How to create a winning social media marketing plan

Today, a social media presence is table stakes for most brands. More than half of the world’s population uses at least one platform, making it the most effective way to reach millions of potential customers at once.

But as common as it is, few marketers truly reap its full engagement-fueling, brand-building, and revenue-driving potential. Creating a social media presence that drives results—like boosted brand engagement, brand perception, and sales—calls for a thoughtful, comprehensive, and actionable social media marketing plan. 

Every brand’s social media strategy will be unique to their business, but there are fundamental steps that every marketer should incorporate (or at least seriously consider). In this article, we’ll walk through the steps you need to create your own social media marketing plan, and share a handful of Airtable templates to help simplify and streamline your planning process. 

(Ready to check out the templates now? Take me to the marketing templates!)

What is a social media marketing strategy? 

A social media marketing strategy is a roadmap that defines how your brand will plan, perform, and manage social media initiatives to achieve business goals. 

Social strategies have to clear the same hurdles as any other strategy. Your social media marketing strategy should answer questions like: How will investing in social media benefit our brand? How does this align to our goals? What kind of return on investment can we expect? 

Once you can articulate why a social media program is the right next step for your brand, you can begin to develop the initiatives that you need to make it a success. A well-written social strategy can be a catalyst for action: one that can get peer and leadership buy-in to invest in a social media marketing program. 

Most social media strategies include a background on your brand’s mission and messaging, a summary of goals, data on target audiences, competitive analysis, and a channel-by-channel playbook. A few other questions that your strategy should answer: 

• Which platforms is your target audience most active on? (If you’re targeting multiple personas, this answer might be different for each group.) 

• What type of content does your audience comment on, and engage with most on social channels? (Short videos? Thought-provoking data or articles?) 

• Which social channels do your competitors use? What types of content are they sharing, and how often? 

• What type of products, services, or events do you want to promote on social channels?

• What resources (budget, time, and people) do you need to execute on the initiatives you’re proposing?

• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success?

• What business objectives do you want social media to influence? How? 

Templates to help you plan your social media marketing strategy

Once you’re ready to create your social media marketing strategy, you’ll need to find a way to record it, share it, and execute on it. 

In the list below, you’ll find seven different Airtable templates to help you flesh out your social media marketing strategy. While each of these templates comes with a ready-made structure to put your plans in, they’re also designed to be customized. So as you fill them in, feel free to tweak and change the fields, tables, and views to fit your business. Throughout the article, we’ll demonstrate how these templates can bring your social strategy to life.

• Social media calendar template 

• Competitive analysis template

• Social advertising template

• User feedback template

• SWOT analysis template

• Marketing plan template

• Persona-focused content template

How do I create a social media marketing plan?

To create a social media marketing plan, you’ll need to clearly define your social media goals and your action plan to achieve them—including the tactics, initiatives, and social channels you’ll use to hit your goals. 

Where a strategy describes your goals and roadmap, a social media marketing plan outlines the practical ideas and tactics you’ll use to execute that roadmap. Think of it as an action plan. For example: a strategy might share your objectives, but a social media marketing plan will offer a timeline with important milestones, campaign details, key stakeholders, and a set of metrics to measure your program’s success. 

Ready to get started? Follow these 12 steps to build a social media marketing plan that will mobilize your team (and your stakeholders): 

1. Set your goals

Setting clear, actionable goals helps get every stakeholder—and every contributor—on the same page. As a rule of thumb, every goal you set should be a S.M.A.R.T. goal. Or: every goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. A few things you could consider measuring: 

• Impressions: The number of times your post was shown on the platform 

• Reach: The number of unique people your post was shown to

• Engagements: How many times your audience interacted with your post (like retweets, likes, reactions, comments) 

• Mentions: How many times your brand or handle was mentioned on the platform 

• Referral traffic: The amount of visitors you sent to your website via your social channels 

For example, let’s say you want to get 1,000 qualified website visitors through your social media marketing campaigns. It’s already a measurable goal. But how do you define “qualified” here? And given your time, resources and budget, is it a truly achievable goal? And when do you expect to achieve it?

Try this marketing plan template to help map your initiatives to your marketing goals.

2. Analyze the competition

Follow your competitors on social media to learn their tactics and strategy. As you’re monitoring their activity, you’ll want to note things like:

• The type of content they share (videos, animations, articles, etc.) 

