Welcome to The Social Smarty Show, your weekly podcast for social media marketing tips, tactics, and practical digital marketing advice. Let's get you taking real action to grow your online audience, build connections and your business. I'm your host, Jodine McIntyre. Think of me as your digital marketing coach, cheerleader and wingwoman all rolled into one. Grab some of my social media marketing known out for free. Social smarty, co Freebs. Now, before we dive in, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
Welcome to episode number 16 of The Social Smarty Show: steal my social media content framework.
Now I'm continuing with the theme on Social media content, but I want to do something a little different today. I want to take you on a bit of a deep dive into my social Media Content Planning guide. Now, before we dive into this episode, it would be a really good idea to head on over to my website. Grab your own copy of the planning guide. You don't have to steal it. You'll find it available for free at socialsmarty.co/planner.
So what is the Social Media Content Planning guide? Well, it's an editable PDF and it gives you a really simple framework to create and plan your social media content. Now, the reason I developed this planning guide is because at this point in my career, I have easily worked with over 1,000 business owners and professionals and they always have one thing in common. So whenever I work with a business owner, a professional, I'm running a workshop, I'm doing a group session, whatever it is, a question that comes up over and over again is what should I post closely followed by how often should I be posting?
So I set about creating a guide to planning social media content that answered both of those questions. Now, it is literally a calendar mapped out for the year that tells you what type of content you should be posting on which day of the week. Now of course, there's no such thing as a one size fits all approach when it comes to social media content, but it's a really good starting point. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling a bit lost, you just need some structure when it comes to your social media marketing, then that is what this planning guide will give you. And at the heart of the planning guide is my content framework. Now, I call this the E C AS framework. It's kind of a play on the fact that I'm a kiwi. Here in New Zealand, the phrase, "easy as" is pretty common. Like, I don't know, can you give me a hand on Sunday? Yeah, sure. Easy as. But it's less about the kiwi slang and more about the individual letters. E C AS. E C AS. Each letter stands for a particular type of social media post. So let's break them down and let's start with the E.
So E stands for Expert. An expert post is just about building trust with your audience. It's about demonstrating that you know what you're talking about, that you can be trusted. It proves to your audience that you're an expert in your industry or the service you provide, or you know everything there is to know about the products that you sell. It's a really good way of just really building trust with your audience. So what type of expert posts could you share or create?
First up is educational content. Now, if you can educate me or teach me something about your industry, then I know you're an expert. You need to be an expert to be able to teach, apparently. So educational content is really powerful. Now, another thing you could do is share some insights into your industry, misconceptions definitions, jargon, that sort of thing. You might be attending some kind of professional development or training upskilling. Tell me about it, your key takeaways or what you learned. You might share some awards or other accolades that you've won or achieved. Another really good expert post are testimonials and reviews. Now, you should have some kind of review testimonial from clients, customers that you can easily share, whether that's pulling it out of Google, your Google business listing where you can pull out a Google review, or maybe it's pulling out a Facebook review or maybe it's an email. If it is an email, obviously we want to ask permission to share that content. But if it's publicly available, like on Google Reviews or Facebook reviews, absolutely share away. Those are really great examples of expert posts.
Now we move on to the C. The C stands for Connection. And connection posts are literally just that. It's building a connection with your audience through sharing information about yourself or your team. Now, another way to think of connection posts is that they are about people. So if you're sharing details about you as a person, then someone online can connect with you. It's way easier to connect with people than it is to connect with just a business or a brand, a faceless business or brand. So connection posts are about showing behind the scenes, showing personality, showing the people in your business. Now, a connection post can sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable for business owners because we feel like we don't want to share personal things about ourselves. But if we don't share just a little bit about ourselves or the people in our business, how can we really expect people to connect with us in a way that makes them want to buy from us or do business with us?
So some really simple connection posts you could share for your business, including like an intro post, introducing yourself, introducing your team. You might share a behind the scenes look at your day. You might introduce your pets or talk about your hobbies, the books that you're currently reading, the Netflix shows you're binging, your favorite podcast like the Social Smarty show, all these sorts of things really help people to connect with you. It gives them a reason to connect with who you are or who the people are behind the business. Now, I will say that it is entirely up to you how much you want to share of your personal life. Now you get to make the rules on that one. And the other thing I want to remind you is that it's really important to ask your team or your colleagues their permission before you share anything personal about them, including their faces. We need to get that permission.
So now we move on to the A stands for Action. And action posts are just like they sound. It's about getting someone to take action on your content. That's our only goal for an action post. Now, an action can be a comment, it can be a like or some sort of reaction. It can even be that they share that post. Any action they take on that content is going to tell the social media platform that they are interested in your content and that what you're sharing is relevant to them and other people like them. So they're far more likely to see your future posts if they engage with some of your content. I hope that makes sense, but just trust me on this one. If people are taking action on your content, then they are more likely to see more of your content, which of course increases your reach. So, examples of action posts, asking questions, polls this or that, asking for advice, asking people for their opinions, multi choice questions, quizzes, anything like this that just gets people to take some kind of action on your content is all fantastic.
