Understanding Social Media Marketing Plan

A social media marketing plan is a broad list of “to-dos” that help you achieve certain goals through your efforts on social media. These goals and objectives are like milestones in a given cycle of well-planned ideas that you will implement on social media.

As a general rule of thumb, social media marketing plans work to fulfill three objectives:

• Lead generation
• Admission conversions
• Brand building

A well-planned social media marketing strategy is conceived in an orderly fashion by following these steps:

• Assessing the current status of your brand or business on social platforms.
• Identifying its strengths and weaknesses
• Identifying goals and objectives that need to be achieved.
• Selecting the tools that will be used to achieve these goals.
• Having goals that are realistic, pragmatic and measurable.

Social Media Marketing for Educational Institutions

Educational institutions are yet to make optimum use of social media to up their game through effective social media promotions. The current generation of students are internet-savvy and that is exactly the potential that the education sector needs to tap into. Social media marketing is the right way to reach out to this target group.

3 Steps To Create A Social Media Marketing Plan

Step 1: Defining goals and objectives

It cannot be called a plan if there are no goals and objectives. It is important to conceive a social media marketing strategy that aligns with the goals of the educational institution. Such a well-planned strategy will help you keep an eye on Return of Investment.

In order to align your plan with the goals of the institution, here are the key components that you will need to focus on:

• Generated leads
• Web referrals
• Conversion rate
• Increase in the number of followers
• Cost of procuring leads
• Keeping up deadlines
• Focusing on target audience

Step 2: Choosing a suitable network

Facebook and Instagram are top favourite spots for the student population to hang out. Seven out of ten students will own a profile on one or both these platforms. Now that you have zeroed in on the perfect spot, here’s what you should do:

• Create a profile or enhance an already existing profile.
• Optimize your online properties to generate maximum SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
• Engage in cross-promotions to underline your presence to the target audience.

Step 3: Creating a content planner

A content planner is a great tool to organize your ideas, identify promotion tactics and chart out timelines for posting the promotions. An ideal content planner must have the following objectives:

• Types of promotional themes
• Identifying target audience
• Compiling promotional content
• Timely posting of promotional content
• Frequency of posting
• Keeping a track of measurable metrics
• Changing promotional tactics by assessing the hits and misses.

Guesstimating The Success Of Your Social Media Marketing Plan

A social media marketing plan is a consistent work in the process. Target audiences are constantly evolving and your plan has to change and evolve in tandem.

Social media marketing for educational institutions needs periodical evaluation to allow you to make informed decisions that will sharpen the outlook of your social campaign. How can it be achieved?

• Work in tandem with all team members and focus collectively on your goals.
• Analyze the pros and cons of your strategies.
• Compile a list of successful approaches that can be used for future reference.
• Use URL shorteners and UTM codes to track the number of clicks to your link.
• Make use of Google Analytics to monitor your progress.
• Make corrective measurements after a thorough analysis of your social media marketing plan.

A well-established social media policy will help to keep your plan in alignment with the branding of the educational institution. It will also aid in setting definitive guidelines for the stakeholders, staff and students to use social media.

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