• How often they post, and on which channels 

• Any patterns of engagement you notice (Do their videos get more engagement than their articles? Do their mid-day posts perform better than their evening ones?) 

• Do they have separate accounts for different products, services, or verticals? Or do they rely on one main brand handle?

Use this competitive analysis template to track important details about your competitors like examples of their work, and assessments of their strengths and weaknesses, and more. 

3. Identify your personas

Knowing your customers is a prerequisite for any successful marketing plan. If you don’t already know who your personas are, start by asking yourself: who do I want to engage with my product or service? It doesn’t necessarily need to be the same people that are engaging with your brand today. 

From there, it’s time to build out a detailed (albeit fictional) picture of one of those people in your target audience. You’ll want to record things like: 

• What’s their job title? 

• Where do they get news? 

• What are their interests? 

• What are they motivated by? 

• What challenges or struggles do they deal with? 

• What social channels are they on? Which are they using? 

It’s possible that you’ll have multiple personas that you want to engage with (like if you’re selling into businesses, and want to engage with both business owners and individual employees). If that’s the case, you’ll want to repeat this process for every persona you need to engage with. Use our persona-focused content marketing template to help get to know your target customers, and to design content and campaigns that’ll resonate with them. 

4. Customize your content to channels and platforms

Every channel and platform requires a tailored approach. An informative long-form video that does well on YouTube, for example, probably isn’t a great fit for an Instagram story. With unique needs for every channel, you can’t easily go all in on all channels—especially when you’re just getting started. It’s best to hone in on the ones that have the biggest potential for your brand, and then tailor your content to those channels, specifically. These are just a few you can consider: 

• Facebook: With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most widely used social network today. It’s popular amongst all age groups, but most popular with the 30-49 crowd. If this is your audience, Facebook may be a smart place to start raising awareness of your brand. 

• Instagram: Instagram gets most of its traction with the 18-29 age group. With 1.38 billion monthly active users, it’s not quite as universal as its parent company, Facebook. But with a format that focuses on photo and video sharing, it’s perfect for brands with hyper-visual content (like a media company, or a design firm). 

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the only social destination on this list dedicated to professional networking—so for most, it’s the default choice for business to business (B2B) social media marketing. Boasting 774+ million users, it’s a natural choice for reaching lots of other businesses quickly. 

• Twitter: A fast-paced, text-forward platform, Twitter is best known for sparking conversations through short-form posts (or, tweets). According to Pew Research, it’s most popular amongst the 18-29 age group. But unlike LinkedIn, the conversation on Twitter is a mixed bag, with sub communities focused on anything from news, to business, to entertainment, so you’ll need to choose your niche carefully. 

• TikTok: Founded in 2016, TikTok is the newest social channel on this list. But don’t let the platform’s age fool you—it’s consistently ranked as one of the most downloaded apps in the world, and in the United States. Notoriously popular with the 18-29 age group, TikTok is best known for bite-sized videos that don’t take themselves too seriously. 

• YouTube: A part of Google, YouTube is a video sharing platform that boasts 2.29 billion monthly active users. With everything from entertainment videos, to detailed tutorials (like ours), to news and world events, YouTube’s content runs the gamut. Even though it falls behind Facebook in monthly active users, research shows that YouTube is the most common platform of the bunch (with the vast majority of folks 18-64 saying they use the platform). It’s a great choice for video-focused content—especially if you have the resources to invest in quality production. 

Every social network claims its own unique audience. What’s the sweet spot for your brand? Which platforms are home to your target customers, or your current customers? Which are best aligned to your brand, or your product? Once you’ve narrowed it down, you’ll be able to better prioritize your resources, and tailor your content to the channels that matter most.

5. Optimize your social media profiles

Your brand’s social media profile is a chance to tell your story for potential customers. It’s one of your best chances to entice them to follow your brand—which is key for building your audience, and your credibility.

It might seem obvious, but before you start posting, your first step should be to complete your profile on each of the channels you’ve picked. To get started, pick out a standard profile photo, and write a short, universal description of your brand—roughly 80 characters or less should help you get your point across. Keep it consistent across all channels to enforce your brand identity and make it easier to find you. 

