Trending December 2023 # Strategic Planning Vs Strategic Management # Suggested January 2024 # Top 18 Popular

You are reading the article Strategic Planning Vs Strategic Management updated in December 2023 on the website Katfastfood.com. We hope that the information we have shared is helpful to you. If you find the content interesting and meaningful, please share it with your friends and continue to follow and support us for the latest updates. Suggested January 2024 Strategic Planning Vs Strategic Management

Difference Between Strategic planning vs Strategic management

The task of strategic planning is only difficult to look at, but it is quite an easy task to do once you get to it and moreover it is of utmost importance to all kinds of business as it critically analyses the current situation of the company, looks at what things are best for the company and focuses on the things that should be done and paves a clear path for the end result. Strategic management in the simplest terms would mean planning for the known as well as the unknown contingencies of the business. Strategic management is a step ahead of strategic planning. It helps in defining if the strategies that are implemented and worked upon properly. In this article will see the difference between Strategic Planning vs Strategic Management.

Strategic Planning

The process of predicting the future of the company and defining it into the goals and objectives in order to be able to fulfill the future envisioned is broadly categorized in strategic planning vs strategic management. Unlike the conventional way of long-term planning, the strategic planning works it’s way backward i.e., first defining the end result and then chalking the strategic planning steps to be undertaken in order to achieve the end result. For example, at the time of long-term planning, the planner plans out the steps to reach the next level but in case of strategic planning, the planner reaches the stage and then thinks what must be done to reach here. In other words, long-term planning is a prospective planning and strategic planning is a retrospective planning process.

Start Your Free Marketing Course

Digital marketing, conversion rate optimization, customer relationship management & others

For example, a company has developed software that helps the users to store and listen to music at their own comfort. But at the same time, Apple Company, looking at the popularity of the software, created an iPod, which made listening to music all the more easy for the customers. Now in such a situation, if the company did not have a strategic plan in place, then it would have suffered great loss because they would have only focused on the day to day operations of the company and hence would have rendered the software obsolete. And in turn, they would not have been able to compete with their competitors in the market.

This is the five steps of Strategic Planning

Once we have understood what exactly strategic planning includes in strategic planning vs strategic management, the next step is to understand the strategic planning steps. It is an understood fact that if you want things done quickly and smoothly then it is important to build a plan as to how things are to be done, or else you will just end up in a mess.

Recommended courses

Here are five steps that you should follow in order to be able to chalk the best possible strategic plan for your company:

1. Determine where you are

Understand the position of your company, understand the market that you work in and the environment of the market. Do not get stuck in the maze of the way you see the company and the actual position where the company stands. Conduct an internal and external audit to best understand your company’s footing and understand how competitive your company can be.

2. Identify what’s important

Once the analysis of your company’s footing is undertaken, the next step is to define as to what is important for your company’s growth, to set the direction for your company and define the missions and the vision that you want your company to fulfill. A strategic plan should focus on the issues that are recognized as the more important issues than the other in the in-depth analysis of the company’s position.

3. Define what you must achieve

Set the objectives for your company as to what should the company achieve in order to properly address the grave issues. This is to make sure that the company is moving in the right direction and has some objective set for themselves.

4. Determine who is accountable

By determining who is accountable for what, you are indirectly allocating the human resource, the time resource and the money resource that you have and make sure that all the plans, strategies and budgets are properly fulfilled and all the priority issues are properly addressed so that the company can fulfill the objectives set.

5. Review the work done

Once all the plans have been made and implemented and all the resources have been allocated and the ball has been set rolling, the next step is to ensure that the plans are properly followed and the tasks are being performed as planned. For this, you need to review the process and make necessary changes in the plan. And this should be done at least every quarter just so to ensure that there are no discrepancies.

It is not only helpful for the big business houses to keep things on track but it is also important for the small business units for the growth of their business as the strategic plan will give you a much better idea about what you should do next.

Strategic Management

In the planning phase, you chalk out all the plans for the company but in the management phase, the strategies so formulated are identified and are described so that the managers are able to do their job in the best possible manner and so as to achieve a competitive edge over their competitors.

The kind of planning would be applicable for both the small-scale firms and the large-scale firms because irrespective of the size of the firm, it important for the firm to be ready for the competition that they face in order to keep themselves afloat and gain a competitive edge. Strategic management helps in defining the course the company is going to follow by deciding upon the goals that the company wants to attain,

Strategic management is not a one-time process but instead, it is a continuous process. It requires a constant evaluation of the company and its competitive edge and reevaluates the strategies panned out in order to compensate for the changing environment.

In strategic planning vs strategic management, it also has another aspect in which the process helps the employees in understanding their job profile and how their job helps in the accomplishment of the overall objective of the company. The employees work better if they know their exact role in the organization and know what they have to do in order to be able to reach that goal. Strategic management can also be seen as a means to manage the employees of the organization so that the employees are able to work to their maximum potential. The management technique also helps the employees to understand the various changes brought about in the organization and understand how these changes are going to affect their job, hence are able to better face the changes being brought about in the organization. They help the employees to be effective as well as efficient as both qualities are equally valued in an organization.

Hence the strategic management has to play a dual role in strategic planning vs strategic management, one is to incorporate all the functional areas of the organization into one thing and to make sure that functional area so incorporated work well with each other. And the second role is to keep checking if the goals and objectives of the organization are properly followed and fulfilled.

One of the main functions of strategic management in strategic planning vs strategic management is to properly analyze the various cross-functional business decisions before implementing them. Strategic management also involves various other functions:

Proper analysis of the various internal and external strengths and weaknesses of the company.

Formulation of the action plans to be implemented.

After formulation, the execution of action plans is also included.

Reviewing the success of the action plans that are executed and making the changes as and when necessary.

Strategic management enables strategic planning which tells about the organizational ability to take the necessary action plan so as to be able to fulfill the goal set by the planners.

There are five stages in the process of strategic management

They are as follows:

1. Goal setting

Goal setting, as the name suggests is the process of setting a vision for the company as to where they want the company to reach. This process can be further divided into three-point process; first is to define the short term and long term goals for the organization, second is to identify the process and the action plan that needs to be undertaken in order to fulfill the objectives set and third is to customize the process according to the capabilities of the staff so that they are able to better work towards the goal fulfillment process.

But during the process of goal setting in strategic planning and strategic management, you should keep in mind that the goal should be detailed, realistic and it should be in sync with the vision set for the organization. In the end, your plan should be detailed enough to communicate your goals and vision to the shareholders and the employees of the organization properly.

2. Analysis

This stage involves in-depth analysis of the strength and weaknesses of the company. Proper analysis of the company is of utmost importance as it helps in the next steps of strategic management. In strategic planning and strategic management the sustainability of the business, the direction in which organization wants to go and the opportunities towards which the organization should be working are the key elements and areas that the analysis should focus on. The external and internal factors affecting the working of the organization are also included in the analysis. A proper detailed SWOT analysis should be undertaken by the business organization.

3. Strategy formation

For formulating the strategy of strategic planning and strategic management in the organization, the planners should take into account the information gathered from the analysis. They should identify the goals and the objectives to be achieved and should also know which problems need to be prioritized according to their importance towards goal achieving. Also, the external help needed by the company in any area should also be identified. Also, the planners should also have a backup plan for each step.

4. Strategy implementation

In strategic planning and strategic management, a successful implementation of the strategy is very important to any business organization as it will define if the organization will be able to achieve the goals set. It is important to understand if the strategy implemented is in sync with the business structure. The roles and responsibility of the people in the organization should be clearly spelled out so that there is no confusion on the part of the employees and they are work with a concentrated approach towards the fulfillment of the goals. Also if there is a need for any financial help, then that help should also be secured at this stage.

5. Evaluation and control

The proper evaluation of the strategy implemented in strategic planning and strategic management should be undertaken and should be made sure that the strategies are followed properly and there is no discrepancy in the implementation. Also if there is any discrepancy then corrective steps should be taken in order to be able to achieve maximum results. Evaluate your actual results to the standards set by you. Internal and external issues affecting the organization should also be taken into consideration and should also keep in mind when formulating the future strategies.

Strategic planning and strategic management are both important for the organization as they help in formulating the goals to be achieved and help in a more concentrated approach towards the fulfillment of that goal.

Pocket Network Announces Closing Of Its Strategic Private Sale Led By Blockchain Industry Leaders

Pocket Network – an infrastructure middleware protocol that provides decentralized cloud computing and abundant bandwidth on full nodes to other applications across 20 blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and Harmony has closed a strategic round of $10 Million led by Republic Capital, RockTree Capital, Arrington Capital, and C2 Ventures, as well as other notable participants such as Coinshares, Decentral Park Capital and Dominance Ventures.

Pocket Network has gone from tens of thousands of weekly relays at the start of 2023 to over two billion relays in a single week in December and is rapidly scaling as demand from L1s and dApps for its services increases. For the month of December, relays were 5.5 Billion compared to 89M 12 months earlier.

Since July, Pocket Network’s usage has more than doubled monthly, measured in “relays” which are API calls processed by the protocol. Just this past week, it broke its average daily record by serving 300M+ relays. The growth in network usage has resulted in corresponding node growth on a network now served by over 18,000 nodes run by hundreds of independent community parties and providers.

With total network revenue exceeding $56 Million in the month of December, Pocket Network is already comparatively amongst the Top 5 revenue producers for all blockchains and blockchain applications globally (source data from Token Terminal*), while remaining relatively under the radar until now, including having revenues surpassing that of Solana, Elrond, Harmony, and most DeFi protocols.

