Ready to streamline your team’s workflows for your social media management?
Here are the steps to develop your content strategy, curate your content, and plan your calendar.
From showcasing office pets to hosting engaging quizzes, these ideas will infuse your Stories with endearing content that keeps your audience coming back for more.
1. Set your content scheduling goals
If you’re making new content without goals, you’re skipping a key step and missing a big opportunity.
Aligning your social posts with marketing campaigns and initiatives can help you meet objectives and be more intentional with your content.
Identify specific objectives for your business’s social media efforts. Depending on your team’s overall goals, you may want to increase engagement, drive website traffic, or generate leads.
Once you know what to accomplish, determine how to make it happen.
If you’re hoping to increase your engagement, for example, you’ll need to post more often, engage with others, and maintain a consistent presence.
If you’re focused on conversions, you can develop promotional integrations in your social posts that work with your social media marketing strategy, new product launches, and special pricing.
This way, when your ideal customer sees your ad, they’ll head to your social profile and see similar content or more information to help them make a purchase decision.
What good are goals if you can’t measure your progress? Set key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective in your social strategy.
For example, you may want to aim for a certain number of likes, comments, or shares per post — or a certain number of website visits from social media.
If you’re just getting started, a simple goal, like posting content four times a week, is a great place to start. Track the performance metrics of your social posts and make necessary adjustments to improve your results.
2. Research and plan your content
Before you log into your social networks and start posting, have a plan for what you’re going to post and when. Choosing what to post has much to do with who will see it.
Research your target audience and understand their typical engagement preferences.
This can help you determine which social networks they use the most, whether they prefer short-form content like TikTok videos or X posts, longer videos on YouTube, or funny GIFs and memes.
Consider collaborating with bloggers or influencers to expand your reach and create engaging content. The goal is to create quality content that speaks to your ideal customer’s pain points and adds value to their life.
Your marketing team may have valuable insights into your target audience. If you own a small business or a solo operation, you can conduct interviews, look into market research for your industry, or analyze competitors.
Industry trends and your competitors’ social media accounts can also provide valuable insight into what content your customers are looking for.
Brainstorm content ideas that align with your goals and target audience. Create a social media posting schedule that considers the best times to post for your audience and any industry events or holidays that may impact your posting schedule.
You can use or create a customizable social media content calendar template to organize your ideas. Many social media calendar tools exist, but we recommend downloading a free template online.
Whatever tool you use, have an organized calendar view to make project management easier for your social media team.
3. Make and schedule your content
You’ve identified your audience. You’ve brainstormed ideas. You’ve aligned your calendar with marketing efforts, business goals, holidays, and promotions.
Now, it’s time to create quality content tailored to your target audience’s preferences and engagement styles based on your content calendar.
Remember to optimize your content for different platforms. Not only are the demographics different on each social media network, but the content approach is too. The type of content that works well on Instagram may not be as effective on LinkedIn. You can use social media management tools to schedule posts in advance.
Adobe Express allows you to make graphics, write posts, and schedule posts ahead of time, from one easy-to-use app. Remember to post at times when your audience is most active to help increase engagement.
It’s important to track the performance of your posts and measure how effective your content is at engaging with your audience.
You can look at metrics like shares, likes, comments, and clicks to understand how people engage with your posts.
You can also track the performance of social media campaigns, such as website visits, conversions, and sales. By tracking your content's performance, you can adjust to improve the results.
Tracking social media metrics can help you identify insights and patterns to make more informed scheduling decisions.
When you understand how people interact with your content and which types of posts perform better, you can refine your content strategy and optimize your efforts.
