How to Create a Successful Social Media Content Plan (Template)

Social media offers a volatile space for marketing.

Engagement rules vary by platform, as do audiences and opportunities for brands. The platforms’ popularity ebbs and flows as new challengers emerge hoping to shake up the scene and steal the spotlight. Once seemingly stable and reliable, shared media channels are shifting their business priorities and becoming inhospitable.

Still, social media remains an invaluable channel for getting your stories, insights, and advice into the hands of content-hungry consumers. To be successful, you have to know how to approach these substantive conversations.

A social media content plan gives you this understanding. It clarifies where to focus your efforts, how to make meaningful connections, and what results you can achieve.

Start by exploring platform options, reviewing existing assets and determining where they best align with priority goals. Then turn these insights into an actionable social media marketing content plan that shows your team where, when, and what to post.

This guide and social media content plan template can make the planning process easier and the resulting efforts more effective.

Make informed decisions

This social media content strategy planning process includes four steps:

1. Explore your options: Evaluate potential outlets to understand the user base, different ways to interact, and the value proposition.
2. Check existing assets: Identify shareable conversations, assets that can be repurposed to increase their appeal, and critical topic gaps that you can fill with new content.
3. Identify Top Opportunities: Match your use cases to potential platforms to determine which best fit your marketing strategy, content goals, and brand values.
4. Establish procedures and policies: Make sure your team is able to maintain your brand’s standards for high-quality conversations.

Let’s take a closer look at each step.

1. Investigate your channel options

Each platform’s unique characteristics and consumer preferences factor into its content marketing value proposition. For example, your audience might be open to dialogue with brands on X (formerly Twitter), but reserve Facebook for face-to-face conversations.

These different attributes impact the nature of content conversations. Authoritative, long-form content might do well on LinkedIn and Medium, while short videos, memes, and mashups get more attention on Instagram and TikTok.

Critically assessing the social landscape prevents you from wasting resources on efforts that are unlikely to produce desired results.

Use these questions to compare each platform’s audience composition, profile types, conversation formats, and marketing potential.

Who uses this channel and how do they use it?

• Is it an essential channel for the target personas?
• How much time do users spend on average here?
• What are conversations and interactions like?

Which content topics and formats attract the most attention?

• Are we already producing such conversations?
• Do we have enough assets/resources to maintain a consistent presence?
• Does the platform offer built-in creative tools to scale production?

How do brands engage and market here?

• Do brands have different profile page options than other users?
• Is there a verification system?
• What options are there to increase organic reach?
• How does the platform handle backlinks and referral traffic?
• What metrics does the platform offer?

Can we gain a competitive advantage?

• Are our competitors active in this area?
• What types of content/conversations do they share here?

Once you’ve analyzed the platform options, you can evaluate the content available.

2. Check your social media assets

You are probably familiar with the purpose of a content audit and how to conduct it. An audit of the content plan for the social media process clarifies the available stories and how to position them on the platforms for optimal impact. It can also help uncover current gaps that you can close to gain a competitive advantage.

For an abbreviated content review, Intero Digital’s Kelsey Raymond recommends focusing on these three components:

• Inventory of existing assets and metrics relevant to your social media goals. These elements provide an overview of the available content, current format, URLs, and performance.

• Data analysis for keyword ranking, organic traffic, calls to action, and bounce and conversion rates of each asset. Assets that performed well on your website are likely to be of interest to your audience and worth sharing with your social community.

• Competitive And Gap analysis. These assessments can help you identify opportunities where your brand can lead the conversation or topic areas that are worth creating new assets.

3. Identify the best opportunities for social channels

With a short list of potential channels, you can assign your content assets to the most appropriate distribution channels. Remember to consider the content experiences your audience expects, determine whether you have the resources to meet those expectations, and evaluate the potential to deliver meaningful business outcomes.

Answer these questions to prioritize platforms. Your answers can also provide clues about how to position your content to persuade audiences to take action.

Will this channel help us achieve our goals?

• Why does it make sense for our company to use it?
• Does it offer something that we struggle to achieve through other means?
• What marketing goals will we pursue on this channel?

Does it fit ours? editorial assignment?

• Do the platform’s policies and practices align with our brand vision and values?
• Would our content be viewed as trustworthy and uniquely valuable or intrusive?
• Is there the potential to lead the conversation and/or fulfill an unmet audience need?

Do we have sufficient team resources to produce high-quality experiences?

