🏆 Community Question Giveaway: 2024 Planning

My top tip for social teams is to not spend time overanalyzing content in order to make sure every post you create or plan is “amazing.”

I find that getting hung up on making sure every post is perfect often leads to spending way too much time trying to tweak already good posts instead of focusing on areas that could provide a lot of opportunities. Not every post is going to be a viral sensation or garner millions of engagements. A lot of times the posts that do are ones that are more casually created and not super refined.

So maybe my overall theme and advice for 2024 content planning is to just go with the flow. If you’ve got a silly idea for a TikTok or a fun idea for an Instagram Story, just throw it out there. Overplanning is usually never the answer when it comes to social.

Partner with your advocates for content! Some of our inspiration for great content comes from the field in our organization, so leveraging those who are already your biggest fans on social with a mutualistic partnership when it comes to content will greatly pay off.

Can’t get your creative juices to flow? Start with AI! I may not use the AI generated posts exactly but it certainly helps get my mind stimulated! 

One of our main challenges as a team is collaborating with other departments/stakeholders on key initiatives or campaigns when it comes to organic social. Currently, we’re sometimes being brought in at the last minute and finding that the brief isn’t fit for organic social, and if we were brought in sooner, we could work together on making sure that the brief works for every output. 

What we’re aiming to do in 2024 is to create a seamless internal process so that key stakeholders understand what is needed when briefing our team, how this ties into our overall business strategy and how our team operates when planning future content. 

Example of this is;

✅ schedule in a briefing call with our team

✅ social media team goes away to create a robust social media strategy based on the ask 
✅ set up another call to take the key stakeholder(s) through the social media strategy to make sure we’re all on the same page, discuss any feedback/questions

✅ collaborate on a shared calendar to execute the ask

It’s very much in the testing phase, but we’re hoping that in time, these shared calendars can feed into our master calendar and make things much smoother for us as a team! Hope this helps any social media managers who are looking for ways to break any silos with other teams. 

Engauge with your audience!

Let your audience know that there are real people behind your accounts and connect with them. Building relationships with your audience helps build loyalty, better understanding of your audience, and organic growth.

Especially with Millennials and Gen Z who don’t respond as well to “perfectly curated” feeds, they want to see people behind your account.

I am always trying to find new departments within our organization that could benefit from social media. Often just taking the time to set up a meeting and talk to them about their departments goal or the products/services they are in charge of, can spark inspiration on ways they could benefit from social media. 

Everyone loves social media and has ideas or wants to share things they saw and loved. Even if it turns out that partnering with those teams doesn't make sense, it can still help you in generating new content ideas. 

My biggest piece of advice would be really know and understand what your social goals are and how they connect to the larger organization's goals. It’s not enough to set a goal at the beginning of the year and check back in at the end of the year. For any campaign or collaboration or post, you should be able to intuitively answer:

• who is the audience for this?
• why do they care?
• what is the next step for them after this content?
• what is the specific measure of success for this and how does it connect to the big picture goals

and adjust your strategy based on the answers. As SMMs, we get asked to do a lot. Having really clear objectives is the best way to prioritize what we’re doing, weed out low value asks, and make sure our content is set up for meaningful success.

It might appear a bit basic, but writing things down and proper communication is key. There are so many things happening in social and in a business at a given time. It’s very easy to lose track of that one idea or that one campaign that you talked about or worked on. So having a structured planning tool makes things much more manageable. And this links to my second point about communication with your team. You need to make sure that everyone is aware and up-to-speed with other people’s projects/workload/progress in order to work efficiently together. 

Host a weekly creative brainstorm with colleagues outside of your team! Each week, we bring together individuals from product, design, customer support, client success, marketing, and more to brainstorm on a certain topic (e.g. a holiday, a campaign, an event, etc). Everyone comes to the call with an idea and/or an example and we spend the entire call being creative - ideating, collaborating, and executing content for that week as a cross-functional group. It’s the most fun standing call I have on my calendar, and it’s amazing to work with so many different functions on one zoom call.