitors may also perceive that you only focus on making profits, as you don’t devote time to keeping them engaged and interested.
Avoiding these situations means applying the 80/20 rule of content creation—80 percent for informative, educational, and entertaining content, while 20 percent for product, service, or brand promotions.
Concurrently, adopt the rule of thirds by curating one-third of your content from followers (mentions, tags, reviews, comments, or interactions).
For one, you can publish videos responding to comments on TikTok. Scheduling these kinds of user-generated content can ease the burden of brainstorming post ideas.
Leverage the best posting times
Posting times are publishing schedules that maximize social media reach and visibility. They are among social media algorithms’ critical ranking signals. Leveraging the best posting schedules can increase your social media posts’ engagement, reach, interactions, and sales.
You can determine your best posting times with a comprehensive social media planner. Many platforms are integrated with dashboards that provide content performance metrics based on your posting times. Even social networks like Instagram and TikTok have built-in data analytics that show what days and times your posts perform well.
General posting times are applicable for all, while many schedules are particularly unique for each industry and social media channel. Some examples of ideal posting times for different sectors and social networks include:
By sector:
- Consumer goods – Saturdays at 11 AM and 1 PM
- Tech – Wednesdays at 8 AM and Fridays at 10 AM
- B2C – Saturdays every 11 AM and 1 PM
By social network:
- Facebook – Every Wednesday, Monday, and Friday at 7, 9, and 10 AM
- Instagram – Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8, 9, and 10 AM
- LinkedIn – Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 11 AM and 12 PM
While these are the general posting times, they may not always work for your social media posts. Focusing on your best posting times from data analytics is necessary to ensure optimal engagement that drives more sales.
Use templates when creating content
Templates are customizable pre-designed graphic layouts that help you create social media content. They provide visually appealing designs that reduce time spent designing from scratch. They can also help you establish a cohesive and organized feed.
Maximize templates by customizing their features to tailor them to your brand and style. Infuse your brand logo, colors, and fonts into the layouts and customize them based on your brand identity. Don’t shy away from adjusting or changing the templates so the final products suit your niche topics and resonate with your target audience.
Various free social media templates—including social media calendar templates—are available online. You won’t run out of options, so choose the most suitable ones for your branding.
Combine relevant and popular hashtags on your social media posts
You’re most likely aware of the power of hashtags in social media marketing. Hashtags can increase your content’s visibility, helping you expand your social media reach. However, like other marketing tactics, you must use them properly.
The best way to integrate hashtags into your social media posts is by combining relevant and popular hashtags. Relevant hashtags help your content connect with your target audience. You should organize them based on content types, industry-specific terms, and themes.
Popular hashtags boost your chances of being discovered. They are general terms used by most social media users. Examples include:
- #love
- #cute
- #beautiful
- #happy
Remember not to put too many hashtags on your social media posts to prevent being flagged as spam. Don’t put symbols, punctuations, and spaces. Don’t put numbers after the hashtag symbol, either. Only use letters, underscores, and emojis. If numbers are necessary, do it like this: #HashtagTips101.
Go for cross-posting
Cross-posting is reposting similar content across social media platforms. You can do this occasionally to give more time for content development.
This strategy is also ideal for potential customers who may not have one of your channels. For instance, some may not have Instagram but have TikTok accounts. Cross-post your Instagram reels on TikTok to ensure non-IG users can still see your content.
Automate posts with auto-posting
Auto-posting is an automation system that instantly publishes social media posts based on a set schedule. Many content planners offer this integration.
Enabling this feature allows you to schedule posts in advance, saving time on repetitive and time-consuming manual scheduling. This approach can also let you focus on developing and creating content in one go.
Pro Tip: Identify your social media marketing goals using the SMART principle: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound. This principle will help you set specific and realistic objectives to ensure a higher return on investment.
Simplify and Optimize Your Social Media Strategies With Archive
Thanks to social media planners, social media management can be more straightforward. These tools are valuable assets that should be appropriately used to guarantee business growth and success. They are significant investments that can benefit your enterprise in the long run. Many options with suitable pricing are also available for small businesses.
In search of a comprehensive social media content planner? Look no further, as Archive is the platform to partner with to simplify and optimize your strategies. We provide tools to track and organize social media posts in one database. We also boast an automation system that detects mentions, tags, and comments to foster customer relationships.
Enhance your team’s productivity with the help of Archive. Request a demo to learn more about how our platform can streamline your social media management tasks and expand your reach today.
FAQs on Social Media Planner
Why should you invest in social media marketing?
Social media marketing is among the fastest and most compelling ways to foster business growth. Investing in this marketing tactic enables you to sell products or services quickly. It is a versatile strategy that can reach audiences beyond your target customers.
Should you hire an expert for your company’s social media management?
Hiring social media planning experts is also an investment. Before outsourcing, ensure you have the resources and financial capability. If you’re ready to work with one, our team of experts at Archive is here to curate a comprehensive social media content calendar for you.
How can you choose the best social media planner?
Choosing a social media planner doesn’t have to be complex. To ease the process, follow these steps:
- Determine your social media goals
- Outline your required features and assistance
- Research and assess reviews, testimonials, pricing, and case studies
- Curate a scaled-down list of your options
- Test the platforms by requesting demos or signing up for free trials
