Social Media Planning, A New Gateway for Your Brand Awareness

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Social Media Planning and What You Should Know

Social Media Planning is increasingly favored by today's businesses alongside popular services like Google SEO. Social Media Planning may seem like a new term, but it really is not. So what does this concept actually mean? Why is it becoming such a popular service? Markdao is confident you will understand much better after reading this article.

As usual, let's start with the main topics this article will cover: what the concept of Social Media is and its common forms; and how to set up effective Social Media Planning for your business.

Social Media Planning: What Is Social Media?

Before explaining what Social Media Planning is, we need to understand the concept of Social Media. Social Media refers to social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. Today, social networks have become an indispensable part of everyone's daily life — proof of this is that millions of people around the world have created accounts; specifically, YouTube now has nearly 600 million members while Facebook has 800 million users. This is why Marketing in the Social Media field has developed strongly in recent years: it is an extremely effective and easy way for social network users to find you and decide to become your customers. In reality, however, Social Media Marketing encompasses many different activities, depending on the field of implementation.

Social Media Planning takes many forms under different names: Social News (measured by reach, views, comments, or votes), Social Sharing (measured by views, especially shares and virality density), Social Network (highly connective, community-oriented sites), and Social Bookmarking (measured by levels of bookmarking or saving).

How to Set Up Effective Social Media Planning for Your Business?

Next, let's explore how to build an effective Social Media Marketing plan for your business. But before diving into the process, we need to understand a bit more about what effective Social Media Planning includes!

What Does Social Media Planning Include?

A business will only publish quality content posts or run ads on social networks when it has a specific strategy and plan — not on a whim. Just like Google SEO, we need a strategy for increasing keywords each month and know which keywords to target. So what should be proposed in a Social Media Planning document?

Social Media Planning is a summary of the planned activities on social networks (such as weekly content publishing, running ads, etc.) and the purpose behind those activities. In addition, the plan should also cover an assessment of the business's current social media accounts, upcoming goals, and the tools to be used to execute the Social Media Marketing campaign. One thing worth noting: this plan should not be overly complicated or propose unachievable things, because it will be the guiding compass for the business's actions.

What Must an Effective Social Media Planning Meet?

We have gained some understanding of the definition of Social Media Planning, but to build an effective plan, you need to meet the following factors:

CLEAR GOALS:

According to Digital Marketing Agency experts, most Marketing campaigns — especially Social Media Marketing — rely on KPIs to measure how effective the campaign is. Therefore, the first thing to do when setting up a Social Media Planning is to establish clear goals or KPIs for each action and stage of the campaign.

KEY ISSUES:

From the goals you set, you can identify the key issues the company wants to pursue, such as promoting a product/service, finding more potential customers, or simply raising brand awareness among the public. If you have time, you can look through competitors' social media pages to learn the good things from them, or spot what they are still lacking so you can draw lessons for your own campaign.

In reality, many businesses fail when they build their own Social Media Planning, because they do not know which specific issues to invest in — they pour money recklessly into the campaign but recover very little profit. If your business needs to run a Social Media Marketing campaign and does not know where to start, consider Markdao, a Digital Marketing Agency with experts who have over 5 years of experience. We have delivered many Social Media Planning projects for major partners — Toyota Ly Thuong Kiet being one we cannot fail to mention.

CREATIVE, ENGAGING CONTENT:

Have you ever heard the English saying "Content is king"? This saying exists because the role of content is becoming ever more important in every Marketing strategy — it is the first element that draws customers to your product or brand. Therefore, you need to create quality content that is genuinely creative, because Internet users are now drowning in a sea of content and will easily be drawn to something interesting and original. One thing to note: content is not just words — it also includes images, videos, and more.

5 Basic Steps to Build an Optimal and Effective Social Media Planning That You Cannot Skip

Now that you understand the concept and the criteria a Social Media Planning must meet, let's build a plan using the following 5 steps:

Step 1: Define Your Goals

As mentioned above, the first thing is to define the goal — is it for sales or for brand awareness? If it is for sales, how many posts will you publish each week, how many images will you design to post on each platform? The same applies to brand-awareness purposes. These numbers are not fixed; they must suit each business model and each company's financial and staffing capacity.

When setting goals, you can apply the S.M.A.R.T principle:

S – Specific: clearly defined

M – Measurable: capable of being measured

A – Attainable: capable of being achieved

R – Realistic: grounded in reality

T – Time-bound: with a time frame for achieving the goal

Also, when defining goals, do not limit yourself to likes, shares, or comments on a post — focus on other important metrics such as leads, conversion rates, or web referrals.

Step 2: Review and Evaluate the Social Media Accounts Your Business Already Has

When running a Social Media Planning campaign, you need to consider many factors — the most important of which is the audience your business is targeting: which channels do they use, which platform is most popular? From there, you can deploy Social Media Marketing activities accordingly. For example, if you sell clothing and your target audience is women aged 20–35, why not think of Instagram?

The key is to grasp the state of your own social media pages in combination with your marketing purpose, because not every product/service is a fit for Instagram or for running only Facebook ads. So you need to sit down and discuss with your colleagues which products should be marketed on which platform, and from there plan who will take charge of which page and which product. Avoid promoting products across all channels — that is ineffective and very costly. By preparing a Social Media Planning document, you will also learn which accounts need investment and updating, and which ones are not yet needed.

Step 3: Do Not Hesitate to Reference Content Shared from Many Sources, Especially From Competitors

One advantage of doing Social Media Planning is that you can reference information from all sources — even your competitors — to learn what kind of content attracts the most user engagement and to study their Marketing strategies, such as what time of the week or day they post, and why they post at those times.

Step 4: Build the Plan

At this step, you will construct a detailed Marketing plan covering: Content Marketing; Content Creation (content production tactics); Content Curation (content aggregation); and the content publishing schedule.

Content Marketing becomes easier if you can pose and answer the following questions, which apply to every business model:

• What types of content will you publish (text, images, video, etc.)?

• What is the publishing cycle?

• Who is the target audience for that content?

• Who will be responsible for brainstorming ideas and executing Content Marketing?

• How will that content be promoted?

Step 5: Check, Adjust, and Evaluate Your Social Media Planning

After publishing content, you need to review your entire campaign to make sure nothing went wrong — and do not forget to track clicks and leads to guarantee the quality of the content published or the ads run.

That concludes the section on creating a Social Media Planning and today's article. This is only a general introduction to Social Media Planning from Markdao, your Digital Marketing Agency. We will return with more detailed articles on this topic — stay tuned!

Related Articles