How Social Media Planning Can Improve Your Brand’s Online Presence

In 2023, the go-to channel for marketing a business of any size is social media. And for good reason. There are 4.89 billion social media users around the world, and their purchase decisions are highly influenced by what they see on social networks. A whopping 76% of consumers have purchased a product that they saw in a brand’s social media post. 

So posting on social media is a no-brainer. But there are multiple different approaches you can take to your business’s social media marketing efforts, with some being much more advantageous than others. In this article, we’ll explore the planning approach to social media, explaining what it is and all of the numerous advantages that businesses can expect from social media planning. Let’s dive in. 

What is social media planning?

There are two possible ways to promote your business on social media: with and without planning.

Newer businesses with fewer resources often try to do social media marketing without planning. They know how important social media marketing is, so every once in a while, they post to one or two social networks, coming up with the idea for the post on the spot.. 

And this is okay. It certainly is better than not having a social media presence at all. But it can also be a little stressful and disorganized, leading to a disjointed brand voice and more pressure on the business every time somebody suddenly remembers, “Oh no! We haven’t posted on social media yet this week!” or wonders, “Have we posted anything for the holidays yet…?”.

That’s where the second approach comes in: social media planning. This is a much more organized, strategic way to do social media marketing. It involves creating a content calendar and planning ahead – usually a month in advance – so you know exactly which posts you’ll create each month. Many businesses also use posting tools like Promo Planner to have social media posts automatically published at certain dates and times that they choose in advance. 

The benefits of social media planning

As you can probably guess just from the above descriptions, social media planning has a significant number of advantages over the alternative. Here are some of the benefits that you can expect if you opt for social media planning for your business.

A sense of direction

A social media plan, or content calendar, can serve as something of a guiding light to help fight uncertainty and indecision. When you make a plan ahead of time, you don’t have to grapple with all of the minutiae and questions every time you want to post something. Instead, it’s all already decided for you. This can help significantly with decision fatigue and provide a comforting sense of direction and guidance. 

Consistent branding

One of the most important advantages of social media planning is that it helps ensure that your branding on social media stays consistent. And there’s no overstating the value of this, as it has been found that consistent branding across all channels can increase revenue anywhere from 10% to 20%. 

Planning social media posts in advance helps you make sure you’re always using the same brand voice and imagery and expressing the same brand values (even across multiple platforms), helping to build brand awareness and recognition. 

Staying active on social media

Without social media planning, it can be pretty challenging to stay truly consistent on social media. As soon as you start planning your posts, it makes it much easier to stick to a consistent posting schedule in which your accounts never go too long without any activity. And this is incredibly important as, when it comes to social media marketing, consistency is absolutely key.

Some of the advantages of keeping up a consistent posting frequency include:

• The algorithm prioritizing your posts more and displaying them more prominently
• Being exposed to more viewers
• Increased engagement
• Making followers look forward to your next post 

Efficient processes

When you plan your social media posts, you build consistent processes that you can use every month to keep your accounts active. The more you go through the same workflow again and again, the faster you’ll get every time, and the more efficient you’ll be. When you’re inconsistent about it, however, and fail to plan, you essentially have to reinvent the wheel every single time, resulting in a lot of inefficiency and time being wasted.

It’s also worth noting that there are social media planning tools that you can use that are specifically designed to save time and make your workflows more efficient. Promo Planner allows you to publish posts directly from our video maker, helping you skip the step of having to actually go on your social media accounts and post things yourself.

Bigger-picture thinking and social media campaigns

When you’re not planning your social media posts in advance, you keep all of your focus on the micro level on a post-by-post basis. Social media planning allows you to expand your focus to the macro level, giving you a big-picture overview of what you’re doing each month, as well as month after month. 

This enables you to start planning social media campaigns, or series of related posts that lead one to the next. That’s how the big brands promote themselves on social media, and it has a lot of significant advantages, helping you be more strategic about your approach. 

For example, you could plan a social media campaign for a shopping occasion such as Black Friday or back-to-school that encourages your followers to make purchases from your business through a series of promotion announcements and reminders. 

Enables analytics and data focus

One other element of social media marketing that all of the biggest brands implement is data-based decision-making. In order to make sure that they are optimizing their accounts for the most success, social media pros will look at analytics to see how each post is performing, making future decisions on the basis of past performance. 

Social media planning enables you to implement this type of data focus by giving you a clear record of all of your posts, past and present, that you can use to track how successful different types of posts have been.

Continual improvement 

The most successful, biggest brands aren’t satisfied with consistently good social media performance. They want to continually improve, growing their views, engagement, and follower count to reach more and more people and make more and more sales. By planning your social media posts and implementing data-based decision-making, you can work to grow your social media accounts month after month to help you meet your business’s goals. 

Social media planning with Promo 

At Promo, our goal is to help your business meet its potential by giving you the tools you need to thrive on social media. This extends beyond just our beloved video maker. We created our newest tool, Promo Planner, to help you implement social media planning so that you can take your business’s social media to the next level. Use it to save time, create more efficient processes, and enjoy all of the advantages of social media planning that we’ve discussed above. You’ll be a social media champ in no time.