A well conceived content plan can boost your social media marketing efforts and help you produce content that is consistently relevant and useful to your audiences.

Your content plan will help keep the goals and objectives of your social media strategy in sharp focus, forcing you to streamline your marketing messages. It should help you stay organized and systematic, particularly in the following areas:

The content you publish

The timing of the content delivery

Which networks you post your content on

Reaching the right audiences

Tracking your efforts

Find the Right Audience for Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

You’ll need to know and understand who will be following you on the social networks, so that you can determine what these readers want or need to know from you, what they like and dislike and where they congregate. This way you can build your content plan and social media marketing efforts around your audience's needs and wants, ensuring that you stay relevant.

Solve a Problem

Your content becomes truly valuable if it helps people solve tricky or persistent problems. Focus on a problem that affects a large part of your community, then craft content that helps to address these problems. This should form the core of your content plan.

Break the Problem Down and Spread the Information Out

To sustain your engagement with your audiences, you can break down their concerns into manageable chunks and space out your inputs across a period of time.

Plan Your Social Media Marketing Content

Now you can get into the nuts and bolts of your plan, including specific dates for when you want your content to be published, and to which social networks these will be posted.

You'll need to build an editorial calendar to lay your content out and give you a clear view of the big picture. It would be useful to you to also map out the keywords you intend to build content on during specific days.

You should also consider the formats of the content you will be posting, and how often you will be posting these. Tools that automate the posting process allow you to easily plan and program your posts, then automatically take care of sending these for you to the corresponding social networks.

One such tool that takes much of the effort out of content planning and posting is Isis Toolbox. This free suite of social networking utilities lets you plan ahead for your content, then automates posting to the popular social networks. This offers excellent advantages and reduces the effort required to roll out your social media marketing activities.

Making Social Media Marketing More Efficient

Following a content plan makes you more efficient at social media marketing. Engaging users requires ample time and enough preparation. Without a plan to guide you through the process, crafting relevant content becomes nothing more than a creative guessing game that threatens to spiral out of control, monopolizing your time and preventing you from effectively responding to market opportunities.

By planning ahead and plotting out how you will engage your users with compelling content, you can realize the benefits and enjoy the rewards of social media.