Running a business on social media requires a lot of planning. Each element in the strategy must be well thought out and in place beforehand.
But to err is human, and it’s not an anomaly for marketers to miss out on important elements while chalking out a campaign or making a monthly content plan.
Hence the irrevocable need for social media templates arises.
In this article, we will take you through the importance of different types of social media templates. Along with each category, we will provide you with a customizable template for download absolutely free.
But first, we’ll start by understanding the basics and the benefits of using templates so you understand the difference they make.
What are Social Media Templates?
Social media templates refer to pre-designed layouts or structures that can be used as a framework for creating social media campaigns, strategies, posts, pitches, and much more.
These templates can be totally visual, text-based, or methodically laid out spreadsheets depicting each component of the requisites to create posts, banners, creatives, pop-ups, bios, reports, checklists, and more elements that are a part of social media marketing strategy.
Why Should You Use Social Media Templates
When starting out with your social media marketing venture, there are many things to take care of. So as to not make any missteps and use your time most effectively, taking the help of social media templates is recommended by experts.
1. Gives You Consistency
Using templates gives an identifiable consistency to your work, which helps establish a persistent image of your business in the eyes of your target audience. The uniform look and feel in your content across all the social media channels you market on will establish trust in the public eye and go with your branding efforts.
2. Help You Manage Time
As mentioned earlier, instead of creating a report or a complicated presentation from scratch, it is way better just to feed your material into a ready-made template and save your time and effort in the process.
3. Makes You Look Professional
Social media templates are often created by certified professional graphic designers, which help shape your content into a polished piece with a professional look which is not the case when the same is done by amateurs who are new in the business.
4. Keeps You Flexible
The best part about templates is that they are customizable to a large extent, especially if they are made in-house. Hence you can keep updating them and make them fit your needs perfectly.
So you see, there are a lot of pros to using social media templates to streamline your social media marketing efforts while also providing a visually appealing and consistent presence.
Types of Social Media Templates You Absolutely Need
Other than content-related templates, there are social media marketing templates that purely deal with the planning and strategizing part of the work. Here are some of them:
Social Media Calendar Template
Marketers manage tons of social media posts for multiple channels on a regular basis. It gets very difficult to keep track of all that content and which post is to go where and when. This becomes especially bothersome when handling social accounts for multiple clients.
To get out of this quicksand, the best possible solution would be to use a social media content calendar.
If you are unsure about this contraption, a social media calendar is a schedule that outlines the content you plan to post on your social media channels over a specific period of time.
Here’s a view of the free calendar template available in this article. You can see that it contains the content types which constitute the outline of the monthly content plan.
The social media calendar templates are pretty customizable. You can arrange your pre-planned social media post creatives or graphic assets, random content ideas, or marketing campaigns in the calendar.
Here is the free-to-download calendar template we promised you to customize according to your business needs and start managing your content more efficiently.
Social Media Strategy Template
When you have a whole business to think about, reaching your target audience on every possible social platform can seem like a gigantic task.
A well-defined social media strategy can distinguish between failure and success in such situations.
Now, what is a social media strategy template, you ask?
It is a pre-designed document that outlines the key components of a social media marketing strategy. It typically includes sections such as goals and objectives, strengths & weaknesses, target audience, messaging, content strategy, platform selection, and performance metrics.
Overall, social media strategy templates can be useful for all stakeholders involved in social media marketing.
If you have questions about the utility of a social media strategy template, take the simple approach of answering the 5Ws, which form the basics of a social media strategy. They are:
- Why are you investing in social media?
- Who is your target audience?
- What type of content are you planning to share on social media?
- Where are you going to put your content?
- When are you planning to publish your content?
No proficient marketer can proceed with their venture without the answers to these questions. So your social media strategy document is where you will answer these questions for yourself. This will become your roadmap for the future.
Here is a free social media strategy template for you to begin with now that you know its uses and benefits. You can style one for yourself or use this one as a reference, to begin with.
Social Media Proposal Template
If you are selling your social media management services to potential clients, you need an ironclad proposal they just can’t refuse. This will be your only chance to show how different you are from your competitors and how much of a better offer you have than them.
Typically constructed with the clients in mind, this document aims to provide the client with a clear understanding of the social media strategy in the proposal to achieve their goals.
The proposal typically includes an analysis of the client’s current social media presence in detail.
Target audience, competitors, industry trends, and a timeline and budget details on the allotment of roles and responsibilities for each social platform and how they will engage with the audience are also included. That is why, before presenting a proposal, intensive research of the particular client’s history and their profile has to be conducted.
