How to Create A Social Media Plan That Works

As a blogger, I’ve somewhat always had to be active on my social media. Social media is just a lot of work for one person, but I’ve been doing a better job on Pinterest in the last few months than I’ve ever been. Instagram, let’s be real, is way more work and is constantly changing up its algorithms. I do love creating content, and I try to be proactive in balancing other aspects of the blog too like this site. If you’re a business owner/blogger too or even if you’re just a content creator (for fun or for business), you might struggle on how to organize your work day-to-day.

For 4 years of blogging and working in marketing (yep, I started blogging the same time I started working in my field), I’ve not only helped build my own business, but I’ve helped hundreds of businesses. I mainly focus on paid social advertising in marketing, but I’ve had my fair share of helping businesses through content creation and content marketing. 

I can tell you that doing marketing is no easy feat and it requires you to really brainstorm, plan, and to take consistent action. We give creators less credit than they’re worth sometimes! I wish someone had helped me out when I began to take blogging seriously, but I decided to be that nice person to help out others.

I’ve decided to share a way on how you can organize your weekdays broken down with easy (and sometimes time consuming but super worth-it!) to-do tasks for your social media and business. Looking at these weekday routines might be overwhelming, but the reality of being a blogger and content creator is that it is a hell of a lot of work! If you’re prepared to take on such tasks and figure out how each tool works, it will get easier over time to manage.

Before Doing Your Weekly Plan:

1. Do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of your blog website.
2. Determine who your audience is or will be.
3. Figure out which social media platforms you really want to work with (the best for a blog is Instagram and Pinterest) and which ones are needed to grow awareness and increase traffic based on your niche.
4. If you’re a blogger: Determine if your articles are all suitable for SEO or if there’s a SEO tool that provides each article with a meta description, if there’s alt text on images, and if it’s appropriately formatted such as the use of categories and tags, H2 headings in each post, and uses internal and external links. Why is this important? Because you’re going to want to promote your blog posts on your social media and not only will your formatted posts help you long-term, but it will be great for whoever finds you on social media!

Helpful tools to help you out

• A social media scheduling tool: You can use Buffer, Sprout Social, Lately, Hootsuite.
• An email newsletter service: Good ones to use are MailChimp, ConvertKit, Mailerlite.
• An unfollow/follow app: A really good one is Followers +. These apps will help you see who unfollowed you from Instagram and which of your following is not following you back.
• Use best-hashtags.com: This website will help you determine the best hashtags to use for social media.
• Google Analytics: Every blog and business site should have this! This will help you determine the number of visitors who came to your blog, to define your demographics/audience, and to see where your audiences are coming from.
• Linktree or Linkin.bio: Use one of these to add a link attached to your Instagram or other social media profiles. These can display the links you want your audience to click on, whether it’s straight to your website, to your latest blog post, or to show them a special discount link.
• Trello: A visual work management tool to help you organize your content ideas of what, when, and where.
• Adobe Lightroom and Canva: These programs will help you make your photos even way better through Lightroom’s editing system and Canva has many templates and fonts for you to use.

Day 1 – Monday:

Before you start your planned days, an Instagram account should be created already. Instagram is one of the best platforms to drive an audience of any kind to see your photo content and the best way to have an engaging community.

1. Curate: Start creating a couple of social media posts related to your blog niche topic and then curate which high-quality images to use for these. *We can use a social media scheduling management tool for this so there are posts drafted and scheduled on different days.* Each post’s caption will be drafted.
   1. Add to your caption: These could be quotes and you can use specific hashtags that relate to your content (you can use a lot of these repeatedly) by doing research and who you would like to attract to each post.
2. Grow your following: Follow people who relate to your content and engage with them by leaving comments and likes. You should also choose to create relationships and connect with other bloggers in your industry, which you can find when you join Facebook groups sometimes for that niche/industry or in blogging Facebook groups.
3. Analyze your data: Check on your Google Analytics account for the blog site and see which blog posts are ranking for you to help you determine what the next blog posts you should focus on.
4. Plan out your written content: Brainstorm the blog posts you want to write next using Trello and then create an outline of what topics and information you want to cover there.
5. Share all the same social media content: Make sure to share all Instagram posts to your Facebook page too and reformat them on your other social media platforms.

