Social Media Planning

When managing a social media presence, you need to make sure your time is well spent. Creating a social media plan helps you strategize and measure your progress. 

Responsible People

Your plan should begin with deciding who will be responsible for populating, maintaining and monitoring your social media presence. List the team members and avoid relying only on students. A Cal Poly faculty or staff member must have administrative privileges to all accounts and is responsible for controlling permissions, content and security for the accounts.

Audience

Who do you want to come to your party? Targeting specific groups, like prospective students, engineering faculty members, or the class of ’99 will help you tailor your content and conversation. List your primary audiences. Do you have secondary audiences, too? How will you reach out to them initially? Remember, simply setting up a Facebook page isn’t enough. You have to invite people there and have a plan to keep them interested.

Goals and Strategies

What do you hope to do with your social media presence? List the goals you are hoping to accomplish and how you are planning on reaching your audience. Use only the social media platforms that your audience uses and that you have the time to devote to maintaining.

Content Plan

What content will you share? Is it news or engagement based? Images? Video? List the kinds of content you will be sharing and the kinds of things you think are successful. You need to be posting consistently and keeping your pages active.

Defining and Measuring Success

Now that you have defined the goals, you will need to define how you will measure your success. Do you want increased traffic to your website? More energetic give-and-take with prospective students? Do you want to reach out to new colleagues on campus or around the world? Define success, how you'll measure it and the tools you need to measure it, such as Google Analytics.

Evaluation

Schedule regular evaluations of your effort’s success based on the plan you outlined. Set out your timeline. Be ready to recast your content and strategy. It’s okay to fail on some things. This is not a project; it’s an ongoing effort.