When it comes to your personal social media accounts, it can feel so easy and natural to know what content to publish – whether to only include text or also use photos or videos, when it’s appropriate to post about a given topic, which platform to post on for certain formats or topics. For business accounts, however, it’s important to have a more thoughtful, data-driven strategy.
One of our main services here at Go Getter Group is training around social media marketing, and a frequent question that the business owners and marketers in these trainings ask us, especially if they’re newer to running a business account on social media, is: “How do I plan out what I should be posting and what I should be talking about on social media?”
To help, we’ve built this step-by-step list of tasks and ideas to help you plan and prepare your social media marketing content in advance… a whole year’s worth, in fact! Here are all our tips, tricks, and resources to get you started.
Step 1: Build Your Social Media Content Calendar
Many companies still don’t implement them or execute content calendars for their social media strategies, but the reason why we think this tool is highly valuable is because it gives you the chance to pre-organize content in advance.
By planning ahead, you can:
- Align content with company goals, promotions, and seasonal trends
- Maintain a steady posting cadence without last-minute stress
- Ensure content variety and avoid repetitive messaging
There will always be posts and events that come up in real-time that you will need to address as it happens. Having a content calendar in place lets you pre-think through themes, holidays, and evergreen topics (topics that just don’t really change or lose traction over time).
Pre-planning your content puts you in a position where you’re not wracking your brain the day of trying to figure out what to say or post about as a marketing leader or a social media manager.
So, our encouragement for planning out social media posts is you need to start with that content calendar.
Start Here: Download our free content calendar template to get started. It’s designed to help you map out your themes, plan campaigns, and keep your posting schedule organized or check out this free content calendar offered by HubSpot.
Step 2: Establish Your Core Content Themes
Before you even think about what you’re going to post on a day-to-day basis, we recommend coming up with themes. Create a collection of topics that you are interested in posting about as a business that you can make sure to cover regularly. This creates structure and ensures a balanced mix of content.
Examples of effective themes:
- Behind-the-scenes & team highlights: Showcase company culture, employee stories, or office life.
- Customer testimonials & case studies: Share success stories to build credibility.
- Industry trends & thought leadership: Position your brand as an expert in your field.
- Product showcases & promotions: Strategically highlight offerings without being overly sales-driven.
- Fun & relatable content: Celebrate industry-specific holidays or trends (e.g., “National Small Business Week” for B2B brands).
An example of how to do this is when we first launched social media for a local firm in Atlanta, Georgia. This firm had a small team in place of about 12 people. One of the themes we came up with was to showcase “company culture,” showing the human side of their business. For the first 6 months we launched their social media, we highlighted two associates per month on their team.
Another theme would be holidays, including both (inter)national and unique “holidays” that fit your brand. When our team managed social media for a local dog daycare chain, we found fun dog-related holidays such as Take Your Dog To Work Day and Adopt A Dog Day to name a few.
As you’re planning out themes, consider assigning themes to specific days or weeks of the month to create consistency without feeling repetitive.
Step 3: Create And Organize Your Visual Content
Social media is highly visual, so planning images, graphics, and videos in advance is key.
As you’re planning out your social media content, always be thinking about what image may go with your posts. While there are some instances where you might play around with doing text-only posts—you could try out text-only post on Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe even Facebook—but most networks you’re going on, you must have some kind of visual attached to the posts.
For Photos & Videos
- Schedule a photoshoot to gather a library of team and product images. To keep your content growing throughout the year, plan to do these quarterly.
- Encourage team members to submit candid behind-the-scenes shots.
- If outsourcing photography, maximize time by capturing multiple months’ worth of visuals in one session.
- For videos, batch-record short-form videos for Instagram Reels, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
- Repurpose webinar or event footage into snackable content.
For Graphics & Templates
- Use tools like Canva to create branded templates for quotes, promotions, and announcements.
- Maintain a consistent aesthetic with colors, fonts, and logo placement.
When it’s time to create content, you can start with stock images if you don’t have your own content, but nothing will resonate better with your audience than them seeing your product, services, and the people behind it. If you aren’t comfortable with being on camera or in photos, consider sourcing some of the work to a content creator or Influencer who will do it for you.
You can also tap into your employees. Get your team members to submit photos or video in bulk while they are on the job in the office, at conferences, work sites, etc., or even working from home.