• Do our creative and community team members have the bandwidth and flexibility to manage our content activity on this channel?
• Do we have the technical capabilities to produce content in the preferred content types and formats?

What results do we want to achieve?

• What should we ask of fans and followers after they engage with our content? Share it? Comment? Are you visiting our website? Do you subscribe to our newsletter?
• Does this channel support these calls to action?
• Are community members likely to take these actions, or do we need to provide additional incentives?
• Do we have the right metrics, monitoring and KPIs in place to quantify our results and report meaningfully to stakeholders?

If your answers don’t reveal a compelling opportunity to engage on that channel, or if the platform’s environment isn’t suitable for your brand’s specific content vision, mission, and capabilities, reserve your team’s resources for channels that are a better fit.

4. Establish social media policies and procedures

Anyone responsible for publishing branded content on social media should understand and adhere to your social media guidelines. Documenting codes of conduct and accepted procedures helps the team maintain consistent conversational, style and quality standards and deliver a trustworthy experience to your audience.

Refine your company’s style guide with your social personality and ensure its accuracy and precision. Consider the correct usage and spelling of unique terms such as company brands, product names, and personnel.

B2B content marketing consultant Erika Heald recommends adding these details to your social media guidelines:

• The social media purpose of the brand. Explain why your business exists on each channel and how your social content should support that purpose.
• Asset locations. Give your team members shared, centralized access to the editorial resources and branding materials they need, including Company logos, article images, profile headings and more. Storing this information in one place increases production efficiency and increases the likelihood of brand loyalty.

You should also identify sensitive topics or other topics that should not be discussed, as well as any legal or regulatory guidelines. You can add instructions for dealing with issues like:

• Disclosures: Describe the language required to promote your content through sponsored posts or ad placements.
• Rights management. Follow accepted procedures for obtaining permission to post copyrighted images on social media and to properly attribute cited source materials.
• Leveraging proprietary insights and assets. Make it clear which materials are approved for use in brand social conversations and which are not.
• Diversity and inclusivity. Provide details about your brand’s diversity, equality and inclusion policies, e.g. B. using gender-neutral language or images that reflect the diversity of your target audience.

Create your social media content strategy plan

Once you have the information to determine where, when, and how to distribute your social content, it’s easy to incorporate it into a plan. Create a matrix of the channels that make the most sense for your brand and note the specifics of engagement. When all fields are completed, you will have a social media content plan that can be easily referenced, updated, and shared across the company.

In my experience, it can be helpful to summarize as much information as possible in the initial plan so that your team can refer to it when new opportunities arise or quick decisions need to be made. But it’s also okay to just start and build on the fields or refine them as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Recommended information in your social media content plan includes:

• Who we reach: Persona(s) who are most active/engaged on this channel.
• Aimed goals/benefits: What this channel will achieve; unique opportunities that cannot be achieved elsewhere
• Recommended Topics/Content Types: Topic areas and resources likely to resonate with this community
• Ideal speed: frequency and time on this channel; how much time to monitor and contribute to relevant conversations?
• Formats: Content types that have proven successful or new formats that offer a chance to dominate the conversation in this social space
• Tone and rules of conduct: conversation style and voice; Special criteria or considerations to follow (e.g., “280 characters maximum,” “avoid auto-playing videos,” “emphasize visuals over text”)
• Team resources: Roles/individual colleagues responsible for your brand’s social communities; other personnel authorized to post on behalf of the Company; Who to notify if questions arise or problems escalate
• Call(s) to action: Messaging and link URLs for referral traffic
• Key performance indicators: Metrics to measure content performance against marketing goals

Also consider adding this information:

• Keywords and topic tags: Prioritized keywords in social posts for SEO purposes and relevant hashtags or topic tags to grab your audience’s attention
• Sales partner: Relevant influencers, industry experts, and community members should be mentioned (with the @ symbol) or featured to increase reach and engagement
• Opportunities for advancement: Paid advertising products and any other platform-specific offers to increase the performance of a post

We’ve created a customizable template to make the process even easier. In the first column, list the platforms you have prioritized. Then fill in the other columns with all the important details of your content plan (you will see that a reference example for Facebook is already filled out). Get your copy of the full table (registration required).

Make your brand the center of the social media party

No matter how far and wide your company wants to expand its reach, successful content marketing distribution often comes down to a strategic, systematic, and scalable approach. This model ensures everyone is working on the same social media blueprint, but it’s not the only way to get the job done. Tell us what processes you use to determine where, when and how you share your content and spread your brand influence.

Updated from a February 2021 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute