How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

 

Monitoring Your Social Media

Like every other business owner or blogger, you’re trying to figure out what you can accomplish with your marketing for the next month, quarter or the year.

My usual planning process for the new year is a full day session of reviewing, recapping, brainstorming and creating quarterly plans with all the programs I’m developing and launching.

I love all this planning stuff!

I get excited breaking down my programs and action items into calendars, filling out questions, adding my goal numbers and ideas into printables that I’ve created to review.

But this last review session was different.

I spent a full year experimenting with new social media tracking programs. I monitored my social media sites, reviewed insights and analytics and kept notes about what worked and what didn’t. I tweaked and shifted and added and deleted.

I even changed my marketing strategy on the Pinterest Strategy Facebook group because of what I learned from the work I did with all this tracking stuff. My year-long tracking experiment turned my usual planning day into something to help me grow my business.

My planning process went from a one day session to many deep dive mini sessions. Rather than just looking at my fan/follower numbers, I dug a little deeper into my social sites and thought about how I was going to grow my social presence to connect to more customers.

My new planning process turned into looking into what really worked with my social sites and what could I have done better.

Let’s Review What Happened

The first step to help you plan your social media goals is to review what happened during the previous year. It’s like I always say, “How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?”

Reviewing your social sites for the past year is more than just writing out the number of followers you gained { or worse, lost! } every month.

It’s more about understanding why you’re spending your valuable time in your social sites. It’s about learning how posting in Facebook or pinning your content on Pinterest helped you grow your business or blog.

Social Media Review:

Let’s just get this out of the way – you know you want to do this so go ahead and get out a piece of paper or pull up a Google doc. Go through all your social sites and write out all your fan or follower numbers.

These initial follower and fan numbers are great to use as a baseline to remind yourself where you are right now.

Now that you’ve got the number thing out of your system, it’s time to dig a little deeper and review what really happened with your social sites.

Let’s work through the Deep Dive Social Media Review Worksheets. You can download a copy below to help you start doing a deep dive review into your social media marketing.

 

 

In the Deep Dive Social Media Review, you’ll work through the review process and answer some questions about your social media marketing. 

To show you how to work through these questions, I’m going to share with you my answers about how I filled out the Review worksheets:

What did your social sites help you accomplish this past year?

I was able to connect and create more meaningful relationship in my Facebook groups. One of the connections I made helped me sell out half of one of my Pinterest coaching programs.

When those sales happened, it just confirmed to me how important it is use to social media to help you form relationships with people that you meet. Your social media marketing plan is more than just posting on Facebook and uploading images to Pinterest.

Which social site was time well spent and brought you the most web site traffic and/or sales?

Honestly, it was a combination of two social sites – Pinterest brought me loads of traffic – especially when I had a few pins go viral! – and Facebook groups helped me make more sales. I learned to scheduled 30 minute blocks of time a couple of times a week to go into my Facebook groups to connect to more people.

Which social site was a waste of your time and didn’t bring anything to your business?

I would have to say Twitter. I tried to schedule a few tweets every so often { I was using Hootsuite } but I never really gained any traction. Occasionally, I would see someone share one of my posts on Twitter and it would trigger me again to rethink doing some tweets.

But when I did spend the time to do the posts, it ended up feeling like my tweets were just getting lost in the massive conversation and it felt like a waste of time.

What was your biggest challenge with your social sites?

I really wanted this year was the year that I would get my Instagram account to help me with my business. I researched how to use the program, I planned out my posts, created my images and yet, I just couldn’t get anyone to click over to my site.

My biggest challenge was being consistent. Because IG wasn’t really working, I didn’t make it a priority and would go weeks without posting anything. I’m sure that my lack of time that I dedicated to IG was connected to why I couldn’t get this site to be a big traffic referral.

How did you handle your challenges?

I tried to plan out my IG posts and set aside the time to create my content but mostly, I just learned to put my expectations in check. I accepted the fact that if I had to the time to do the IG posts, then I would. And if I couldn’t get it to the IG posts, I wasn’t going to stress over it.

What could you have done better to deal with your challenges?

I needed to put my expectations in check about Instagram.

I so wanted this to work for my business. I followed others and watched how successful they were and I got caught up in the idea that I could make this work. I could have done a better job of accepting my schedule for what it was and I wasn’t going to always find time to post on IG.

