Today I want to talk to you guys about setting up a social media marketing plan
with a social media content calendar for 2019 and because the start of a new year
and we're already in February it's important to think about how to do our
businesses differently this year and that includes a superstar social media
content planning calendar. If you've ever struggled to keep up with your social
media post, don't know when to post, how to post, and what to post, then you're
gonna love this episode. Now, creating an effective social media content calendar
it's gonna be a huge game-changer for your business and your brand, because it
will save you time on planning for what you post and also thinking ahead of time
so that way you can coincide with your marketing and promotional plans. And that
is exactly what I'm going to be showing you today in this episode plus I've got a free
social media content calendar and template that you can download in the
caption of this video. Now this is the content calendar that you can download
straightaway, I'll also show you a step-by-step tutorial in this video on
how to use this content calendar. So if you're interested in learning how to get
your social media plan up and running in 2019, then keep watching. Hi everyone, I'm
Laurie Wang, your online marketing coach and trainer helping you grow your
audience online faster with social media and digital marketing strategies. In this
channel, I'll be sharing mini execution plans, tips and tricks and also
behind-the-scenes secrets on how you can grow your audience online and ultimately
translating these audiences into customers and clients for your business. Thank you
so much for joining me today and if you like this video make sure to subscribe
and also hit that notification bell below so that way you'll be notified every
time I release a new video. Now let's dive into today's episode. Before we get
started I want you to know that social media and marketing efforts should be
aligned with your brand goals and having a calendar will really help to get
everything organized so that way you can carry out your
social media marketing plan with confidence. And before you start thinking
about which social media platform you want to be on, it's important thing about
where are your ideal customers and clients hanging out on. Where are your
competitors and what social media platforms are they using. Any partners
that potentially share your audience? For example you could be a realtor so you
might be looking for interior designers in your area who have established their
followings. And I want you guys to pay attention on what your competitors and
also aligned partners are doing right and wrong with their social media, take a
note of where they're active and whether or not they're actually thriving on
there. Now I want you to do the research and let's make it real, so on which
social media networks are your ideal clients hanging out on? Now that you know
where your ideal customers are then it's important to think about how can you
serve them and help them. So what is your ideal customers' biggest challenge and
what is their ideal solution to overcome those challenges? And how can your
business help to solve that problem for them? What other topics are they interest
in learning about? And what other websites and also blogs do they
currently follow? And you also want to be super clear about why you're on social
media in the first place, so what is your overall goal. Now for a lot of us that
big goal is ultimately leading to more leads and also getting more sales on
social media. That is really great! However, you want to also think about
your short term goals in the meantime on social media as well. The short term
goals will always lead to your big-picture goal, and they usually fall
into one of these four categories, grow more followers, get more email
subscribers, get more visitors to your website, and getting more sales. Now each
of these goals lead to the next so it's important that you set a realistic time
frame on each goals you can actually achieve. And the reason for this
is because on social media is all about the like, know and trust factor. Now
people usually won't be able to buy on day one, however as you build that
like know and trust factor over time you'll be finding that some of your
followers will be turning to your ideal customers and also clients. Now here's an
example tactical plan when it comes to let's say a Facebook page. So your goal
may be to grow an email list and to measure the success you want to see how
many people are becoming fans over time and also email subscribers. And the
network of choice here is your Facebook page and on a daily basis you might be
replying to messages and posting one time per day and as a monthly goal you're
thinking about planning and scheduling content for the month, creating free
content to attract your subscribers, revise any website pop-ups that are
helping to get more subscribers, and also tracking email subscribers that come
from social media. Now I want you to write down an example tactical plan for
yourself and on the specific social media platforms that you choose to be on.