And then we have our S. This is our Support post. This is where we ask our audience for their support. So that could be money, we might be asking them to buy from us or book our services. It could be time. We might be asking them to attend an event that we have coming up or listen to a podcast or read an article. Or maybe we want their personal information, like their email address when they join your email community, for example, or their name and phone number to follow up with a sales call. Anything that we want from our audience, that is a support post. Now, this is where many businesses focus too much of their social media content in this sort of support or sales area. They use it purely as an advertising channel rather than an online meeting place to connect with people. So if you spend all your time selling or promoting or advertising on social media, then you're probably going to get a little bit frustrated when the number of people you reach is really low because no one has any reason to engage with your content. So the platform doesn't really show it to anyone. And then those who do see it, they don't buy from you because they don't know who you are and they don't really trust you. So if your strategy is just to use social media as an advertising platform, then you need to focus on paid ads. If you want to use social media in an organic sense or use organic content to market your business, then you need to mix up different types of content, not just focusing on asking for support or just promoting your business.
Now, if you are sharing support posts, what sort of things could you share? Well, they could be really simple. Detailing a service that you offer and inviting people to book, showing them how to book. It could be talking about a product, a new product. You could have a discount and add a bonus. You could be inviting your audience to attend an event, come and see you at a trade show you're attending. It could be a little snippet from your latest newsletter and inviting them to join your email community. It's really just that straight promotional marketing stuff.
So there we have it. We have our four different types of social media content that fit into my E C AS framework. E for expert, C for connection, a for Action, and S for support.
Now, chances are you've heard that saying that people do business with those they know, like and trust. So the E C AS framework is really developed around this know like trust factor. So the expert posts build the trust. The connection posts let people get to know you. The action posts get people to get to like you because you have conversations with you, you have some back and forth with them and then we ask them to do business with us with our support posts. So now we have an understanding of the different types of posts. Then we need to schedule these into our content plan. So in the planning guide, I have given you a calendar for each month of the year and it shows you a frequency that you can use for simply rotating through each of these content types. Now, I have suggested posting two to three times per week in the guide, avoiding weekends. But this is your social media plan, so you make it work for you. If once a week sounds more manageable, absolutely fine. Or maybe you want to post daily, go for it. Or maybe weekends work really well for you and you do get good engagement on weekends. Personally, for my business I do not. But that is absolutely fine. Make this your own. But the key is actually to do the planning.
So for each month you have a calendar and you have a planning page. So the planning page allows you to kind of jot down your ideas under each of the ECAs headings. And once you have an idea so we pop that into the box and then we think about what type of visual is going to go along with it. Will it be a photo or an image? Will it be multiple images? Is it a little video? Or is it something you're going to create in a graphic design program like Canva? If you haven't signed up for Canva yet, you are missing out. It is the best thing ever. I do have an affiliate link in the show notes. So go and sign up and you can come and report back to me and tell me how amazing you think Canva is. I am obsessed anyway, a little bit of course there, right? So we work our way through the planning page and we get an idea of our posts plus the visuals that go with it. So effectively you should, at the end of this process, have a page which shows you what you're going to be talking about and it tells you what the visual aspect will be.
Now we need to collect up all those visuals. Now I have a folder on my desktop just literally called Social Media Content and I basically dump everything in there. I do reuse images. If you scroll through my Instagram, it's very clear that you'll see the same images over and over again. Sometimes I have to just go and record a quick video. Or I might jump into Canva. I might find an old template that I update. But basically once I have all of my visuals kind of collected together for the month, that's when I start scheduling. Now, if you're using Facebook and Instagram, Meta Business Suite is great. It's really simple. You can head to business.facebook.com, they'll take you straight in there. Or you can download the Business Suite app on your phone if you prefer to do your content on your phone. If you are using LinkedIn or other social media platforms as well as Facebook and Instagram, then I love Publer. I do have an affiliate link in my show notes. I am an affiliate, but I do also use it in my business. I love Publer. Really simple interface. If you have listened to a few episodes, now you'll know that it is a tool that I recommend over and over again.
So once I've logged into my scheduler of choice, I have my calendar sitting next to me and I just start scheduling. I upload the image or video or images. I write the caption, I add the hashtags for Instagram and LinkedIn. I choose the time and day I want to schedule that post for, and then I hit schedule and then I repeat. So for the entire month, I'll go through one at a time, looking at my planning page, looking at my calendar, and just getting that content plugged in.
Now of course this takes some time, but once it's done, it's done. And I know that I can focus on things like responding to comments and messages, sharing some in the moment stories that I know will disappear after 24 hours. But really my core content, my months worth of content is just going to pop out like magic on the days and times that I have scheduled it for. Now, of course, if something exciting comes up, like, I don't know, I get to meet a celebrity, or I have some sort of massive win on my business, or, I don't know, a helicopter lens in the front yard of my home office. Something that's newsworthy. Then, of course, I might share that to social media, but that's kind of the cream on top of my month's worth of content.
So if you want to give this a go, head on over to my website, grab the planning guide for free. Remember, it's socialsmarty.co/planner and then I'd love to hear from you what you thought of it. Come and find me on Instagram Facebook TikTok. I'm @socialsmarty.co let me know what you thought of it and let me know what you thought of this episode. A review or a five stars on Spotify? It goes such a long way. I would love you to give me a review on whatever platform you're listening to this on, and I'd love you to introduce my podcast to a mate if you have another friend in business. Until next time, stay social.
