Creating a 30-Day Social Media Plan

Your goal is to deliver high-quality, relevant content that will engage your audience, establish brand trust, and drive business—but how can you tailor your social content to break through all of the noise, provide value to your audience, and ultimately impact your bottom line?

Week 1. Establish Goals for Social

The objective here is to give purpose to your social efforts. Once you’ve established your social goals, the content you produce and share should continually support those goals.

This week you will:

1. Define your success metrics

2. List out your challenges

3. Brainstorm solutions

4. Analyze the competition

Week 2. Optimizing your profiles and brand voice on social media

Take a deep dive into your social strategy and determine where you are successful and where there is room for growth.

It might even be a good idea to conduct a survey among your marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams to gauge where they see areas of success or room for improvement.

This week determine your strengths and weaknesses. Run a social media audit to identify your best-performing content and most popular channels. Take time to understand what’s working and why. Your metrics can help you identify which posts effectively cater to the interests of your audience. Use social media listening tools to identify the keywords most often associated with your brand. These keywords can help your team throughout the content brainstorm and creation process.

Week 3. Find and listen to your audience to better understand your industry

Transforming your social marketing strategy may require you to either revisit your current buyer personas or to create new ones from scratch.

Buyer personas help you better understand current and future customers, so that you know exactly who you are marketing to and can create relevant content and offerings. Start by writing down everything you know about your target customer and perform research to fill in any gaps.

1. Listen to your audience

2. Research industry trends and topics

3. Choose your content types

4. Start thinking about the types of content that will benefit your brand the most, while keeping your audience engaged.

Week 4. Fill out your social content calendar to increase reach and engagement

Now’s the time to gather your inspiration and plan out content you know will resonate with your audience. The key to effective brainstorming is to put yourself in the mindset that inspiration can come from anywhere. Your publishing cadence depends on a handful of factors including your company, your audience, the campaign in question and the social networks being used. We cover this more in our guide to creating a social content calendar, but here are some suggested guidelines on how often to post: 

1. Facebook pages: 1-2 per day

2. Twitter: 3-10 times per day

3. Instagram: 1-3 times per day

4. Instagram Stories: 2-5 times per day

5. Pinterest: 3-20 times per day

6. LinkedIn: 1-2 times per week

To begin your calendar:

1. Gather resources

2. Create your content

3. Optimize your content

4. Create a call to action

Keep in mind that transforming your social media strategic planning doesn’t have to end with these 30 days—continue to identify challenges to your social marketing strategy, analyze your competitors, discover ways to optimize your content and social profiles, and remember to always revisit and adjust your strategies as needed.