Social Media Power Planning Step by Step

Promoting your business on social media outlets is a great idea, but if you don’t take a strategic approach, it can quickly become useless. Your social media marketing can also be a wasted effort if you don’t create routines and systems that keep you focused on value-adding, goal-aligned activities. This just means that when you post, post with purpose and aim for pre-defined results.

Here are 12 steps you can put into place to ensure that your business social media activity is routinized and designed to build followers who become customers.

Make Key Decisions

• Choose 1-2 social media outlets to focus on at first. If your time is limited, you can’t be everywhere at once and build a strong presence.
• Decide which of your products and services you will promote most heavily. Choose 1-2 of them to primarily promote on social media for a selected period of time. Remember, the idea is to avoid spreading your attention and resources too thin by focusing on them. Have the links for those selected promotions ready to go. You should have links to the sales web or landing page itself, and any related blog posts for that promotion.
• Develop a shortlist of influencers whom you want to engage with, and incorporate them into your posts. Influencers are active and post often. Their follower bases are active (not necessarily huge) and are the types of customers or partners you are seeking. 
• Find the top relevant and active hashtags for your market and customer base and add them to or within your posts.

Create Daily Themes

• Create themes for different days. Creating themes helps your followers to grow to expect certain rituals and activities and they build culture and community. Sticking to the same themes allows you to track popularity easily. For example, Motivational Quotes for Monday, Tuesday Customer Tips, Hashtag Humpday, Thursday Humor, and Saturday Stats. The key is to mix informative, motivational, entertaining, and interactive throughout the week. These sorts of planned themes help you ensure that you consistently have this mix in your content.

Brand It Out

• Create a visual image for your posts by using your logo, color palette, and website URL. Keep that visual image for brand consistency and just change the text and statements on the image. This creates a consistent look and people begin to recognize and remember your brand.

Get a Routine Going

• On the last week of each month, block a day for yourself to create all your posts for the next month. You will need to post frequently and consistently – 2-3 times per day, so create a post calendar for the month and fill it in – in advance of the month. Use my posts calendar template. 
• Make sure that each of your posts includes one or more of the following:

Links to your sales pages and blogs. This will help drive traffic to your website and increase revenue.

Tags for your influencers.

Hashtags for the topic.

Branded images.

• Use Hootsuite or a similar platform to enter the post across all of your social media outlets. This saves time because you only have to enter content once and it will post on multiple platforms.
• Keep an easily-accessible document that you can copy/paste into when you run across great content online. This makes it easier to do your calendar because by the time you get to your scheduled posting day, you might find that you’ve curated most of your content over time.

Be a Social Butterfly

• Once posts go out, respond to everyone who likes or comments on your posts with a simple like, love, or comment. 
• Keep engaging with influencers, liking and sharing their posts, until a relationship is built. Now you’ve become an authoritative part of the conversation in your field – maybe you’re an influencer too!