How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan?

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan as a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage


Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos.


Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

You have to be sure your profile info is up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio shows “Who I am”


Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base.

Voice is the mission statement; the tone is the implementation of that mission.

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.


Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you postWhen should you postWhat should you post? The solid gold, the ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.


Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. That’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.


Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate the posting of your social media content.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply to your followers.


What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

  1. Pick your networks
  2. Fill out your info
  3. Find your voice
  4. Choose your strategy
  5. Analyze and test
  6. Automate and engage