Tips for Small Teams: Planning Your Social Media Strategy

Even with a dedicated marketing team and specialists in social media marketing, planning and scheduling your social media campaigns can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, for small teams, there are an abundance of free or low-cost templates available online to help you save hours of time in putting together your social media campaigns.

To be successful you need to do the same things you do in any marketing plan:

• Identify who you want to reach
  • Families
  • Professionals
  • Youth
  • Seniors
  • General community

• Know your audience and their interests
• Check out what your competitors are doing in social media
• Determine which social media platforms will work best for your audience.
  • Facebook is the largest, and its demographics include adults. Many adults 40 and older use Facebook, and for many of us, these are a big segment of our audience. Post at least once a week. For many audiences, Mondays and Tuesdays are the least desirable times to post.
  • Instagram has fewer users than Facebook, but a much higher rate of engagement. It is also much more popular with younger adults and may be a better way to reach them. It is a highly visual platform, and is used mostly on mobile devices. That means people can access it throughout the day. Early mornings (over coffee,etc). are times when a lot of people are on Instagram.
  • LinkedIn is the network most used by professionals. This is an ideal platform to reach adults interested in professional development. Videos and content related to professional development are good ideas, especially if you can tie them to your program.
  • Pinterest has the smallest following of the networks listed here. However, it is extremely popular with women, especially younger women. It is highly visual and often focused on do-it-yourself topics. LERN would recommend not using this as your primary social page.

Once you have your target audiences and platforms set, it is time to begin planning your content. You can create your own content which can include information about new or innovative programs you offer, as well as old favorites, highlights of great teachers, features on participants, upcoming events, and curated content that will be of interest to your followers. Make sure you focus on content to create engagement and don’t just use your social media to sell your classes.
Once you have started your media efforts, you can use their analytics to find out when people are most likely to engage with your posts and what kinds of posts get the most engagement. This will help you define what you post and when to get the greatest visibility
When your entire social media strategy is planned out on a single calendar, it is much easier to make sure you target the right people with the right information.
Here are just a few resources you can check out, but you can also look for other options that might fit your situation more closely: