How can I best utilise my time for Social Media planning?
Smart planning can help a small business maximise their efficiency when sourcing and planning content for their Social Media channels. The benefits of Social Media to a business is underestimated – especially when attracting new potential clients. Social media also gives our customers a voice – a positive voice can benefit our business as word of mouth is still so highly valued.
During our One on One Coaching Sessions, we are often asked how to efficiently plan posts for our Social Media channels. There are some great tools that can all link in together to help you efficiently source, share and plan your posts for Facebook and Instagram. Remember that above all, consistency of posts is important, along with quality, and then finally – quantity.
To maintain a balanced social feed, we recommend creating each post with one of four themes in mind, Dream, Plan, Engage and Sell. These themes are based on the tourism customer purchase cycle. Posting a balanced blend of the below four content categories will keep your Social Media presence interesting and engaging.
- Dream: is about positioning your destination and business by providing inspiring content to your followers.
30% of your posts should fall into the Dream category. - Plan: is about helping your followers plan their trips by providing informative and educational content to inform your future guests. Captions on these posts should also ask for comments/direct messages (DMs) wherever relevant so that you can start a relationship.
30% of your posts should fall into the Plan category. - Engage: is about creating content to engage your audience by enticing them to interact with your posts.
30% of your posts should fall into the Engage category. - Sell: is the content that you sprinkle in every 10th post that is focused on promoting your product or service directly.
10% of your posts should fall into the Sell category.
Generating ideas for unique posts that fall into each of these categories can be laborious and time-consuming. Thankfully we have designed a tool that does that process for you. Our Social Superhero Calendar is a very powerful social media content planner that automatically generates 24 months worth of unique daily post ideas designed around the above four themes and tailored to tourism businesses. Used in conjunction with a social media scheduling tool such as Facebook’s Creator Studio, Hootsuite or Later, this tool takes much of the guesswork out of Social Media planning.
Below we share our recommended Social Media planning method to help you minimise your time planning, sourcing and posting content and maximise your results.
- Firstly, we recommend downloading our Social Superhero Calendar so that you can map out your social media channel content with the assistance of over 1,000 pre-generated post ideas.
- Set up your Facebook Creator Studio so that you can schedule Facebook and Instagram posts in advance. Using a scheduling tool like Creator Sturion gives you a great overview of your scheduled posts. It’s also free to use and is automatically integrated with your business’ Facebook page.
Create posts for Facebook and Instagram and schedule them in advance using Creator Studio - Set a time once a week, or once a month, to use the Social Superhero Calendar to map out your posts for the coming week/month. The calendar is an idea generator, so you will need to fill out the basic post ideas with your own unique take and materials such as photos, videos, external links, etc.
Use the post ideas generated in the Social Superhero Calendar as a starting point for your businesses social channels - Go around and take pics and short videos of all the popular things your guests do and things people ask you about.
- Create a shared dropbox folder so you always have access to the shared images you can use. (maybe you can do 2 folders – USED and UNUSED to help with your content) then connect this Dropbox account to your Hootsuite one (through Hootsuite) – this means you can access your pics from anywhere!
- Remember that once your posts are scheduled – do the maintenance – like responding to comments and messages etc.
- Look at increasing your following on your Insta acct – follow similar pages and their followers to monitor their methods for engaging and interacting with their audiences.
- Improve your Booking Confirmation email to include links to your website posts about what to do and see in the area and tours. In this email Include links to your social channels and ask people to ‘check-in’ or tag you in their post while they are enjoying their holiday. Doing this is going to make posting easier as you will have access to more content you can use.
- Look for opportunistic content for example – there is a family having a great BBQ by the pool – snap a pic and post to Social media (with consent) Help paint the pic for your potential guests. Or some HAPPY kids have just clearly some back from the beach with smiles from ear to ear – snap that pic and in the wording, you will mention how you are WALKING DISTANCE TO THE BEACH! Remember to paint the picture for your potential guests and weave your business attributes throughout the stories that you tell in your Social Media.
Opportunistic photos can help paint the picture of the experience a guest can have - Check your @mentions and #hashtags to see what content other people are creating related to your business that you can use for your own page.
- Check your stats and insights on your social media to review which types of content earn the highest engagement from your audience. It’s a good idea to know what you’re audience like right? Knowledge is power!
- Have fun with it and don’t be afraid to experiment.
