What Is a Content Plan for Social Networks and How to Make It

To confidently build up a base of subscribers and potential clients, the posting on the page of a business community in a social network should be regular and well thought out. Ingenious but occasional promotional posts or videos won’t help increase conversion rates. As in any serious business, like 20Bet, Amazon, or Netflix, you need a plan to fill a social media page.

What Is a Content Plan

A classic content plan is defined as a tabular schedule for one month’s worth of content. Some experienced perfectionist editors write a content plan for a quarter or a year.

However, at the outset, audience response studies and daily analytics are a priority. Since these factors can change any scenario beyond recognition, at the start, marketers recommend planning content no more than one or two weeks in advance.

For each of the publications in the table, fill in the columns:

• Content format: text, video, audio, graphics.
• Type of material and format of presentation.
• Heading, if any.
• The topic and title in the first approximation.
• A summary of the material.
• Date and time of release.
• Task status and performer.
• The area of display in the network: a long-term post or Stories that are deleted after 24 hours.

In practice, not only a detailed plan is used but also a truncated one, resembling a calendar. Usually in the truncated version a day of the week corresponds to a publication of a certain type.

The mission of any content plan is the same: to organize the information space with strategic and tactical marketing goals in mind.

How to Create a Content Plan

For the mission to be accomplished and the conversion rate to increase, you need to thoroughly research the product niche, expectations and requests of potential consumers and readers.

Objects to research:

• Target audience. Gender, age, education, marital status, income level, place of residence.
• Topics of interest to the target audience.
• Pages of competitors. We look at the number of likes, reposts, engagement rate.
• Frequency of publications on the site. We take into account the specifics of the site, our own capabilities and the achievements of the same competitors.

Knowing the answers to these questions, you can start making a content plan in Google Spreadsheet, Excel, or PDF format. The key point in the planning is competent alternation of content of different types.

Basic Types of Content in Social Networks

According to the intended purpose, there are the following types of content in social networks: advertising, sales, viral, storytelling, entertainment, informational, news, educational, expert, reputational, and user-generated. The format can be different: an article, a post, an infographic, video content, a check-list. A checklist is a step-by-step algorithm for achieving a certain goal, which is placed on one page.

Different types of content have different objectives. A pool of user-generated content creates comments and feedback. The goal of viral is to be shared with as many users as possible. Reputational works on brand image.

Visualization in a Content Plan

Each of the types listed can be categorized into one of three large groups: sales, informational and entertainment content.

Often the editor assigns a different color to each of the groups, shading the cell with the name of the material with it when compiling the content plan. There are more than three colors in the content plan: the type of material is added depending on the profile of the page or channel. For example, news.

Happiness Formulas: 4/1 and 90/10

There are two formulas that editors apply when working on a content plan. The formulas refer to the ratio of promotional texts to everything else.

If the frequency of content output is one piece per day or less, then 1 engaging or selling piece is needed for 4 informational and entertaining publications.

If several posts are posted online daily, the ratio of ordinary material to advertising material is 90/10.