Social Media Marketing Campaign

A short campaign checklist

Seven tasks for running one social campaign end to end — goals, audience, platform choice, content, scheduling, engagement, and review. It's deliberately short. Social campaigns fail from vagueness far more often than from missing steps.

Pick fewer platforms than you want to

The platform selection task is where most campaigns go wrong, by choosing all of them. Each network wants different formats, different posting rhythms, and a different tone, and spreading one team across four of them produces content that's mediocre everywhere.

Choose the one or two where the people you're trying to reach already are, and be genuinely good there. You can expand once the cadence is sustainable.

Schedule the posts, don't schedule the engagement

Batching and scheduling content is what makes a campaign survive a busy week — write it all in one sitting, queue it, stop thinking about it. But the engagement task is the opposite: replies, questions, and comments need you present while the conversation is happening, and a scheduled campaign with an absent account reads worse than no campaign.

Block twenty minutes a day for it rather than leaving it to whenever you next open the app.

Define the goal in numbers

Awareness is not a goal you can act on. Reach, click-throughs, sign-ups, DMs — pick one and write down the number that would count as working, before you start. It's what makes the review task at the end worth doing.

Timing

Two to four weeks per campaign. Due dates are useful for the posting schedule; leave them off if you're batching everything up front.