It’s a struggle almost all artists face. You need social media to market your music, but it keeps eating up all your time. Or you’re so fed up with updating all your profiles that you hardly ever post. Both of these problems can be helped by one thing.

A plan.

But not just any plan. You need a plan to make your social media profiles engaging to fans, and you need to spend less time doing it.

Creating a Social Media Plan

• Step One: Decide what you want from your social media profiles. Do you want to create more personal interaction with fans? Do you want to drive sales of your album or traffic to your website? Having an end goal gives your social media profiles purpose, and keeps them from being useless time-eaters.
• Step Two: Determine where your audience is, and how they want you to communicate with them. Meeting your fans where they are will help you engage better. If I know the majority of my fan base is on Twitter, then I should probably put a little more effort into Twitter. This doesn’t mean you ignore your other social profiles, it just means that you spend the most time on the sites that are going to help you meet your goals. For more information on that topic, you can read this blog.
• Step Three: Take a look at your social media profiles. Briefly analyze how you use them. You probably already know off the top of your head which ones need the most work, and which ones you are already keeping updated well. This is also a good time to make sure that on each network you have filled out your profile completely, and that the information is current.
• Step Four: Write down your plan. Put down what you think is going great, and what could use work. Write down the social network where your target audience is spending the most time. Then write down three goals to focus on this month.

Here is an example of a simple social media plan that took me about 10 minutes to create: