How to Start On a PDF Social Media Plan Template.

Managing social media is more than simply posting an occasional picture on Instagram or a tweet on Twitter. It involves content creation, scheduling, and strategic planning. Effective interaction with your audience is crucial to expanding your reach. Whether you're developing a social media strategy alone or as part of a team, utilizing a social media plan template can be helpful.

What you’ll learn

• What a social media plan template is
• Using PDFs for social media plan templates
• Things to consider for a social media plan
• Items in a social media plan template
• Tools to create social media content

What is a social media plan template?

A social media plan template is a document that helps you achieve your social media goals. It includes an outline of the processes and steps to take, follow, and measure along the way. You have a schedule to follow of what to do and when.

Using a social media planning template is a great way to get organized and stay organized. Personalizing a social media planning template with your unique approach will help lead to success.

Using PDFs for social media plan templates.

Social media plan workbooks and templates can in various formats. These include spreadsheets, word documents, calendars, and, of course, PDFs.

The advantage of PDF social media plan templates is that they can be easily shared across different devices. There's no formatting lost and no need for everyone to have the same software. PDFs can also be as dynamic and interactive as you want them to be.

Choose the level of features you need within Acrobat products. These range from the free Acrobat PDF Reader with basic editing functions to all the bells and whistles in Acrobat Pro.

There’s also a lot you can do with Acrobat online without needing to install an app. For example —

• Editing PDFs to add text, comments, highlights, sticky notes, and more
• Converting PDFs to and from other formats such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint
• Password-protecting PDFs to protect specific content and authorized access

PDFs can be created as fillable forms for you and your team to fill out and sign and return. Y You can include links to content and online locations in PDFs. Or incorporate visual content such as videos, GIFS, and images.

Things to consider for a social media plan.

In a world where we’re bombarded with information, effective social media marketing needs to stay on point. You also need to keep up with what can do on different platforms.

Any type of strategic planning needs to be SMART. That is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time specific. A SMART plan is an often-used project management tool for good reason.

There are a few key elements to consider when you’re creating a social media plan. These elements can then be detailed in your social media planning tools into tasks.

Campaign mission or goal.

The main goal of any social media campaign is usually about building brand awareness and/or increasing sales. But you need to be more specific than that. A good marketing plan starts with a clearly stated goal. Then the rest of the plan should focus on the details needed to achieve that goal.

For example: Aside from brand awareness, do you want to generate new leads? Drive traffic to your website? Boost conversions? Improve customer service? Have a larger share of voice? Get more community engagement?

Target audience.

A clearly defined target audience is foundational to a good marketing plan. Take your time with this one. Audiences vary between platforms, and people use social media platforms in different ways.

Social media is about interacting with real people. Evaluate any information you already may have about your existing customers. How and why do they use your products or services? What are their social demographics — age, gender, location, and income brackets? Don’t make assumptions too quickly. Develop customer personas to identify social media channels and content needs. Create content that existing and potential customers will be attracted to.

Find out which platforms your target audience uses most. You will need to adjust your strategy and content type and tone for each. For example, LinkedIn posts tend to be inspirational work-related content. Facebook posts tend to be more personal and targeted towards home, family, and leisure. Find out what social media tools each platform provides to help make your posting as efficient as possible.

Also, think about whether you want your posts to be sent out from a business-branded account or an individual account. Relationship building is key in social media marketing. So, whichever platforms you use, make sure you or your team can interact with people on the platform appropriately and timely.

Post types.

Plan for different types of posts throughout your campaign stages.

Any type of social media post should include a call to action — something you want your users to do. Along with seeing the number of views of a post, user actions are useful measures of the effectiveness of a post. You might encourage users to comment on a post, follow a link to your website, or sign up for an email mailing list. Make it something quick and simple for social media users to do and interact with.

• Pre-campaign promotional posts. Create pre-campaign posts to generate interest and test timing and platforms before launching.
• Product and/or service posts. This post content should focus on your campaign message and goals. Make them visually appealing, easy to read, and remember your call to action.
• Follow-up posts.! Campaign follow-up posts towards the end of a campaign can also be effective and very strategic. Create content that thanks and acknowledges the people who have already responded to the campaign strategy. Think about whether you might capture more people through the “fear of missing out” by letting them know when you are near the end of a campaign.

These should not be confused with follow-ups to user interaction with your posts. That is essential! You must engage with your customers to get them and keep them!

Campaign timeframes.

Scheduling is an important part of a social media marketing plan. This includes start dates, end dates, and frequency of posting on different platforms.

• Start date: Choose a start date strategically. Consider seasons and sales cycles in your industry. Determine when your target audiences are more likely to take an interest in your campaign and most likely to act on it. Make sure you and/or your team are available to deliver content and respond to requests and queries generated from social media.

• Frequency and timing: Look for market research that tells the best frequency and times to post. Is it once or twice a day? Several times a day? Once or twice per week? Is your audience online mostly in the morning, daytime, or evening?

• End date: No marking campaign lasts indefinitely. Set an end date so you have a conclusion to your campaign, whether it’s a month or a year away. Map out the plan with the number and frequency of posts from start to finish. Measure your results in manageable chunks — at the end for a shorter campaign, or in monthly interviews for an ongoing campaign.

Items to include in a social media plan template.

Once you’ve determined the key elements of your social media plan, schedule the details of how you're going to do it. This will include the tasks and workflows for you and/or your team to follow.

Specific tasks in social media plan templates usually include the —

• Social media platforms or channels that will be used
• Accounts that will be posted from
• Dates and times — start dates, end dates, frequency of posts, timing of posts
• Post type and format — pre–campaign, in campaign, post-campaign, educational, promotion, in-feed, story, etc.
• Content type — written copy, video, visual images
• Links — internal and external links to your website/email addresses
• People involved and their roles and responsibilities in your social media management
• Status — planned, in progress, scheduled, published

You can use and customise online templates online or create your own from scratch.

Tools to create social media content.

Creating great social media content goes hand in hand with successful social media planning. We’ve brought all our best content creation apps to create social media posts together into the Adobe Creative Cloud. Combine photos, text, and graphics, change aspect ratios, reframe videos and more.

Related content.

Want to know more about how to use PDFs in content marketing? A few of our related articles include —

• Create engaging digital marketing documents with interactive PFDs
• Capture data with PDF forms
• Collaborate on PDFs and connect your team
• PDF security: Protect your sensitive content and information