At the heart of any social media strategy is the plan showing what content will be published, where and when. If a content plan has not been correctly crafted with all involved parties understanding how to navigate and provide feedback & suggestions, then it’s likely to cause confusion internally and potentially hinder the performance of your social media activity.

Once you’ve developed your social media strategy and set goals, established which social platforms you will have a presence on and determined what assets you have available; blog posts, images, webinars, infographics, press releases, videos. The next stage is to define how you will be publishing your content.

Which social platform should I publish my content on?

If you’re using multiple social platforms to market your business then it’s likely that the audience you’ve built on each of them will vary from one another. Which means it’s likely that not every piece of content will be appropriate for all platforms.

Social media app icons shown on mobile phone screen.

Even if a piece of content is relevant to your audience on multiple social platforms, the way you publish the content needs to be considered. Making sure it’s tailored for the unique features available on each platform to achieve greater reach and increase the chance of engagement. This may be how media or link snippets are displayed, tagging third parties, character limits, hashtags or even just simply the way you word it.

To tackle this you need to ensure your content planner splits each social platform out and enables you to input a tailored post for each of them.

When should I publish my social content?

Of course there is always going to be time sensitive content for announcements, events or releases where the choice of the date and time to publish is out of your hands. However if the content is not time sensitive then there are resources available to aid you in making a strategic decision as to when you publish it.

Take a look at the insights and analytics tools you have access to on each social platform you’re using. Use the data available to determine when the best time of the day and day of the week is to publish your content for each of them. Review similar posts you’ve published and how they performed. There may be trends in timings for the more successful of them.

Screenshot of Facebook insights tool.

In your social content plan it’s important to assign at least the day each post will be published, as opposed to just an ordered list of what content will be shared during a month.

Social Content Plan Template

To help you hit the ground running, we’ve built a template for you to use for your own content plan. We’ve hosted it on Google Sheets, an ideal platform as it is a live document and people in your marketing team can leave comments or make changes seamlessly.Screenshot of Social Media Content Plan created by JTHN Ltd.You can specify what date and platform the content will be shared on as well as what type of content it is. We hope you find it useful!

Going beyond the plan

The important thing to remember when creating any type of social content plan is that you can schedule your posts, but not engagement. Pre-prepared content can be automated, but you will still need to be on hand to react to user feedback or recent events which may have occurred that will make your content redundant or even inappropriate.

We hope you find our template useful. If you’d like any support with your social media strategy or activities then talk to us and find out how we can help you!