Day 2 – Tuesday:

Pinterest will help you gain readers more than any other platform, especially for those who write blog posts. You can skip this day if you do not have a blog/website at all and if you’re just a social media content creator.

1. Research for your blog: Do research for keywords to be used on future blog posts to place in SEO and topics for what you can write about based on the content you capture.
   1. Write down the keywords in a document or a spreadsheet to keep in mind for the future blog post.
   2. Draft up meta descriptions for upcoming blog posts.
2. Promote your (new and old) blog posts: Any blog post you write up should have a created pin on Pinterest and attached to each post to promote it from being able to be shared.
3. Engage on Pinterest: Re-pin other pins onto your boards and join Pinterest group boards.
   1. Join other Pinterest board groups to connect with other travel bloggers on the platform.
4. Start working on your mailing list: Add emails that you already have of your readers/followers/customers if possible. Place a code on your website that is visible or a pop-up asking for a site visitor’s email to join your newsletter.
5. Daily task: Continue to grow your following on social media platforms and connect with the same niche type of bloggers. Engage with new followers. Open up an unfollow/follow app to see who unfollowed.

Day 3 – Wednesday:

1. Write your blog post(s): Remember what you organized and brainstormed on your Trello? Get to the writing part of it! If there’s one blog post you may have to take a while working on (as I do that), then…
2. Edit the pics: Edit all your photos, for your social media and blog posts. They may need to be enhanced on Lightroom, or need consistent branding on it using Canva.
3. Analyze your social media data: Using a social media management program with the features of reports, you can go back and analyze the best times that social media posts were engaged with, seen, and had the most clicks. You can record down those best times and keep in track for the next weekly tasks.
4. Daily task: Continue to grow your following on social media platforms and connect with the same niche type of bloggers. Engage with new followers. Open up an unfollow/follow app to see who unfollowed.

Day 4 – Thursday:

1. Continue to write your blog post(s).
2. Format those blog post(s): You’d want to start formatting them so you can be prepared to publish. You can choose when to publish based on which day and time that your readers/site visitors are more engaged or come to your site (Google Analytics can help you).
3. Do more Pinterest: Continue to create more Pinterest pins for newly scheduled blog posts and promote through Pinterest boards or group boards.
4. Daily task: Continue to grow your following on social media platforms and connect with the same niche type of bloggers. Engage with new followers. Open up an unfollow/follow app to see who unfollowed.

Day 5 – Friday:

1. Friday can be the report day for last week! (I say last week because this week you just did some work and it can take time to generate engagement.) I would pull out Google Sheets or Excel to record your numbers to help you analyze how each of your social media and blogging platforms did that week. Doing so can help you pick up on what to focus working on next or what improvements you can make.
   1. You can look at Google Analytics to see if any traffic increased and determine which sources did the traffic come from and we may also start to gather who our audience is.
   2. Take a look at how the Pinterest pins performed.
   3. Take a look at who engaged with your blog posts and which of your blog posts are getting traffic.
   4. Take a look at the engagement rate and likes of your social media posts that week.
2. Start designing your newsletter email: Once you see there are enough emails collected for the site, you can start to design the 1st email campaign. If not, this can be pushed until there is a good amount collected. (I would say 100 emails are good to start sending out something.) Then, choose when you can schedule its publication day and time.

And then, repeat these week to week! If you want, you could also choose to do it bi-weekly or choose to make these routines every other week, however much you can give attention to your work based on your life schedule.

That’s it. If you create blog or social media content, has using any of these tools and tips helped you long-term? Do you feel that following a social media calendar helps you to be more organized, whether you’re a full-time worker with another job or a full-time parent or just have many responsibilities going on?

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