What is a social media content strategy plan?

When considering your social media content strategy, a successful plan is easier to implement and manage if made accessible online.

Consider giving read-only access to anyone else who may also need input in the social media platforms, reserving the write-access-only for the person or team who acts as Social Media Editor.

Publish content according to what is in the plan, and when you leverage topical opportunities at short notice, be sure to record these, marking them with a specific colour.

Your content calendar will serve as an archive of what happened (or didn’t happen, and why) each day. This way, you’ll be able to review at a glance what your balance of content was across channels, formats, curated vs created, planned vs reactive.

Curation vs creation

You can plan your original content months in advance. Your content calendar, on the other hand, can only contain placeholder entries for the curation of content from other sources, as this will largely be re-shared shortly after its publishing.

To develop successful curation on your social media channels it is important to follow the most relevant and high-quality accounts in your niche or industry. This will give you lots of fresh content to cherry pick for curation on your own channels.

There are additional tools you can use to discover content. We explore some of them below.

Feedly

Plug in all your favourite news and blog sites to create a feed of the latest content. Share directly from Feedly into Buffer or post links to the content manually.

You can input RSS feeds and separate them into multiple sub-feeds (folders) to get specific content feeds to serve all of your topics and niches with fresh content.

Buzzsumo

As well as being able to show which content is the most popular (shared and back-linked) in any interest area, Buzzsumo can also provide access to dynamic trend feeds for any given keywords or topic, including the trending content for a particular period.

Reddit

The self-described ‘front page of the internet’, Reddit is a great source to pick up viral content before it gets picked up by the big news websites. There is also a vast swathe of interest-specific ‘subreddits’ which are thriving fan communities, serving every imaginable passion, hobby and topic.

The filter option allows you to select ‘Hot’ or ‘Rising’ content for you to find posts which are gaining popularity at a high rate.