Social Media

Marketing:
Six-Steps in
Creating a
SMM Plan

Prepared by:
Maria Angelita Ramona L. Valles
Faculty, Department of Graduate Business
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Note: The content of this materials should not be copied or distributed. This is used solely for the classroom purposes only.
The Social Media Marketing: An Introduction
The statistics illustrated in Hubspot that 92% of marketers claimed social media marketing was essential for the business
with 80% indicating social media marketing efforts have increased traffic to the websites. 97% of markets, according to
Social Media Examiner, participate in the social media marketing, but 85% of participants are not sure what social media
marketing tools are the best one to use, as well as how they should be marketing on social media, to begin with.
Social media marketing (SMM) has a huge potential for an increase in sales, but there is a lack of understanding among
entrepreneurs on how to achieve these and how to join in SMM arena successfully. SMM can benefit you and your
business through:
1. Increases in brand recognition;
2. Improve brand loyalty;
3. More opportunities to convert;
4. Higher conversion rates;
5. Increased inbound traffic;
6. Decreased marketing costs;
7. Increase search Engine rankings;
8. Better customer experiences; and
9. Better customer awareness.
 The Social Media Marketing Plan, why you need one
SMM plans are in-depth outlines of everything one want to achieve by making an organization active on
social media. Without a solid plan, SMM is a meaningless task, and the potential for success suffers greatly
without direction.
The outlet for advertising has matured to a point where it provides organizations with concrete, realistic,
and measurable impacts to the business profits. SMM has to work in sync with the rest of the business
strategy to ensure that the overall goals of the brand are being attained.
There are six steps to creating a social media marketing plan, like any other business plan this requires
details in order to be impactful to the business enterprise. These are as follows:
Step 1: Make Goals for Social Media Impact
Step 2: Create Social Media Profiles
Step 3: Establishing a Tone of Voice
Step 4: Creating a Post Strategy
Step 5: Experiment and Analyze
Step 6: Automate the Process, Engage with Followers, and Listen
Step 1: Make Goals for Social Media Impact
SMM helps businesses reach numerous goals to include the following:
1. Brand awareness increases
2. Improving customer loyalty and increasing sales
3. Increasing customer and potential customer engagement with the
organization
4. Increasing traffic to a website
5. Improving the customer service department
6. Increasing the number of followers or fans, which will increase the
amount of potential customers
These goals are a great way to start, it’s important that you begin by
focusing on just one or two of them at a time. Creating goals for a SMM
plan do not start with too broad with a goal which would spread the
resources too thinly and risk of not achieving the main purpose.
The best way is to create a S-M-A-R-T (Specific, Measurable, Attainable,
Relevant, and Timely) goals.
Let us revisit the SMART goals as follows:
Specific: Always have a clarity in the organizations AIM, never a vague goal.
Measurable: Knowledge if the SMM plan works with quantifiable monetary
revenues for the enterprise, and increase exposure to potential customers.
Attainable: Make sure goals are challenging, but must be realistically achievable.
Relevant: The SMM goals should be in line with the rest of the business goals;
gaining traffic is going to expose audiences t free product guides and industry
insights, and encourage potential customers to obtain a subscription to your
mailing list for more information and updates will encourage the purchase of
products and services from the company.
Timely: The need to set a timeframe for the goal. Open-ended goals but always
to meet a deadline. Timebound help stay accountable, driven, and less likely to
stray from the path when it comes to putting a plan in action.
Step 2: Create Social Media Profiles
If the goal is to be pinned down, start creating profiles that wow your
potential customers. There are small steps to make:
1. What Social Networks to Join
– There is one unique aspect in every social media. The primary characteristics
of each network can vary greatly. The key is to focus on just one or two that
will help you achieve you SMM plan.
– The audience demographics are the most imperative factor to consider.
Obtain a good idea of where your customers tend to hang out online in five
largest social media networks-Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and
LinkedIn.
2. Optimizing the Social Media Profiles
– An up-to-date, complete social media profile will give your visitors a good first
impression that will highlight the enterprise professionalism, and show people
the business is ready to serve. A good idea to refresh profiles from time to
time, but crucial to start off on the right foot.
• Upload profile photos and cover photos that will optimized your social media profile.