What do you want to see change in your social sites this year?

I would like to see the engagement in my Pinterest Strategy Facebook group continue to grow. I’ve started doing new things in our Pinterest group to turn it more into a community where we help each other learn, grow and support each other’s business or blog.

 

Setting Social Media Goals

Now that you’ve downloaded the Deep Dive Social Media Review and worked the questions to see what happened with your social sites, it’s time to set some goals.

When you did your review, what seemed to be a consistent pattern? Did you struggle to find time to post or schedule to your sites? Was your engagement down because you didn’t know what content to post?

Think about your biggest challenge with your social sites and we’ll use this information to help you create your social media goals.

Now think about your top social site and let’s answer the following questions in the next section of the Deep Dive Social Media Review:

 

To keep your focus on creating achievable goals, I recommend that you answer these questions for just one of your social sites. You can repeat this process for each of your social sites that you’ll be using in your marketing plans.

Like you did before, use the Deep Dive Social Media Review worksheet to answer these questions. And I’m also sharing my answers below:

Social media goals for:

My Pinterest Strategy Facebook group

What is my big goal for this social site?

It’s not about the numbers! Most people think that the more people you have in the group, the better your group will be.

My big goal for the Pinterest Strategy Facebook group is to increase the engagement of my posts and to see the others sharing, asking questions and answering questions for the others. I want to create a close-knit community of business owners and bloggers who will help each other grow their business or blog.

How will this help my business or blog?

It will connect me to my community and when I have a Pinterest coaching program that I want to promote, I can sell out all the coaching spaces without having to do a big long email promotion sequence. It’ll be great to have a connected community where I can easily sell without feeling like an icky salesperson.

How will I get this done? List 5 action items to help you reach your big goal.

I will continue to be present in my Pinterest Strategy Facebook group.

Five action items that I’ll do to reach my goal:

1. Create a weekly posting schedule to ensure that I’m giving my community good information to help them.
2. Organize more monthly events where they can meet with me off of Facebook for free coaching workshops.
3. Start doing more Facebook Live learning sessions to keep checking in with my community to connect with them personally.
4. Do more posts to see what my community needs to help them grow their business or blog.
5. Think about creating ways to get the community to help each other more – like maybe group working or planning days – something where they can learn about each other’s business or blogs.

What is preventing me from making this happen?

Honestly, nothing. It’s about creating a plan and scheduling the events and Facebook Live sessions to make this happen. And making sure that I make this a priority every week.

How will I measure my progress?

I will be able to measure my progress by seeing how many people are participating in the conversations and watching how many people are connecting with each other.

I will also set up a posting calendar and I can monitor my progress as I’m actually doing these action steps and not just talking about them.

I will mark this date in my calendar to do my first check-in to see what’s working and what’s not:

 February 28 – I’ll give myself two months from the start of the new year to see what’s working and what I need to tweak with my schedule.

 

Planning is More Than Just Numbers

Planning your social media goals is more than just writing down some numbers and making predictions that you’ll grow your Facebook fans by 20%.

Yeah, we do need to know these numbers to give us something to measure our progress but does that fan number really help you grow your business?

No, not really.

If there’s anything my social media experiments have taught me, it’s that social media really does work. It’s an amazing tool that can help grow your business.

Being active on social media can help you connect with the right people who want to buy your products or services. It helps you share your content and bring more traffic to your site.

It’s that one piece of the planning puzzle that will bring you closer to your goals.

Time to think about downloading a Social Media Productivity Planner!

The Social Media Productivity Planner is the tool for you when you’re ready to take back control of your minutes. You’re ready to take back control of your schedule. You’re ready to take back the power you feel like you’ve lost to that social game that’s hard to beat.

If you’re ready to do this social media marketing stuff differently, then grab your FREE 18-page glimpse of the Social Media Productivity Planner.

BUT … if you’re:

1. Tired of aimlessly posting wherever and everywhere and getting nowhere.
2. Done with the weekly struggle of what to post or what site to use.
3. Worn out from not knowing why your social strategy isn’t working.

Download the Social Media Productivity Planner! Grab the one tool you need to take you from wishing you had time to grow your business to owning a profitable business.