Strategically planning your social media posts

[Karina DeJong]

One useful way at the Willmar Area Community Foundation for marketing ourselves, is social media. However, there is a direct correlation when to post, what to post and how you post. Therefore, one way we have organized our social media posts was creating a marketing plan to help guide and support our posts to help continue strong product.

Each year at our foundation, we have a theme which is based off our annual report that comes out in the earlier part of the calendar year. This year our theme is “philanthropy at work”. This provides a starting point for creating some hashtags and generated quotes to use throughout the year. To start our marketing plan for social media for the year, we create an excel for each month and each week. In our opinion, you should be posting on your social media page 1-2 times a week, depending on content. If you don’t have anything strong for use or have random filler content, consider once a week as it is important to not fill your page with random, non-specific content. Bad content is no content.

You can start slow with filling out each month for your community foundation social media pages. Our recommendation would be to hash out each month at a time, to start. What we start to do is consider holidays, activities and events within or in relation to our organization, and any other correlations that could be strong content during that time of the year. Of course, this excel is just a guide, you can always change it. By going through the week by week, you can go over your work calendars to pinpoint some areas that would be good to post. Then you start filling out what the post is going to be, where it will be posted, when it will be posted and who will be posting it. It is okay to have open weeks when you are unsure of good content that would fit within. In addition as I mentioned, looking at holidays is another action you can use. We even look at national days and months to consider if they deem appropriate for use. For example when it is mental health awareness month, we share a donor story that her legacy helps support national mental health organizations.

There are lots of ways to strategically plan out your social media posts, by starting with some key factors to consider, you can truly fill out your calendar and have some great content to share.

How do you implement a plan for your social media? What are some factors you consider? I would love to hear others ideas!

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