For example, whenever we’re working on projects at Go Getter, even internally as a team, a lot of times we’re creating content in bulk. We take lots of photos. We might spend an afternoon doing it. We might even spend a day doing it.
You can think about graphics in bulk as well if you work with a designer who can create really good templates for you, then use those templates interchangeably as you’re posting. Our personal formula as a team is our graphic designer prepares six to eight templates for us using Canva that we can pick and choose from, and then when we’re publishing graphics for our social media posts, we’re pulling from a library of professionally designed templates that already have our brand logo, our color scheme, and other branding choices.
When you’re planning your social media, always think about, “How can I take this idea and apply it to get ahead of schedule and have this content scheduled in advance so that when current events come up, I can put my energy and effort into figuring out how to promote those.”
– Sonja Crystal Williams, Go Getter Marketing Group Co-Founder
Step 4: Write Captions That Drive Engagement
Once you’ve got a content calendar structure in place, know what themes you’re running with, ideas on how you will execute imagery based on those themes and topics, then you need to actually write the captions. Yes, captions are a communication tool to reach your audience and grow your customer and follower bases but do remember that it’s just talking to people. Don’t overthink it. Sometimes when you look at a picture and you come up with a caption in your mind, go with it. Sometimes your first instinct might be best for testing, but with most captions, focus on basing it around the image you chose, the themes of that post, or the current events or trends that might be happening.
Your caption should complement your visuals while encouraging interaction.
Best Practices for Caption Writing:
- Keep it conversational—write how you speak.
- Ask questions to encourage comments and shares.
- Include clear CTAs (e.g., “Tag a friend who needs to see this!” or “Visit the link in bio”).
- Adapt the length and tone based on the platform (shorter for X, more detailed for LinkedIn).
How you word the caption might also depend on what type of engagement you prioritize. If you want comments or shares, ask a question, or get people to fill in the blank. Ask people their opinion about something. Get a conversation going. If you’re trying to get clicks to your website, ensure you’ve got that link in the text for people to read. Just make sure, no matter what you write, that it aligns with your brand voice.
Step 5: Repurpose & Recycle High-Performing Content
It is not a bad thing to find ways to repurpose content! If your company has been doing social media for a while and you have a video/image/post that did really well and it was a year since you last used it, then use it again on some social networks—particularly X. A lot of times, as we like to call X, it’s the land of greatest hits for some accounts. It’s a place where if we know a post did really well and we repost it a year later, chances are that a different group of people will see it because the feed moves so fast on X. It’s a good opportunity to get quick hits back over to your website to a totally new audience. So, look for opportunities like that where you can repurpose content.
Not every post needs to be brand new. Repurposing successful content saves time and maximizes impact.
How to Repurpose:
- Take a high-performing social post and turn it into a blog article (or vice versa).
- Reshare past posts on fast-moving platforms like X, where content lifespan is shorter.
- Re-edit past videos with new captions or clips to give them fresh life.
Another way we found to reuse our content was to take some of the videos that had been previously posted on Facebook and turn them into blog articles on the website, resharing them in a different format.
Step 6: Stay Flexible & Adapt
While planning ahead is essential, leave room for real-time content. Industry trends, breaking news, or viral moments may require shifts in your strategy.
- Schedule 70% of your content in advance
- Keep 30% open for reactive, real-time content
Start Planning Your Year Of Content Today
By following these steps, you’ll create a structured yet flexible social media strategy that keeps your brand top of mind without the stress of last-minute posting.
- Download our free content calendar
- Choose your core content themes
- Start batch-creating visuals & captions
The sooner you start planning, the easier it becomes to execute.
More Resources To Help Plan Your Social Media Content
Besides the resources we’ve linked throughout this article, here are some further social media insights to help you grow and prepare your social media marketing strategies for the year ahead:
- 2024 End-Of-Year Social Media Round-Up
- What Does A Social Media Trainer Do For Your Business?
- Organizing Your Social Media Marketing System
- 30 Days of Content: Coming Up With Fresh Content Ideas
If you have any questions about social media marketing planning and strategy, please feel free to reach out to us via our Contact form, or by tagging or DMing us on social media! You can also learn more digital marketing insights by listening to episodes of our 10 Minute Marketing podcast, as well as set up a consultation regarding our social media marketing services and trainings specific to your brand’s needs.