• Complete the About and Bio sections for each network fully, tailoring the text to the
audience of the social media networks you joined.
3. Perform an Audit for the Company and Competitors
If the company already created presence in a social media sites, the time a plan out
marketing plan is perfected through an audit. Audits ensure all your social media profiles
are up to date, and gives you an insight into how competitors are performing. Take a look
at the following checklists to get you started with an in-depth audit of your profiles and
your competitors profiles.
Company Profile: find and take note of every social media profile has, unofficial or official.
Profiles and fan pages set up by employees or followers should be merged to avoid confusion.
– Make sure profile and cover photos are always updated and consistent with company’s
branding.
– Update the Bios and About sections with current information and messaging, using the tone
and language suited to the social media used by the company.
– Take note of the follower and fan accounts of the profiles, when the last activity was recorded.
– If one account started to lag behind the competitors consider whether it is time to carry on
with that platform or whether best focused somewhere else.
Competitor Profiles: find a few social media accounts run by the competitors,
either from one network or a variety of networks.
– Take note how often the pages are updated with new posts, what are posted,
and what type of engagement the posts receive on average in the forms of
shares, likes, and comments.
– Write down the date and current number of followers and likes on the profile,
which is a benchmark to work out the growth versus you company’s growth a
later time.
– Examine the branding of the competitors profile:
❖ Profile and cover photo, and the tone.
❖ Do the competitor have a good reflection of the brand’s offering, the brand and the
brand personality?
❖ Is it something to emulate or stay away from?
Step 3: Establishing a Tone of Voice
The way you speak or write the message to the audience has a significant impact on how they view
the company. Brand personality is a set of associative and emotional characteristics that are
connected to a brand or company name. These things will shape how people view a company and
how they interact with a company. Often brand’s personalities mirror that their target customers.
The following are set of questions that will make everyone in your team has a consistent point of
reference to use.
✓ If your company or brand was a person, what type of personality would it have?
✓ If your brand was a person, what would their relationship be with the consumer? Would they like
to be a friend, a coach, a teacher, a parental figure among others?
✓ Write down what your company’s personality is not, using adjectives. Are there companies that
have similar personalities with your brand? Why are these companies similar?
✓ How do you want your customers to view your company or brand?
The answers to the above questions will lead you to a good idea on the tone of the social media
marketing the company is going to have, and set up to start creating and publishing content.
Step 4: Creating a Post Strategy
Your company may have the best looking social media profile and the best intentions in the world, but you don’t have the content
plan and a posting strategy, all those efforts can go to waste. Rather than plowing ahead without a plan, take a little time to build a
posting strategy that is going to knock the competition right out of the ring. Consider the following points:
– What forms of content are you going to post, and who is going to be responsible for creating that content? Images are necessary with most
social media platforms but video content is becoming a central medium to many companies’ content strategies. Other forms of content include
statistics, quotes, quizzes, comics and so much more.
– How often are you going to post, at what times during the day? There’s always a debate going on about what posting frequency and times of
the day are the best to post. The truth is there isn’t a one size fits all solution to this. The answer to that question is unique to every company
and audience.
– How often you want to post is going to depend on the industry your are in, your capability to make and crate good content, your reach, and the
social network you are using. As a general rule, businesses ought to aim to post on Facebook one or two times a day, five times or more per day
on Twitter, and once a day on LinkedIn and Instagram. What time of the day you post content should be determined by past history, or by
targeting your fans when they are most likely to be active on social media, such as before work in the morning, after work in the evening , or
any time during the weekends.
– How are you going to promote content using both free and paid strategies? Without a loyal, large, and engaged audience, posting an update
and hoping for it to do well isn’t going to work for you in a long term. With competition from attention in the social media feeds of your fans,
posting the same content so many times in different guises, as well as targeting them using paid promotions, should be big part of your
