How to Cover All the Social Media Bases Using An Effective Content Plan

The problem with social media is that there are so many of them, and every day a new one keeps popping out of nowhere, which make so much noise, that one feel guilty if one does not include “the happening one,” in one’s online marketing plan. And in case a marketer keeps adding every new channel in the mix, she spreads herself too thin and ends up nowhere.

Along with a lack of focus on social media channels, a big reason behind this “all activity and no movement” situation is the absence of a comprehensive content plan for social media participation. In this article, I am going to share some tips for creating an effective content plan to make your social media participation more meaningful.

Content-Focused Social Media Strategy:

A common mistake many new entrants fall prey to is planning which social media channel they will use, but not developing a plan on how and when to use it. Not just that, they fail to look beyond the major 3 social media sites—Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+, with a semi contextual inclusion of LinkedIn, and at times, YouTube.

Even if marketers make use of just these channels, though they limit themselves by doing so, the effort to keep all in the same loop to help marketers reach their marketing goal, and by extension, their business goal is enormous. The enormity of thid task is that it is fairly easy for people to lose focus and end-up in a downward spiral of meaningless activity, creating what we referred to earlier as an “all activity and no movement” situation.

The only way to avoid this situation is to create an overarching strategy plan for social media participation, with a focus on types, nature, and format of the content pieces you are going to share on social media and to what end. You need to form a general view of the content you will share on social media.

Create A Monthly Content Theme:

Once you know what kind of content you are going to share and the nature of it, you need to become more specific with respect to the content you will share. To do that successfully, preparing a monthly theme for social media is important.

Like any periodical, you need to come up with a theme, keeping in view your overall social media strategy, revolving around which you will create content for your social media pages. The themes should be in line with your overall strategy and should be created with a specific goal in mind, which will be a subsection of the overall goal, in such a manner that at the end of a calendar year, you reach a certain point in terms of sales, lead generation, or brand building. All categories of promotions, content types, surveys, etc., should be in line with the themes.

Match Platform With Content Type:

Although each social media website claims to give space for more than one form of content, all content types are not suited or consumed by people on all social media websites. Since you do not have an unlimited flow of resources, you need to match content pieces with the platform they will go on, but this does not mean you should do it in complete isolation. You should keep the rest of the social media channels in the loop, but their job should be limited to pulling people to the specific channels where you have shared the content.

Conclusion:

When it comes to social media marketing, people coming with old-school marketing ideas tend to use the media in the same way they have used mass media – shout, shout, and shout. And those who look up to old-school marketing folks repeat their mistake. This is where an idea of must-do-so-and-so-number of daily updates comes from. There is no set number or minimum number of updates required. How many content pieces you will share on social media should be strictly guided by the goal you have set for the promotion. This will also help you avoid the clutter marketers are creating on peoples’ walls, in response to which they mute the feed from such marketers.