You’re posting on social channels, keeping up with trends, engaging with the audience, but still seeing no real results. Chances are, your content isn’t resonating, or you aren’t reaching the right audience on the right platforms.

Social media success demands more than just posting content and aesthetic graphics. It requires a solid content plan built around data and platform-specific audiences.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of creating a practical social media plan. Plus, you’ll have free templates and ways you can use AI to automate social media marketing. 

What is a social media plan?

A social media plan is a strategic framework that guides how businesses use social media platforms to achieve marketing objectives. It involves setting SMART goals, identifying target audiences, auditing existing performance, optimizing accounts, selecting posting schedules, and creating engaging content.

A social media plan serves as a roadmap for consistent, measurable social media marketing efforts. It helps you:

• Save time and resources – Streamlines posting processes and prevents last-minute content creation
• Maintain brand consistency – Ensures unified voice and messaging across all social networks
• Target effectively – Reach distinct audience segments who resonate with your brand
• Stay competitive – Gain valuable competitor insights to enhance your strategies
• Measure and optimize – Analyze content performance and refine marketing approaches
• Ensure regular engagement – Post content consistency based on the schedule for active audience interaction

How to Create a Social Media Plan?

Talking of creating a social media plan, most creators or brands get confused—Is it a social media strategy or a content schedule?

To clear the air, it’s both.

As Redditors discussed, a social media plan combines strategy and content scheduling. From setting clear goals to selecting platforms and building a posting schedule, it covers everything.

Step 1: Audit your current social media presence

If you’re a beginner starting out, you’ve a clean slate. But, if you’ve posted some content on social media, assess the existing before you plan.

Run a social media audit and check the following:

• Active social media accounts: List all your accounts, including active, inactive, and duplicate ones.
• Content performance: Review to determine what content format or type works well for you. Track reach, engagement, shares, and saves.
• Track key metrics: Besides content performance, check your follower growth, click-through rates, and list the content types used.
• Note inconsistencies: List the inconsistencies in your messaging, brand voice, and visuals so you can bridge the gaps.

Step 2: Define clear goals and KPIs

Set goals that align with your overall digital marketing strategy. For example:

• Increase brand awareness by 30% on TikTok in 90 days
• Drive 5,000 visits/month to your website from Instagram
• Grow LinkedIn newsletter subscribers by 1,000 in 60 days

Along with marketing goals, define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track the performance of your content based on your objectives. For example, set benchmarks, track follower growth rates and impressions if your goal is to increase awareness. For leads, track conversions, such as, downloads, click-through rates, or sign-ups.

Step 3: Understand your audience

Knowing your audience is the key to creating social media content that resonates. Most social networks offer built-in basic demographic information. For example, LinkedIn offers insights into your audience’s location, industry, job role, company size, and more.

To narrow down your audience segments, research further so you can create a brand voice and messaging that resonates.

• Conduct surveys and interviews: Collect data about your audience, such as their core interests, age, job role, pain points, challenges, and more.
• Research your competitors: Identify your competitors, check their content types, what they engage with, who their audiences are, and any other relevant information.
• Check your support tickets and sales calls: Collaborate with your customer support teams to understand challenges and pain points.

Thereafter, you can build personas and ideal customer profiles detailing location, interests, job roles, industry, preferred channels, and content. Here’s an example:

Step 4: Choose the right platforms

If you’re just getting started, choose a maximum of three platforms where your audience is the most active. Also, consider your business goals and the content formats that best fit your product/brand. 

For example, if you’re a B2B agency, share educational content, user-generated content, brand stories, etc., on LinkedIn to attract leads. You can also repurpose your content into infographics for Instagram.

Distribution AI can help you repurpose podcasts, videos, blogs, and other long-form content into social media text posts, LinkedIn carousels, and Instagram infographics.

Step 5: Map out content themes and pillars

From this step, starts the content plan of your social media marketing  strategy. Identify 3–5 content pillars based on your audience’s interests and brand expertise. These content pillars help you plan consistently and create with purpose. Here’s an example:

Step 6: Build a content calendar

Once you have defined the content pillars, create a weekly or monthly social media content calendar to ensure consistent scheduling. It also helps you balance the types of content you share, align with social media campaigns, and avoid repetitive messaging.

So, what should your content calendar include?

Content pillar, type, platform, and content topic. Here’s an example of a weekly calendar:

You can also add a column for relevant reference videos, blog links, competitor posts, as well as hashtags and CTAs to go with each post.

Step 7: Create a posting schedule

After mapping your content, create a publishing schedule so you know exactly what goes live, where, and when.

For example, you can start with 3 posts on Instagram, 2 on TikTok, and 4 on LinkedIn based on your audience preferences, the channels they use the most, and your best-performing content format.

If you’re an agency, you can assign roles or use a social media marketing tool like Distribution AI to automate content creation, scheduling, and publishing. With Distribution AI, you can also get the best times to post across social channels for maximum engagement.

Step 8: Plan engagement and community building

What most brands miss out on is creating an engagement plan. Mapping your content is only half the job done. You must set aside time for engagement and community-building activities.