An “optimized” profile looks different on every channel, but a few elements you could consider adding are:

• A link to your website (or even a mini landing page with multiple links, like Linktree) 

• Hashtags related to your brand (or that you post under a lot)

• A plug for any time bound offers or news your brand is promoting (like a recurring livestream, for example)

• A quick description of what type of content you tend to share

6. Perform a content audit

If you’re already active on social channels, a social media content audit is a chance to take a fresh look at your current tactics. In a social media content audit, you’ll comb through the content you’ve shared on your channels. Note the day that each post was shared, the media that went with it, plus copy, hashtags, and engagement metrics. Putting it together in aggregate can help you spot patterns in what is (and what isn’t) working in your content. Note: If you don’t have a social presence already, you can skip this step. 

To save you effort, some platforms will let you export your engagement data to get a closer look. Others tend to share info only in-app. Check out these resources to see how to see your data on each platform: 

• Facebook

• Instagram

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

• TikTok

• YouTube

7. Brainstorm and plan the content you’ll publish

Next, it’s time to plan your content. Whether you’re revamping your existing channels, or kickstarting your social presence altogether, this is your chance to apply what you learned in steps 1-3. 

Start by looking at upcoming holidays, industry trends, competitors, research reports, past content, and key events for inspiration. Depending on the channels you’ve chosen, you could try things like: 

• Short-form videos

• Ask me anythings (AMAs) 

• Quotes from relevant leaders

• Thought-provoking research 

• ...and more 

Keep in mind that variety (within reason) is your best friend here. Especially as you’re starting out, sharing a mix of content types can help you zero in on what works best. Measuring that performance, in turn, can even help you learn even more about your audience. Are they showing sudden interest in research? Or maybe an unexpected appreciation for comedic posts? Just make sure you keep your ideas consistent with your brand to stay recognizable. 

8. Establish a publication cadence 

In social media marketing, a consistent publishing schedule is key. Setting a steady cadence of content can help you build trust with your audience, and can help you better plan your use of resources (and time). 

But finding the right balance of effort and engagement isn’t always easy. Maybe you’ve noticed that your LinkedIn audience clamors to comment on your daily posts, but your Twitter audience isn’t engaging, even when you’re posting multiple times per day. In that case, you might try ramping up to two LinkedIn posts per day, and take a few Twitter posts off your plate. Play with content volume and cadence to determine what drives the highest possible engagement for each channel. Schedule content out ahead of time so you'll have always-on coverage (which you can do using our Airtable<>Hootsuite automation).

9. Boost top-performing content with ads

Paid content is one surefire way to wedge your content into the social media algorithm. Especially on platforms like Facebook, organic reach has been on a steady decline for years. It’s not to say that organic content can’t be successful—but generally, your organic content is only ever shown to a small percentage of your followers. Putting money behind top content can help ensure it gets seen by your target audience. 

One way to bump up visibility is to “boost” your organic posts with paid ads. This approach can give your social content far greater reach, or even just help you show your content to a bigger portion of your followers. Depending on the network, you can even target desired demographics, job titles, locations, or known interests.

Try this social advertising template to organize and track all of your paid social campaigns. 

10. Collect and engage with feedback from users 

Engagement is the ultimate metric on social media. Strong engagement shows the algorithm that you’re creating useful content, and helps you better understand what your users want to see. 

As you create your content, make a point to invite feedback from your customers. Keep a close eye on your comments section to see what they’re sharing. You can even try asking what kind of content they want to see through an informal poll. Use our user feedback template to capture and track valuable customer feedback you find in a centralized place. It’ll make it easier for your team to spot patterns that can help hone your strategy—or even surface opportunities in the business. 

11. Study the data

Gathering performance insights is key to any social media marketing program. As the saying goes: you can’t manage what you can’t measure.  

Make sure you’re tracking information like: 

• Post content and cadence 

• Follower demographics over time

• Follower count over time

• Post engagement 

• Click-throughs 

• Traffic to your website from social 

Collect your data into one dashboard to help you find patterns in behavior. Does your audience respond better to video content? Or do they engage more in the mornings vs. the evenings? Maybe they’re more likely to click on articles that cover research topics? Performance data enables your team to optimize your social media marketing plan and steadily improve engagement.

12. Use the right tools

An effective social media marketing plan is an important stepping stone on the road to achieving your social media goals. And using the right tools can shorten the time it takes to get there. While our marketing templates can help you get started with your social media marketing plan, you can also build and tweak your own versions of those templates. With Airtable, you can create your own easy to use, fully customized social tool that integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack. Try building on one of our marketing templates to get started.