Content Planning
My name is Karla and many know me as Champions School of Real Estate’s Social Media Manager. I am responsible for the statewide social media initiatives and I’m glad to say that it has been a uniquely enjoyable role that has allowed me to witness the achievements and successes of our Champions students. Many people have a lot of questions about social media and I wanted to focus the content of this blog post to address social media content planning. Today I had the pleasure of speaking to a “Prospering in the Hot Texas Market” class at Champions School of Real Estate, where I had the opportunity to answer some of their pressing social media questions. They asked me wonderful questions and it was a pleasure getting to speak with them!
In today’s blog post, I am going to be sharing about content planning for social media.
I think that Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said that by “failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Most people don’t wake up every morning to think about what on earth they are going to post on their social media channels everyday. They have life to attend to and so do you!
To approach social media in a sane, time-efficient way, I do suggest that once a month you schedule a few solid hours for yourself to devote to brainstorming for your social media content strategy. The following is a breakdown of what a typical brainstorming/planning session looks like for me.
Step 1: Brainstorming
Ask yourself (and write down the answers to) the following questions:
- What goals am I trying to reach and what products and services am I promoting to reach them?
- What major events do I have coming up that are worth highlighting?
- How can I inform my audience about the real estate listing/buying/investing process?
- How can I motivate and inspire my audience?
- How can I personalize my posts so that people I work with can get to know me?
- What events and holidays are coming up?
- What do I want to motivate and inspire my audience to do? (Call to Action)
Step 2: Define Content Types
Having a proper social media content plan will help you make sure you cover all of your bases without the stress of coming up with new content, so after brainstorming, what I normally do is organize my answers into categories to make a list of post types that I want to make sure I use throughout the month. I don’t like leaving any stone unturned, so this helps me make sure I cover all my bases.
Here is an example of how I would have answered organized this, for example:
| What products and services am I promoting? | List every different product and service as individual post categories |
| What major events do I have coming up that are worth highlighting? | Facebook Events, Live Tweeting/Posting During Events, |
| How can I inform my audience about the real estate listing/buying/investing process? | Share Articles, Relevant Statistics, Case Studies, Mortgage Rates |
| How can I motivate and inspire my audience? | Quote Posts, Testimonial Posts, Photos of Buyers Having Closed or Sold on their Homes, Seasonal Advice for Maintaining Homes |
| What do I want to motivate and inspire my audience to do? (Call to Action) | Contact Me Posts, Visit My Website Posts, Upcoming Event Posts, Call Me, Refer Me, Etc. |
| General Events and Holidays | Company Birthdays, National Holidays, Local Community Events, Fun Social Media Holidays, etc., |
| Personalize | Introduce people to your life and personality; make them feel like they know you. People do business with people they know and trust, remember? |
| Curated Content | Videos, Photos, Articles, etc. |
| Have Fun | Share Weekend Forecast, Have fun photo contests, fill-in-the-blank, caption this photo, funny photos, quotes, seasonal articles, etc. |
Planning for and developing a good variety of content may seem tedious at first, but your follower base will grow and engage with you more because they will trust that you are genuine in providing information and services that is relevant to them.
Step 3: Organize Post Types & Plug into Calendar
Now that you have content types, you need to decide how many times a day you’d like to post. I would recommend you begin with two – three posts a day (normally I recommend posting more, but we’ll get into that and post timing in other post when we discuss scheduling.)
Jumping into social media requires a long-term commitment and it may be frustrating to spend time on something without seeing immediate returns. By plugging your content posts into a calendar, you will help yourself stress a little less by knowing that the content you are sharing is covering all of your bases.
Something to consider: According to RallyVerse, a social media company from New York City, their “Golden Ratio” is 30% Owned Content, 60% Curated Content and 10% Promotional Content. Balance is required if you don’t want to burn out your follower base and turn them off to the content you’re sharing.
Remember that your social media following are building a relationship with YOU and you are providing them quality content that will help THEM in return. Fostering any relationship requires give and take – social media is no exception. You should never forget that. People that simply use social media to sell are demonstrating that they don’t understand how relationship marketing works. Social media is no exception in the respect, as the concept around “social” is about building relationships.
Activity: Print out a blank version of next months calendar and do the following….
- Fill in important dates, holidays and events that are already set on predetermined dates.
- You’ll see that once that is filled in you will have a lot of blank space left over through out the month, fill in the calendar with different post types until you have 3 different post types (from your list above) in each date
(Note: I like to use fine-point multi-colored sharpies to fill in my calendar, using a different color for every different type of content post. This helps me make sure that everything is pretty spaced out and not too repetitive.)
A blurry version of a recent calendar I worked on – I color-code, highlight and scratch out as the days go by.
Once you have this you are going to have a very basic skeleton of what you’ll have going on throughout the month, so you won’t be scrambling for what to post on a daily basis.
Champions – your questions are always welcome! What pressing social media questions do you have? What would you like me to answer? Please let me know and I’ll be glad to answer you back in the form of a blog!
Best,
Karla Larraga
Social Media Manager
Champions School of Real Estate