Components of a Social Media Content Plan

Over the next steps in this activity, you will have the opportunity to create your own example content calendar. In this step, we’ll think about what to include in your content plan.

When planning your forthcoming content, make sure your content is tightly integrated with the rest of your marketing activities.

Your first considerations should be your key company’s events, milestones and campaigns that you will be supporting.

As a social media editor or manager, you’ll need to discuss with your marketing team how you can support their work. This will also be in your own interests, protecting your channels from becoming too promotional and ultimately losing your audience’s attention.

Include Topical Moments

Research key holidays and special days, as well as cultural events such as major TV shows, film, and music releases. The extent to which you observe some of the more informal special days such as ‘International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day’ (23rd February) is a matter for your brand and marketing leaders internally.

Likewise, many cultural events are potentially hazardous for brands to create content around. In particular political ones such as elections or anniversaries of controversial historical figures.

All of these topical moments should be considered in light of your brand’s core values and business/ marketing objectives, as well as the relevance to your target audience.

Plan both cross-channel and channel-specific Ensure your pillars and campaigns are communicated across your platforms. Your output must clearly be coming from a consistent and integrated brand. However, whilst achieving this consistency ensure that each of your platforms has its own specific content plan allowing this content to be tailored to each specific platform.

Hashtags
Hashtags started as a tagging convention, whereby a ‘#’ symbol is placed before a keyword and included in a post to make it discoverable by a relevant audience. It is now integrated into social platforms in different manners.

Originating on Twitter as a community convention, it was then implemented into the platform as a feature a couple of years later. Since then, it has continued to grow and is now the standard means by which people tag content on most platforms.

This being said, usage and value of hashtags vary across social media platforms. On Twitter, for example, they are primarily used to connect content about things that are happening now. Sports, politics, news and television events are the key drivers of this.

Instagram users, on the other hand, make different use of hashtags. Here they are used to order content in its thematic context, denoting what topics and interests the content is about. Fashion, food, travel, design and fitness are some of the most popular topics.

Discussion
Bear in mind the way that threaded discussions play out on the various platforms. Here, Twitter is the exception as a response published by users becomes a unique status update in itself.

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On the other major platforms, comments are threaded, meaning they appear below the content being discussed, and are organised as a clear hierarchy of contributions contained within that single post only.

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However, among these, there is some variance between how many comments are visible, how likely people are to reference each other, and how conducive to discussion the functionality is. Consider these differences when posting discussion points or asking for responses.