The New Year is fast approaching and that can leave you dreaming of a successful 2019. It can also stop you in your tracks when it comes to creating a plan. Let alone beginning to execute that plan in less than 2 weeks!
Don’t worry; you’re not the only one. So, we decided to share how to successfully plan your social media marketing for the New Year.
1. SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT
People tend to forget this one more often than not when it comes to your business page. As a business owner, you’re often doing so much that you can neglect your own social media marketing. Which, as we all know, is quite possibly the most powerful branding tools. A simple fix to this is content scheduling. When you have time and are feeling creative, take a couple hours and get some content scheduled. Our personal scheduling tool favorite is later.com. They offer both free and paid versions. At Think, we schedule all content, at least, two weeks in advanced. How about the post that went up this morning? That was carefully curated over two weeks ago, somewhere between Thanksgiving leftovers and putting up the Christmas tree.
Content scheduling is incredibly useful for big launches or holidays. Know you’re dropping some new product Feb 1? Don’t create the post in the 11thhour, do it in advance when you have plenty of time. Get it scheduled in January and shift your focus to the rest of your “to do” list. Great social media execution shouldn’t be stressful.
2. TASK SCHEDULE
Look, I love my paper planner as much as the next person. I have hundreds of colored pens and stickers ready to jot down my action items. But the things that really need to get done? That goes in Asana. Asana.comcan be used as a task scheduler for your entire team. Never forget anything ever again under your pile of sticky notes. You can also assign tasks and create due dates. Remind yourself immediately of the content you need done in 2-3 weeks because the holidays will come and go and you’ll be left with a pile of work.
3. CONTENT CALENDAR
It’s one thing to put all your content into a scheduler, but another thing to have a collaborative calendar for your entire team. At Think, we utilized the power of Google Drive and Google Sheets to create a color-coded calendar that the entire team can edit in real time. As most companies, when it comes to marketing, everyone does a little to help. We have multiple people writing blogs, someone scheduling Instagram and Facebook, another scheduling email campaigns, and without an integrated calendar things can get messy. Creating a calendar that everyone can see/edit allows for maximum coverage for any given initiative. For example, if an email campaign is launching next Thursday, throw it in the calendar so the person scheduling Facebook can tag-team the content and get maximum eyes on this campaign.
Setting yourself up for success doesn’t need to take hours and hours of stressing on the computer after the workday is long over. Taking little steps (and utilizing the amazing apps people have created) makes things so much easier. Cheers to a productive New Year!
