Did you know that, according to Statista, there will be a whopping 5.35 billion internet users worldwide in January 2024? Of these, 5.04 billion – 62.3% of the world’s population – are social media users. Social media is no longer just about memes and cat videos. It has become an essential communication channel for companies to interact with their audience online.
So, what’s a content plan all about?
A content plan or publishing calendar is your marketing team’s best friend. It’s the secret sauce for organizing and structuring your content creation and publishing, allowing you to develop a content marketing strategy that aligns with your brand’s goals.
And when you’re juggling not just one but multiple social networks like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter, a structured and automated content planner becomes crucial. It allows you to tailor posts with a unique tone of voice for each platform, manage different versions of each message, and figure out which messages to send where.
But how do you ensure your content plan is efficient and practical for everyone involved – from writers and designers to marketers and team leaders?
In this article, we’ll look at how Planfix, the ultimate system for automating your company’s business processes, can help you optimize your brand’s communication strategy.
Do I need a content plan for social media posts?
You may be perfectly happy with your current social media content planner. So, why bother with a new format or even an entirely new system? The answer is simple: with the Planfix planner, you can speed up your content work by freeing everyone involved from mundane tasks and making more room for creativity!
Here’s how a content planner can solve a variety of challenges and lead you to more efficient content management and optimization:
Structuring your content: The Planner helps you structure your content and decide which topics and formats you want to use for different social networks. Think of short posts for Twitter and in-depth posts and case studies for LinkedIn.
Determine frequency and timing of publication: Figure out the optimal frequency and timing for your posts, considering your target audience’s social media activity. In addition, reminders and recurring tasks ensure you never miss a post.
Plan content in advance: Prepare your content for future releases and create a publication schedule for a week, a month, or even longer. This will help you stay organized and consistent in your content marketing.
Balance different types of content: The Planner helps you diversify your content by including text posts, images, videos, and links to articles or blogs.
Communicate with your audience directly through the system: By integrating social networks into Planfix, you can communicate with your audience through a unified platform and ensure that customers receive messages in the same network they reached you through.
Create a user-friendly content plan in Planfix
We’re excited to share our positive experience with Planfix, a business management platform that has transformed our content department. This case will show you how to make a social media content calendar and set up automatic scripts.
Our company runs all its business processes through Planfix. All customer requests and ideas for product development become tasks that go through a lifecycle, from discussion to developing new product features.
Once a task is completed, we decide whether it suits publication. The main criteria for selection are whether it can be explained to a large audience in plain language, what the feature is for, and, most importantly, what benefits it offers users.
Challenges that Planfix solves in content work
This case study aims to develop a business process for regular blog publications. The goal is to set up and automate the selection of news for two different channels: the company’s internal blog and social media.
Our company’s blog traditionally publishes big news and case studies, while social media is reserved for short, “quick” posts. As our product evolves and grows, information and news must be gathered, categorized, and published across multiple channels.
Implementing a content plan in Planfix: A step-by-step guide
We’re excited to share a part of our journey with Planfix, a platform that has revolutionized our approach to managing content in our department. Here’s how to make social media content calendar, transfer your content strategy and set up a content plan in your Planfix account.
Step 1: Create a task template
The first thing we did was create a specific task type. This template can be standardized for your content, marketing, and development departments. You could also create separate templates for different content requirements, e.g., for company news and publication ideas from the marketing department.
Each product improvement task has a “Publication” field with a set of statuses: “Awaiting blog publication,” “Awaiting social media publication,” “Published,” or “No publication required.”
Of course, you can customize the status to your business processes by specifying which social network the content should go to: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, etc.
Step 2: Create the Planner
Next, we created a planner called “Managing News.” You decide on a name that is convenient and clear to your team.
In our company, news can come from different sources:
- First, news publications. The “Planfix news Publication” list is the heart of this Planner. We have implemented this Planner using a table that visually resembles a classic Kanban board and contains four columns for each required value of the “Publication” list. The first two columns are news waiting to be published on social media and blogs, and the last two are for operational purposes. This Planner makes work easier by allowing you to drag tasks from one column to another.
- Secondly, publication candidates. We have placed another list following it, a kind of backlog called “Publication candidates.” It contains recently completed tasks that don’t have a value in the “Publication” field. What is the purpose of this list? Sometimes, it highlights tasks that might interest users and deserve a place in the news or a publication but were overlooked when the task was completed. We then pull these directly into the appropriate blog or social media publication list. This is our second approach to filling out our content plan.
- Thirdly, ideas. If an idea (such as this content planning case study) doesn’t yet have a task, I can enter that idea directly into the task creation field in the appropriate column. This idea then becomes a task and immediately lands in the correct column.
Step 3: Set up automation for managing news publications
How does this work? Every day at 10 a.m., content managers find an automated, recurring task in their Chronicle that reminds them about news tasks that need to be completed. This task includes:
- A link to the news publication Planner.
- A checklist of additional steps embedded in our business process, such as who else needs to be involved after a publication has been prepared. A step could be to personally inform a customer about a new feature in Planfix or to prepare a newsletter.
Upon receiving the task, content managers go to the “Managing news” planner via the link and select a news item for publication. Once they have prepared the news item and published it on the chosen platform, they return to this task.
After writing and publishing the news item, the content managers take care of follow-up tasks:
- Informing the customer: They check whether customers are waiting for this feature or improvement and forward the information to the Support Service, who then contacts the customer.
- Updating the Help Center: They also check the Help Center to see if an update is appropriate and publish it if necessary.
After this, the task is closed, and the cycle starts again the next day.
And there you have it! This is how our team designs and uses a content plan in Planfix. With three simple steps, you’ll have a finely tuned content production cycle. Of course, this is just one of the countless ways to use Planfix for content planning. Thanks to the system’s flexibility, you can adapt the Planner and automation to your business processes by deciding what content belongs where effortlessly, involving the right people at the right time, and, most importantly, ensuring nothing is forgotten thanks to the calendar, reminders, and recurring tasks.