Let's now put it all together and making this real. Head over to
lauriewang.com/smcalendar to download your free social media calendar now
Okay, so now we're in the social media content calendar and from what we talked
about earlier about your social media marketing efforts, you'll want to include
everything in this content calendar especially if you work in a team. And
that includes what platforms are you using, which ones are performing the best,
should you continue publishing on all of them? Are there any impostor accounts
that needs to be shut down? What are all the usernames and passwords of each account
How many times per day are you currently posting to each
network? And who is responsible for each channel? And you can use all these
important questions to ask for yourself while planning your future social media
publishing schedule. Now each social media network speak to a distinctive
audience and these audiences shape the content that you'd be expecting to share.
Make sure you get a handle on these distinctive
audiences before you started putting any content into the social media content
calendar to ensure that everything you plan to post is actually appropriate for
each channel. And you will have to determine your posting frequency on each
channel, how often are you currently posting to each social media network? And
what would be the plan going forward? Are you gonna be changing things
up? Now I want you guys to use this as a content calendar storage where you can
store all the pieces of content that you may want to choose from when building
your social media calendar. So decide on how much of each type of content that
you want to post, so that your calendar is actually aligned to the ideal mix of
different types of content for your audience. Maybe they like more videos
maybe they like more still images whatever it might be you need to
determine that and create a content calendar around this. Now in this content
calendar you have the title of the content, you have the content type, the
link, and also the date you'll be publishing, as well as any image or video
assets that you will be posting here. And now it's a fun part, filling up your
accounting calendar with awesome content but don't just go at it willy-nilly. Make
sure you got a process in place first. So first of all decide who is responsible
for updating the calendar if it's just yourself then make sure to schedule a time
that you'll be doing this on a weekly basis. Make a copy of this spreadsheet and use
it every single week. If you're using a copywriter or you have someone posting
this for you make sure to share this calendar with them so you can
collaborate together on the Google Drive and as I always said to you guys when
you stick to a lean process and even if you're just a team of one sticking to a
process will really help to minimize any mistakes and help you to carry this
forward week by week. So that way you're always consistent with your
social media content. Now in this social media content calendar, you have the
publishing date of the social media content the content
is a blog post, video, podcast, etc. What's the topic of the content in the title?
Did you create an enticing title that people wants to actually click through
and read? And the content details, in this case is a weekly blog post for the
website. Which social media network will you be sharing this on? Is it Twitter
Facebook etc. The posting type, now this is just a regular post or is it a
promotional post that you have as part of a campaign? The content type is just
the website link and the copy, what kind of social media copy are included into
your post. In this case I said it's important to start the year with a
social media plan for your business read this blog now to get all the insider
scoop. And the assets, now this is where you can embed the link to the videos or
the photos whichever image or video assets you want to attach to this social
media post. Next to it is the link and that's the link where you will have the
final blog post. So in this case as an example is website.com/social
media plan but obviously depending on wherever you're hosting your blog post
and next to this is a shortened Bit.ly link. So the reason why I use Bit.ly is because
you can actually track how many people have clicked on this link and also how
many call to actions you've driven from your social media post to your website.
Very very useful to use. It's just Bit.ly and you'll be able to sign up for a
free account there to get everything set up for the link. And here I included the
actual publishing time for the social media post, which is at 12:00 noon, and
the 21st of January. And if you're working with a team it's great to have
in column where it actually talks about if this social media post has been
approved or not. In this case it has so it's ready to go. And once it's posted
here you will see the live link of the actual Twitter tweet. So in this case I
put a generic link here which is twitter.com/link but whatever that tweet
link is you then drop it here so you can track that it's been shared and when was
this shared. Now once you populate this whole entire
list for the week, then it's time to take all this and schedule
it into a tool like Buffer or HootSuite. I'll be doing a tutorial on Buffer in due
course. In the meantime, you can sign up for a free account on Buffer.com and
give it a test drive on your own and let me know what you think. Did you like this
video? If you liked the video, make sure to hit the like button below, subscribe
to the channel, and hit that notification bell to make sure you get notified every
time I release a new video. And let me know in the comments what are some of your
favorite social media channels that you would like to use this content calendar
for today. I look forward to reading your comments! Thank you so much again for
watching and see you next week!