• Block time, say 10 minutes, on each platform—comment on posts, like, and share
• Track brand mentions, online conversations, and audience reactions using social listening tools.
• Share polls or questions for more audience interactions.

Step 9: Set up the reporting and optimization system

Consider your social media plan as a live document and refine it based on data. You can set a weekly or monthly review where you can track social media metrics such as engagement rate, DMs, saves, shares, conversion rate, and more.

Though most social networks offer built-in analytics, it’s basic. Use tools like Distribution AI to track detailed engagement metrics and use these valuable insights to optimize posting times, content formats, and CTAs.

Step 10: Use the right tools and start publishing

When you have your plan and schedules ready, start creating content and posting it across social media platforms. However, to prevent burnout and maintain consistency, implement the right tools so you can automate content first drafts, scheduling, content repurposing, analytics, and more.

Here are a few social media management tools you can consider:

• Distribution AI: For AI-powered content creation and repurposing, scheduling, and publishing
• Canva: For creating brand-aligned images and templates
• Sprout Social or Hootsuite: For social listening, in-depth analytics, monitoring social media trends, and automating approval workflows
• CapCut or Descript: For generating and editing videos and voice cloning

5 Free Social Media Plan Templates

Though you can create your social media plan from scratch manually, here are a few templates to save you time.

Canva’s Social Media Strategy Template

This template by Canva has a 6-step social media marketing plan to help build your online presence. It enables you to set SMART goals, identify your target market, analyze competition, perform a social media audit, and even conduct a SWOT analysis. In short, you can map out your strategy and make adjustments as you go along.

Ideal for: Content creators and small teams working with 1 to 3 social media channels/ accounts.

ClickUp’s Social Media Plan Template

ClickUp’s beginner-friendly social media plan template helps you create a centralized plan for all your social media accounts. It allows you to organize content ideas, streamline content creation and posting, and collaborate with team members. It also offers custom statuses to track post/task progress and custom views so you can visualize information the way you want.

Ideal for: Small teams and agencies handling multiple social media accounts across different platforms.

SmartSheet’s Social Media Strategy Plan Template

The social media strategy plan template by SmartSheet helps you create an action plan for social media marketing. It helps you organize each stage from planning to competitive analysis and social media goals. Simply download the Excel template and edit it based on your social media requirements.

Ideal for: Marketers and strategists who prefer Excel-based downloadable templates with offline functionalities.

Backlinko’s Social Media Strategy Template

This social media strategy template by Backlinko helps you set clear social media goals and KPIs. It has tables to list where your website traffic is coming from, your follower count, engagement level, competitors, and more. Available in Google Docs, PDF, and Word formats, this template also lets you plan your engagement, track social media promotions, and list the social media management tools you use.

Ideal for: Marketers and creators looking for a basic strategy template to streamline social media efforts.

Figma’s Social Media Planner Template

The social media planner template by Figma lets you plan your everyday content across social media platforms. It lets you create content pillars, track posts, streamline posting, manage posting frequency, and streamline the overall content distribution process.

Ideal for: Creators and marketers mostly dealing with visual content, looking for a custom planner to organize social media content.

How to Use AI to Create a Social Media Plan?

Social media automation with AI can help you accelerate planning as well as execution. Here’s how you can use AI to your advantage:

Brainstorm content ideas

AI can be your assistant in brainstorming content ideas, generating hooks, or content pillars. Provide a prompt like ‘create 10 carousel ideas for an eCommerce brand.’ This can save you time and help you get past creative blocks faster.  

Generate captions and visuals

Once you have the list of content topics, you can use AI to draft the content, generate captions, and even visuals. However, ensure to edit the drafts to add a personal touch and maintain authenticity.

Distribution AI can help you generate social media content, search engine optimized (SEO) captions, and infographics aligned with your brand’s voice and personality. This saves your editing time and cuts down on designer costs.

Build social calendars automatically

Once you have your posts ready, you can use AI to build and schedule your social media content calendar. For example, Distribution AI lets you plan weeks of content so you don’t miss out on social media posting. It helps you replace spreadsheets and prevent back-and-forth for schedule changes.

Analyze post performance

When reviewing content weekly or monthly, track its engagement metrics. For example, Distribution AI’s built-in analytics feature lets you monitor impressions, engagement rate, clicks, and top-performing posts. This way you know which formats work the best for you and what type of content your audience engages with the most. 

Wrapping Up

Posting on social media without a concrete plan won’t help you achieve your business objectives. Instead, you’ll end up relying on algorithms to (hopefully) push your posts to the target audience.

Whether you’re an enterprise, small business, or influencer, having a solid social media content plan is a must to ensure the right message reaches the right people at the right time. And this guide gives you a step-by-step framework.

However, to speed up execution, use ready-to-go templates and tools like Distribution AI that can do the heavy lifting—from content creation to scheduling and real-time performance analysis.

So, start planning your social media content and explore Distribution AI’s features to automate routine tasks.