How to Create a Social Media Plan

Every company that uses social media must have a social media strategy. Your company is wasting its time if it does not have one. Would you hire someone to design and build a magnificent sign for your company only to have it placed on some random highway somewhere? That’s what you’re doing when you post randomly on social media. Using social media to connect with your customers and persuade them to take action, like any other medium, requires a plan as well as the time and money to put it into action.

To create a social media plan or set aside several days, you don’t need to know how to use fourteen different social media platforms. All you have to do is make five decisions and then stick to them.

What social media is the best fit for your business?
What are your social media goals?
How will you measure the success of your social media plan?
What is the budget for your social media plan?
Who is going to implement your small business’s social media plan?

Continue reading to learn how to apply these decisions to your own small business and develop a social media strategy that will help you achieve your goals and reach your customers.

1. Which Social Media Is the Best Fit With Your Business?

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard about using social media for business. Small businesses, she claims, lack the resources to effectively use multiple social media platforms for business, so it’s critical to focus on just one or two and learn how to use them well. This is the first step in implementing your social media strategy.

Which One or Two Social Media Should You Pick?

That’s simple. The ones your target market employs.

As you can see, different social media platforms appeal to different audiences. LinkedIn, for example, is the largest network of business professionals and the leading social media channel for B2B marketers (OmnicoreAgency.com); Instagram is mostly used by young people aged 18 to 34 (Statista); and Pinterest users are mostly women (81% of users in 2018). (OmnicoreAgency.com). Both Facebook and Twitter have a much more evenly distributed gender user base, though Twitter has a much higher percentage of college users and its users are generally younger (Pixel Fish Digital Marketing Blog).

So, to choose the “right” social media for your business, simply determine which ones your target market is using.

How to Find Out Which Social Media Your Customers Are Using

Asking your customers and/or potential customers which social media platforms they use are one way to find out. It’s simple to create a small survey that you can use in your store and wherever your customers congregate to collect data. You can set one up online if your website receives a lot of traffic. One tool for creating web-based surveys is SurveyMonkey. Encourage people to participate by offering a prize draw or another tangible benefit.

You can also conduct an online search. If the person is in the United States, one of the quickest ways is to use a site like PeekYou; enter a person’s first name, last name, and location (state), and PeekYou will compile a report of their online presence. You can learn about the social networks they use for free. Another option is to do a Google image search for the person, then click on the image to go to the page. Typically, it will be a social media profile shot that you can then use to track the person’s other social media accounts. People frequently use the same user name for all of their accounts, so once you have it, it’s simple to remember.

Step 1 of your social media plan:

Once you’ve determined their location, be ruthless: you’ll only use the top two. If the social media platforms you’ve chosen are new to you, you should take the time to experiment with them and get to know them before proceeding (ideally by creating and using a personal account rather than the account you’ll use for your business, so you don’t accidentally poison the well).

2. What Are Your Social Media Goals?

Now that you’ve decided which social media platforms to use, you must decide why you’ll be there. For business, social media can be used for the same purposes as any other marketing channel; the difference is in how the goal is pursued, not the goal itself. You could, for example, use social media to:

Increase your referrals or leads
Build your word-of-mouth
Increase product sales
Become known as an expert or thought-leader
traffic to your website or blog
Develop new products or services
Provide Customer service.

To put it another way, social media can be used to pursue and achieve any traditional business goal you can think of. The trick, as you’ll see in the next decision point, is to choose a goal that can be measured.

Another tip is to focus on only one or two goals and make sure they are complementary. Using social media to provide customer service, for example, is not the same as using social media to drive traffic to a website or blog. However, if you can develop that level of engagement from your users, providing excellent customer service may be a goal that fits in nicely with developing a new product or service.

Remember that for the time being, one or two goals are sufficient. You must be focused in order to carry out your social media strategy consistently. Other goals/good things may occur incidentally, but people meandering around do not win races.

Social Media Goal-Setting Tips

Your social media goals, like any other, must be relevant, actionable, and attainable.

Finally, don’t set unrealistic social media goals. Your social media objectives must have a clear link to your business strategy. I can’t tell you how many businesses proudly tell me about their social media success – only to reveal that their success is just… well… social. Getting 1,173,000 Facebook likes or 800,000 Twitter followers is nice, but it’s ridiculous as a business goal. How valuable is a Facebook fan? Unless you can show that he or she is actually purchasing something, the answer is zero.

Step 2 of your social media plan: Think. Prioritize. Make a list of your social media objectives. Make them as detailed as possible. Purple Duds will increase sales from new customers by 30% over the next six months, not “Purple Duds will gain new customers.”

3. How Will You Measure the Success of Your Social Media Plan?

This is a step that many small business owners overlook when developing a social media strategy, but it is one of the most important.

In general, social media success must be measured using the same criteria as any other marketing effort: cost and ROI (ROI). That is why it is critical that you select measurable social media goals.