strategy.
An excellent way to keep track of your progress and when to post is to keep a social media content calendar. This will help plan for
weeks or months ahead of time and give you an idea of the content you will be posting on social media. This will help prevent you
from posting inconsistently and randomly, and it will let you build themes into your updates weekly, monthly, and seasonally.
Spontaneous posting on social media still does have its place, such as in response to breaking news or a customer service crisis that
has to be addressed immediately, but for the main part of your marketing strategy, a content calendar is good step.
Step 5: Experiment and Analyze
The most post are put out by a company, and the more you experiment, and clearly find out what content is going to work best
for the company, what times of the day are best for engagement activity, and how often you need to post new stuff. The
easiest way to know what’s working and what’s not is to use a reporting tool. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have
a built-in analytics you can use that give you a good idea of the performance of your profile and growth, such as a post and
page likes, popular posts, audience demographics, and a lot more. A company can measure the success of your social media
marketing plan is to include links shorteners that keep track of the clicks on the link, and the social section of the Google
analytics is a good tool for observing the impact of social media marketing on your website.
Structure Testing Method
There are times when the amount of figures and charts become overwhelming, so here’s one way you can structure your social
media experiments clearly.
✓ Choose what it is you want to test. Is it the engagement rate on your video posts? The website referrals you get? The reach
of your images? Pick just one.
✓ Set a goal. After a certain period, a week or a month, check the statistics on the factor you have chosen to test and take
note of it. This going to be your benchmark for the following segment of testing.
✓ Double-down or try something new. Experiment with variations of your posting strategy, and then revisit that goal after
another period of time to see whether performance has declined, improved or stayed the same.
✓ Depending on the results, alter the strategy to optimize it and make it a regular part of the marketing plan. If it doesn’t
work, then try something you again.
✓ Did you meet the goal?
Step 6: Automate the Process, Engage with Followers, and Listen
The most wonderful thing about a detail social media marketing plan is you get to prepare the bulk of
your content strategies ahead of time, and then you can use automation tools to queue your content,
publish it, and distribute it exactly as your marketing plan schedule has dictated. Hootsuite, Post
Planner, and Buffer are all great tools to check out.
When your posting schedule has been automated, you free up your time to engage with the audience.
You can set aside time on a daily basis to chat and interact with customers who are engaging with
your content, answer questions, and thank people who have shared your posts, as well as active
searching, and thank people who have shared your posts, as well as active searching and native
notifications, tools such as Mention and Google Alerts send you emails when someone has mentioned
your brand online, which prompts you to re-share or interact with that post.
When you have social media marketing plan in place, you feel a lot more confident about using social
media to market your business. You are much better prepared to reach your goals for social media
marketing. Remember these steps, create your plan, and you’ll be well on your way to social media
marketing success!
Marketing to Clientele on Facebook
TIPS FOR MARKETING ON FACEBOOK
Learn the following tips are going to help you increase engagement your marketing efforts:
1. Timing 11.Website Custom Audiences
2. Images 12.Increase PR Efforts
3. Contests 13.Split Testing Facebook Ads
4. Crowdsourced Answers 14.Running Facebook Promotions and Contests
5. Boost Posts 15.Rules for Promotions and Contests
6. Find Audience Insights 16.Do’s and Don’t of Facebook Contests
7. Give Them Unique and Valuable Content 17.Choosing What Type of Contest to Run
8. Building your audience 18. Timeline Contests
9. Email Acquisition with ActionSprout 19.Facebook App Contests
10.Boost New Product Announcement 20.Best Practices for Contests
Secret Tips to Marketing on Twitter
Statistics reported by CNN suggests a majority of the people who are logging onto Twitter are seeking
information and not entertainment, which means businesses can easily attract the attention of potential
customers or clients looking for more information. Using Twitter for business, you can optimize results by
following a few simple steps:
1. Optimize your Bio 15. Twitter Marketing Plan:
2. Find out Influencers and Experts in the Target Areas and Interact with Them – Set Objectives
Regularly – Figure out Where Twitters Fit into the Content Strategy
3. Get your Colleagues Involved – Identify Target Audiences on Twitter
4. Tweet Regularly – Determine Best Times to Tweet