To you, it might seem like the social media strategy and social media proposal templates are similarly documented strategy outlines, and there are some similarities.
However, there is a big distinction. A strategy is an internal document. On the other hand, a proposal is an external document that is created to pitch management services to a potential client.
Here is a free social media proposal template you can customize according to your needs and use to pitch to prospective clients.
Social Media Creative Brief Template
While executing a social media strategy for a business or brand, there are a lot of people working on the content. Now if there are no defined creative guidelines for a team to follow, the uniformity in the creative style of the brand voice is lost.
This is where the social media creative brief templates come into the picture.
It’s a roadmap that provides direction to the team responsible for creating the social media content, such as the copywriters, graphic designers, and social media managers.
Creative brief congregates all the basic information for marketing campaigns, big and small, and the creative messaging for the audience, which should reflect the vision and mission of the business along with its short-term objectives.
Here’s a summed-up view of all those elements for you so you don’t miss out on anything while creating your own social media template for a creative brief:
- Brand introduction
- Campaign summary
- Goals
- Campaigns assets and deliverables
- Target audience
- Creative considerations
- Competitor analysis
- Budget breakdown
- Deadlines
Even if it looks like a lot of information, a creative brief more commonly deals with short-term goals within a couple of pages.
Here is a customizable creative brief template to give shape to your social media campaigns and present it to your team members and clients.
Social Media Audit Template
We have talked about generating successful strategies. But we are yet to talk about the research involved in identifying the strategic gaps. All this research can only be done through careful screening or audit, as its commonly called.
Evaluating the concerned profile’s content performance on different social platforms to see the good and the bad is one of the main objectives of the audit. It also reveals the target audience’s interests, preferences, and behaviors.
To perform a quality audit, go systematically and follow a social media audit template.
You must inspect the vital elements of the social media presence of a brand for insightful results. Here are the things to do on your audit list:
- List out all the social accounts
- Brand voice and messaging
- Content analysis
- Audience analysis
- Publishing frequency
- Monitor audience engagement pattern
- Make a note of traffic sources
Here’s a template to conduct an effective social media audit. This will help provide a structure to your investigation and give you the requisite insights to make the right moves.
A Social Media Hashtag Kit
Few things represent social media, like hashtags. They are used by everyone online and not just for fun. Hashtags are an essential part of social media content because they allow users to discover and engage with content that is relevant to their interests.
When you use a hashtag in your social media posts the right way, your content gains visibility, popping into search results of people using that hashtag for their searches.
And the way tag lines are made into hashtags for successful branding is a very known phenomenon.
Everyone is familiar with Nike’s #JustDoIt.
Hashtags can also start huge trends when you associate suitable ones with your social media campaigns. Coca-Cola launched this hashtag campaign called #ShareaCoke to encourage consumers to share photos of themselves drinking Coke with personalized bottles featuring their names.
Marketers often use hashtag-tracking tools to see how their brand’s hashtags are performing.
People can go wrong in using hashtags in several ways. Using too many or overly generic hashtags can be overwhelming and make your post look spammy. Not researching hashtags before using them can lead to using hashtags that are already overused.
If you want some help building a solid hashtag strategy, here is a complete hashtag kit for you with all the trending hashtags of 2023. It includes:
- A complete guide on how to make use of hashtags on social media platforms effectively
- 3614 trending hashtags from 2023 + Content ideas
- Editable social media templates
Download the whole kit and start using all the trending hashtags and get your posts to reach all the right people!
On a Concluding Note
As social media marketing expands, so does the range of content types and their diversity. And marketers are always looking to get their work done quickly, which is where templates are the most useful.
They are perfect for making content in a quick second while keeping the essence of your brand in each post. But as mentioned in this article, templates are also needed for planning strategic purposes. They are especially useful for marketing agencies.
That is why businesses require strategy templates, social media audit templates, creative briefs, and many more. They help from the planning and researching part of the process to analyzing and reporting the results.
However, there are a few things to look out for. Here are some reasons for using templates in moderation:
- Using templates excessively can reflect on your content as a lack of originality, making all your content look extremely similar, which is never a good thing.
- Another fact you need to be careful of is the overuse of templates. It’s great when you have an easy way out to reduce your workload, but social media marketing demands creativity in many different ways.
- Highly specialized templates cost a lot of money which is not a feasible option for growing businesses.
Hence, using social media templates should always be done in moderation. You must keep trying to bring originality to your content so you don’t become monotonous.
So use all these social media templates we have provided to streamline your social media management and make your job easier.
