Before dishing out content on your social media networks, it is often great to have a social media plan. A social media marketing plan is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve for your business using social networks. Below are some of the steps to create a social media plan.

Objectives/Goals
Before creating your content for social media, you need to set the goals for your campaign. Ensure that your goals are in line with your brand’s marketing strategy. A great framework that can guide you is the S.M.A.R.T strategy. Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound.

Audit
Run an audit of your current social media strategy if you have one. Take a look at the current audience that you are serving, how your clients respond to the content, how frequent you post versus how frequent they respond, how broad the reach of your content is and several other analytics such as a number of likes, comments, shares and so on.

Create/Improve social media accounts
After carrying an audit, the next thing to do is to improve the current state of the accounts by making adjustments to the branding metrics such as logo, general information, SEO optimization and so on. Make sure that the look is in line with the organization’s brand and description.

Inspiration from other brands
Take a look at several similar brands to yours and get inspiration from them. What are they doing right? What can you adapt to your strategy? If you study these brands, you would find out certain things that you can adjust to suit your brand’s communication strategy.

Content Strategy
Your next step is to develop a content strategy for each account. Who are the people that you will be speaking to? What would be you content direction? How frequently do you want to post? Who would be in charge of each account or content development? Make sure that all these are checked before posting.

Testing, Evaluation, Adjustment
After developing your strategy, test it to see if it works. You can test your strategy for a duration of your choice: e.g., a week, a month, six months, etc. Evaluate your performance and make adjustments where necessary.

Excerpts from Hootsuite Blog