5. Ask for Twitter Love – Getting Content Ideas

6. Track Mentions and Respond – Monitor Competitor’s Tweets

– Choose what you Share
7. Retweet
– Promote Content
8. Favorite Tweets
16. Building an Audience
9. Follow Hashtags or Trends
17. The Strategy Overall
10. Offer Special Deals and Discounts
18. Optimize that Bio
11. Use Images and Videos
19. Discover and Engage with Twitter Users
12. Promote Tweets
20. Grow by Following Users
13. Make Twitter integrated with other marketing efforts
14. Use Twitter Analytics
How Instagram Isn’t Just for Budding Photographers
Instagram is a great tool to use, but you have to know how to use it. The 25 ways your business can use
Instagram to boost customer interaction and sales
1. Get Familiar with Instagram using a Business Perspective 14. Create Network
2. Balance Fun Images with Images from Your Business 15. Create an Amazing Profile
3. Build a Following 16. Promote Using both Facebook and Instagram
4. Debut Videos 17. Qualify and Quantify
5. Embed Instagram Videos into Blogs or Websites 18. Reward Your Followers
6. Follow Followers Back 19. Showcase Employee Photos
7. Create a Flexible Posting Plan 20. Treat Followers to Visual Experiences
8. Use Apps 21. Use Hashtags Related to Your Industry or Niche
9. Inspire Your Potential Customers 22. Film Important Brand Moments
10. Use Filtered and Non-filtered Images 23. Expose Yourself to Other Brands
11. Try a Change in Perspective 24. Expose Something New
12. Create Photo Contests on Instagram Using Facebook 25. Make it Funny
13. Market Your Brand with Trends
YouTube for Business
YouTube has statistics very similar to Facebook. They have one billion active users every month, which is about one
out of every two people on the internet. This means businesses can easily get in front of their audience with a simple
YouTube channel or some videos that demonstrate how to use their products, or what their services can do for their
clients. Important things to know using YouTube. The key points when it comes to posting videos:
1. Length of videos at least less than 5 minutes. 15. Get Interactive
2. Video Types 16. Customize the Channel
3. Equipment 17. Put Thought into Titles
4. Signing Up 18. Choose the Right Tags and Category
5. Images and Colors 19. Write Great Descriptions
6. Editing 20. Consider a Collaboration
7. After Uploading the Video 21. Let Customers do the Talking
8. Feature Videos 22. Use Subtitles
9. Sharing Videos 23. Don’t Confine Videos to YouTube
10. Privacy Settings 24. Types of Videos to Make
11. Reports – Demonstration Video

12. How to Make Videos – Event and Promotion Videos

13. Keep the Content Fresh – Solve Customer Problems

14. Include a Call to Action

Social Media Tools Every Business Needs
These tools will help you keep track of customers’ demographic, make life easier when
sharing posts or videos, and streamline your social media experience.
1.Google Analytics 6.MailChimp
2.Bit.ly 7.LastPass
3.Buffer 8.edocr
4.DoShare 9.Manage Flitter
5.Feedly 10.Commun.it
 The most popular social media platforms worldwide in 2022
If we look at Statista’s data as of October 2021, the most
popular social media platforms worldwide are:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. WhatsApp
4. Instagram
5. Facebook Messenger
6. TikTok
7. QQ (Chinese instant messaging software)
8. Douyin
9. Telegram
10. Sina Weibo (Chinese microblogging website)
11. Snapchat
12. Kuaishou
13. Pinterest
14. Reddit
15. Twitter
16. Quora

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/01/11/most-popular-social-media-platforms
 According to Pew, the most
popular social media platforms
in the U.S. are:
1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. Instagram
4. Pinterest
5. LinkedIn
6. Snapchat
7. Twitter
8. WhatsApp
9. TikTok
10.Reddit
11.Nextdoor
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/01/11/most-popular-social-media-platforms
 The most popular social
media platforms for business
in 2022.
According to Statista, the
most popular social media
platforms for marketing are:
1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. YouTube
5. Twitter
6. TikTok
7. Snapchat

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/01/11/most-popular-social-media-platforms
Conclusion:
Most business owners have no idea how to
post on social media, and they end up
blunder through the process and not getting
much reward due their etiquette. There are
some specific do’s and don’ts of posting on
social media sites, so let’s go over some of
them:
✓ Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
✓ Do not Employ Automatic Messaging
✓ Respond to Comments Quickly
✓ Never Badmouth Competition
✓ Keep Your Brand Accounts Professional
and Separate Personal Accounts
✓ Don’t Spam Followers’ Feeds
✓ Never Follow for Numbers
References:
Kennedy, C. (2017) The Art of Marketing on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram for Success, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform