How to plan your social media content

How you plan your social media comes down to a personal preference and natural way of working. You might be a fan of traditional pen and paper or prefer a digital system that allows you to efficiently switch between apps and calendars. There’s no right way to do it. Just find a way that works for you.

Here’s my list of planning tools to help you. Personally I switch between a few of these, depending on my mood and creative energy levels.

7 Ways to Smash Your Social Media Planning

1. Pen and paper. For me there’s nothing better than a blank piece of paper to brainstorm ideas and quickly plan out a month’s content. It’s a creative way to work and allows for an unstructured flow of thoughts. Just because there are other methods doesn’t mean that this traditional and low cost way of working cannot be effective. Definitely use the blank piece of paper for brainstorming ideas.

2. A social media planning pad. I regularly use Hello Time’s Weekly Planning Pad. It’s a planning tool designed by owner Sam Smith to help you organise your week more efficiently and be more productive with your time. It’s really versatile with many uses from just planning out your weeks tasks, even your meal plans to draft plan a week or a month of social media content. I have an amazing digital content library and planner on Trello, but sometimes I feel the need to break away from the busy and organised and begin with a blank canvas and find it more empowering to wander. My creative mind loves this. I often start here when I’m planning content for clients. It’s A3 so plenty of room. And there’s fabulous dotted thinking spaces on the reverse – in the style of bullet journal pages.

3. A social media planner. Again if you are a pen and paper kind of planner, there are lots of social media planners available. Jan Murray has been producing one for many years complete with all the special awareness dates. It guides you with your planning and gives calendar style pages to plan out your months and content.

4. A digital project management tool such as Trello. I plan my social media content with access to a content library housed as a Trello board. I capture content ideas daily into this library, instantly allocating them to content pillar lists. When I’m planning a month of content, I’ll refer to the ideas library and pick and choose my topics from there.

Within the Trello board I then plan out my month’s content. Planning a month usually takes me just 30 minutes or so, because the ideas are already there and it’s just a case of dragging and dropping the content topic into the weeks. It works well for me. I use the free version.

5. Other digital tools such as Notion and Asana. Both work in a similar way to how I use Trello explained above. You may have a preference for Notion of Asana and have used them previously for other project or task management. I have clients who are successfully using both.

6. In a scheduling app such as Planoly, Plann, Planable or Later. The last option is to plan directly in a scheduling app. Particularly if you are an image based brand, this can work really well. You could load up all of your images to use for a month, drag them around into the correct order you would like to post and then just write your captions from there. There are free versions that allow a certain amount of posts to be uploaded and scheduled each month.

7. I nearly forgot the trusty excel spreadsheet! Works equally well and has served me very well in planning content for clients in the past, in the days before I moved to Trello. I still use an excel spreadsheet / google sheet to plan out ideas with power hour clients in content planning sessions now.

So that’s my roundup of ways to plan your social media. If you don’t know where to start, just begin with a piece of paper and a pen and get your ideas out of your mind and onto paper.

Happy planning! And if you need a hand, you know where I am. My content planning power hours will get you a month or more content planned and ideas to keep you going for sometime.

My most popular workshop ‘Content Planned’ is now available as an online masterclass. The Content Planning masterclass will give you lots of quick wins to help you get organised and save you heaps of time and effort with your social media marketing.