7 steps on planning and scheduling your social media for your business

Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Pinterest.LinkedIn.

Woah Woah Woah. Overwhelmed yet? Social media can be overwhelming but how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

The number one rule to social media is the ‘C’ word, Commitment.

You must be committed and if you can’t commit to social media then you need to hire someone to do it for you.

The thing about social media is that it can be a lot of work, but it is only as much work as you make it. There are some great tools and resources that you can get that make it that little bit easier which we will cover a little bit later on.

There will be two underlying reasons that will influence your content on the two platforms that you choose:

The first will be what does your audience want to know/ engage with? What are their burning problems that you are trying to solve?
And second, what are your goals or what are you trying to sell to your audience?

Step 1: Pick two Platforms to launch your business on. Carefully consider where your niche is spending their time. I personally started with Instagram and Facebook because that is where a lot of consultants spend their time.

 Step 2: Set up a scheduling app to assist you with your content.

I use Hootsuite but it is good to note that even though you plan the content in advance, you still need to manually publish it. What this means is you can block out time and pre-plan what is going to be sent out on social media.

Step 3: Plan! Have you downloaded the content calendar yet? I wish I had this when I started. This is a great starting point. Now there are some ideas that is enough for every day of the week BUT you are under no pressure to post every day. Use the calendar to drag and drop the ideas to the dates that you wish to schedule the content.  Print out your plan.

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There are two avenues to planning;

1.       Set yourself time each week to look at the week ahead including your research and scheduling the whole lot. Once you get your plan together this might only take you two hours a week.

2.       You can spend a day or two mapping out a theme for the days and then for the weeks and planning out in advance. I took option two and although it was tedious couple of days. I’m all planned out until March!

Now each week I keep building on the end and it my year is organised. Personally I wouldn’t schedule out much further than 3 months as your focus shifts, directions may change and you could collaborate with someone in the mean time and share different content completely.

Step 4: Research your content. This is everything from articles, images, quotes, material for your blog. Also, it is really important to start researching your hashtags! There are some great tools that you can read about very soon that will assist you with your marketing.

Step 5: Write & design

You are almost there, I promise! We use Canva as our design tool and it is highly recommended. A great feature of Canva is that you can download and design on the run with the app. Design the graphics for the social media platform of your choosing and download it.

Step 6: Schedule/Publish

The final set! Get it all lined up in buffer/hootsuite/facebook scheduler, which ever your choice of poison and then you are ready to go

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Step 7: Monitor & Analyse.

Lucky number 7! So you are organised and posting every day, with what you think is great content! Of course it is, you came up with it, but is it hitting the spot? Is your audience pickup what your putting down? Just as important as it is to plan and schedule, it is important to track and review your content to ensure you are capturing the market.

Things to look for include standout reach for;

–          Days

–          Hashtags

–          Posting times

–          Visits to profile / website

–          Post reach & how (Instagram)

Don’t worry, we have you covered. Click below and download our really simple tracker that all you need to is throw in a few numbers and you will get an overall picture. I don’t dive deep every week as my numbers are growing, people are coming and traffic is flowing but if I see I have a drop in the week then I will absolutely pencil in some time and see where I can make changes or add different hashtags etc.