Your small business needs a website to make measuring your social media ROI easier. (Having a business website also provides a destination for your social media followers; in a sense, it functions as a portal for your business.)

Once you have a website (or sites), you can use Google Analytics, a free tool that allows you to track and analyze data from various websites, mobile applications, and social media platforms. Using the Google Analytics goals feature, for example, makes it simple to see if and how your site engagement goals are being met. (Keep in mind that there are other tools available.)

You might want to use the data gathered to compare results across marketing channels. To put it another way, if you’re using Facebook and YouTube to try to achieve the same marketing goal, which one gives you the best bang for your buck –

Just as you would if you were comparing the ROI of a cable television ad campaign to a series of newspaper ads when measuring the ROI of marketing campaigns using traditional media.

What metrics do you use to assess your success? In a 2018 survey conducted by The Manifest, 20% of business owners cited engagement as the most important metric, while 19% cited audience growth. Other critical metrics for small business owners and managers included website clicks (16%), leads or conversions (15%), number of posts (13%), and reach (12%).

Step 3 of your social media plan: Set up a business website if you don’t already have one, and install the tool(s) you’ll use to track your social media goals. Use them religiously once you begin implementing your social media strategy.

4. What Is the Budget for Your Social Media Plan?

Fifty percent of SMBs spend less than $300 per month on online marketing, and 47% handle marketing efforts on their own (Blue Corona).

Neither of these things is a good idea. Make no mistake: there are no freebies in the world of business social media. Organic reach is steadily declining, and if you want to develop a social media presence for your small business, you will either pay someone else to do it or pay you to do it.

Even if you believe you are doing it for free because using Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest is free and there are numerous free tools available to make using social media easier and/or better, you are not, because your time is valuable as well.

So you’ll need a budget for social media. How much is it? Hopefully, you already have a marketing budget for your small business, so your social media budget will be a percentage of that.

I do not recommend that any small business market itself solely through social media. I emphasize this point because small businesses tend to gravitate toward anything labeled as “free,” and there’s been a lot of talk about how social media marketing can be a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising.

Because no single marketing channel can reach all of your small business’s potential customers or clients, your small business marketing should always include a marketing mix.

Another component of your marketing mix that you should include in your marketing budget is your business website because using social media to market your small business without a website is akin to racing a horse without a jockey.

What Else Should You Use to Market Your Small Business?

The rest of the marketing mix is determined largely by your target market. If you are selling internet-based applications to young, savvy, live-on-the-Internet types, for example, online advertising may consume the majority of your budget. If, on the other hand, you are selling fall prevention products to seniors and middle-aged people who are concerned about their elderly parents, radio, and television commercials may be the bulk of your marketing budget.

My general recommendation? Choose how much money you’re willing to spend on marketing and then double it. I’ve yet to meet a small business owner who spends even a fraction of what they should on marketing!

Step 4 of your social media plan:

Examine your marketing strategy (and budget) and incorporate your social media strategy into it.

Do you lack a marketing strategy? The Marketing Plan will guide you through the entire process.

5. Who Is Going to Implement Your Small Business’s Social Media Plan?

Tell me how many free hours you have in a week before you tell me you’re going to implement your small business’s social media plan yourself. Uh huh. Yes, I thought so.

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends said in a presentation at a Social Media Success Summit that she spends 15 minutes a day, Monday through Friday, monitoring, commenting on, and updating the social media she uses, and another two hours once a week updating the company blog. That works out to three hours and fifteen minutes per week.

She also mentioned that you should allow seven to ten hours for the initial learning curve phase of each social media platform you decide to work with and that any social media campaigns you undertake will require additional time bursts.

Can you do it next week, even if you have or can free up those hours now? What about next month? Throughout the entire year? Abandoned profiles litter every social media platform.

That’s not to say you can’t use social media for business and create your own social media strategy. It’s just that if you’re considering it, you should be aware of the time and consistency requirements.

There are an increasing number of tools available to help you automate your social media posts, but creating posts and scheduling them to drip takes time.

Some businesses avoid this issue by delegating social media tasks to various employees. If you do this, keep in mind that the cost of staff monitoring, commenting, and posting on social media is not only their salary or wages, but also the cost of whatever else they could have done in the time they’re now spending on monitoring, commenting, and posting.

If you don’t have staff to delegate, it’s simple to hire someone to implement your social media strategy and manage your small business’s social media efforts. If you don’t have time right now or believe you won’t in the future, this is the path to social media success you should take. Social media efforts that are incomplete or amateurish can harm your small business.

Step 5 of your social media plan:

Consider your time commitments and whether you want to personally take on the task of putting your business’s social media plan into action. If the answer is “Yes,” you’ll be the one to do it. Return to your first decision about which social media you’ll use, choose one, and begin learning how it works. Once you’ve determined this, you’ll be able to begin figuring out how to use that social media to achieve the goals you’ve set for your social media strategy.

If the answer is “No,” it’s time to start looking for a person or company that can effectively implement your social media strategy.