The moment I decided to take my writing seriously I knew I had to come up with a social media plan to support my goal.
I’m not one of the writers who knew they wanted to be authors since they were small kids. I actually started writing poetry in Spanish and sometime during middle school I discovered that I enjoyed coming up with stories and writing them down. I’ve been writing on and off as a hobby since then but only in the last couple of years (I would say maybe in the past 3 to 5 years), I’ve been contemplating making it my career.
When you decide to change careers pretty much in your late twenties or early thirties you know you have to make a plan if you want to make the transition work.
As someone who has a degree in advertising and took some classes about social media and how to come up with campaigns for this new (at the time I was in uni) medium and had been using it and paying attention to all the changes and nuisances of each platform, I had a fairly good idea how to set up a plan. It was a matter of what was the purpose of my content and what frequency posting would be the best for me.
One thing I would like to point out is I know consistency is very important (almost a key factor) in growing your social media and your brand awareness; that in my mind was a given. But what I needed to figure out was the frequency. One thing I’ve seen a lot is people confusing consistency with frequency.
When I changed my personal Instagram to a writer's Instagram I put some things to test. The first thing was frequency. As someone who is very introverted (and a huge homebody), I had to find what frequency would work best for my mental health. Social media is a great tool and you could meet many people and learn many things but since it is a tool everything in it is curated. If you aren’t constantly aware of it, it could mess up your mind. Also, it takes the same energy out of an introvert as physical gatherings do. I wanted to use it mindfully and purposefully.
So I tried a couple of different posting frequencies. I posted daily for a month, a couple of times a week for a month, and then once a week for a month. I also tried automated posting services, reminding myself to create the content and post it and set up all the posts in the draft in the order I wanted to release it and just post them at the time I wanted. I decided on a frequency I wanted to post and did it consistently for a month at the least.
Sadly I don’t have screenshots with the numbers but my following grew when I was posting daily and when I was posting once a week. Both of them did well on visibility too. Posting a couple of times a week, at least for me, didn't perform the best compared to the other two.
Engagement (comments, bookmarks, likes) didn’t seem that different between the three but I think it has to do more with the type of content rather than the frequency it was posted. I’m still honing down what type of content I want to share (besides the broad topic of writing). Plus I know engagement can get affected by how much you engage yourself in the community and for the past couple of months I haven’t been the most engaged individual.
Now keeping all of this in mind, I sat down and decided how my social media plan would be for August. I’m not only trying to build a community for fellow writers and readers but I’m also building a Virtual Assistant business for small businesses and creatives while in the middle of moving back home. Knowing this daily posting without a service to post for me was not an option. Same with posting a couple of times a week, especially since I aim to post to at least three mediums (blog, youtube, and Instagram). That left me with posting once a week.
I decided on Saturdays (yes this was posted on Sunday and my only excuse is I’m drowning in boxes and stress). After deciding the frequency and the date I brainstorm topics. While I was planning my social media I thought this would be a good topic because I’ve never talked about it and my process is a lot simpler than other people I’ve seen both from following them or taking their courses. Granted a lot of them post daily or more than once a week.
After deciding what topics I want to tackle I assign them a date and work towards in the next few days on drafting the blog post, recording the video, and deciding what would be the photo and the caption for the Instagram post. And when Saturday comes (this case Sunday) I hit the post button.
Social media doesn't have to be complicated, it can be but it doesn't have to be. It should serve you and not you serve it. If you find yourself in the latter half I highly recommend you change your approach or maybe come to terms that that specific social media platform might not be for you. I know a lot of people say you have to be everywhere but you really don’t have to.
To summarize here is a little list of how I go about my social media planning:
Decided how this social media tool will serve my monthly goal.
Decided which frequency would be the best for me.
Decided posting dates
Brainstorm topics
Assign topics to dates
Create the content
Post on the dates you decided
Is very simple but if you stick to it and create content that YOU are proud and excited for you’ll see your platform grow and you might end up enjoying social media.
Share with me in the comments if you plan your social media or what is your approach to it. Also if you have any topics you'd like to hear how I tackle them please leave those topic suggestions in the comment section.
Thank you for reading and happy planning!