“Today in blockchain, the valuation of a project is based on its actual performance and real metrics. In Pocket Network, we have uncovered a gem that is scaling at warp speed and its performance is measurable onchain. Many exchanges and dApps are still reliant today on Web2 centralized cloud computing and hosting providers which can cause costly outages when they go down. RockTree believes Pocket Network is critical infrastructure for the Web3 revolution, that offers true decentralization and constant uptime for a multi-chain blockchain future. Just look at the onchain data” said Omer Ozden, CEO of RockTree Capital, a fund and merchant bank focused on projects at the nexus of Asia and North America. “I want to add that it is Pocket’s high-quality team and leadership that has made it an easy choice for RockTree to be their Asia partner and invest.”

Building on its already large community of thousands of node runners Pocket Network aims to scale into the trillions of relays per day, spread across hundreds of thousands of full nodes within the next 5 years.

“We’re incredibly excited to support Pocket Network in its mission to incentivize L1 decentralization. We are believers in many different ecosystems — including Terra, Algorand & Polkadot — and understand the need for wide node distribution at the base layer. Ultimately, POKT is critical to enhancing the long-term robustness and antifragility of the entire crypto-ecosystem”, said Michael Arrington, Founder of Arrington Capital.

“Pocket Network’s market-based approach to infrastructure properly demonstrates how Web3-native services can outcompete Web2 incumbents both in economics and performance. For blockchain app developers and node runners alike, Pocket is a clear no-brainer,” added Alex Ye, Managing Director, of Republic Crypto.

“We announced earlier this year the strategic partnership with Rocktree Capital, who is helping lead the global acceleration of our presence into all of the major blockchain markets. Today we are excited to announce the continued acceleration of this plan through the strategic partnerships formed in this sale with Republic, Arrington Capital and many high impact players providing value to the whole Pocket Network ecosystem.” – Michael O’Rourke, CEO of Pocket Network

Pocket Network is targeting increasing developer adoption and node coverage through multiple initiatives, including an extensive multi-jurisdictional expansion into the Asia-Pacific region in the coming year.

About Pocket Network

*Token Terminal will publish full revenue data for Pocket Network on January 5th

Pocket Network, a blockchain data ecosystem for Web3 applications, is a platform built for applications that use cost-efficient economics to coordinate and distribute data at scale. It enables seamless and secure interactions between blockchains and across applications. With Pocket, the use of blockchains can be simply integrated into websites, mobile apps, IoT, and more, giving developers the freedom to put blockchain-enabled applications into the “pocket” of every mainstream consumer.

RockTree Capital, a merchant bank and fund based in China focused on blockchain projects and mobile e-commerce companies, with offices in Beijing, Shanghai, New York, and Toronto. RockTree Capital invests in top-tier blockchain projects and accelerates their growth in Asia.

Arrington Capital is a digital asset management firm primarily focused on blockchain-based capital markets. The firm, founded in 2023 by TechCrunch and CrunchBase founder Michael Arrington and TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, has over $1 billion under management and has invested in hundreds of startups across the world.

Republic Capital is a leading investment platform that provides access to startup, real estate, crypto, and gaming investments for both retail and accredited investors. Republic has facilitated over $700 million in investments by our global community of over one million members

C2 Ventures is a chain-agnostic venture fund, focused on empowering builders with capital as well as operational expertise to develop and scale the next generation of leading Web3 and Metaverse applications.

For more information, visit: Pocket Network

Traditional Vs Dynamic Project Management

Difference Between Traditional vs Dynamic Project Management

Project management has captivated our professional lives in such a way that it’s now become a norm in every single business and office/organization. This phase of systematically conducting your work and organizing the bits and pieces of a project to achieve a common company goal or objective was what governed successful projects and innovative, state-of-the-art changes and change management systems. With project management techniques evolved project management approaches, and these approaches kept evolving and growing to the ever-changing aspects of global businesses.

Start Your Free Project Management Course

Project scheduling and management, project management software & others

As industrialization grew exponentially there came about a divide in the way we looked at project management approaches and how it would affect the business. The work needed to get faster and better and more accurate than ever. That’s what came about to us as the new side of project management. The older approaches, or more legacy systems, came to be called Traditional Project Management and the new, vibrant and more intuitive approach came to be known by the name of Dynamic Project Management.

Traditional Project Management

When we speak about traditional management, we’re looking at a very confined and rigid form of a project management approach. This approach was the start of project management on planet earth and assumed that the scope and objectives of the project stayed constant throughout the life cycle of the project. The initiating and planning were then designed as per this thought process. Allocations were made and the product was envisioned in a two-dimensional setup without any variation or even the possibility of a variation considered.

With absolutely no margin left to accommodate variance and changes to project plans and schedules, the success margins were bleak and not very encouraging. Traditional project management would identify the timelines and resources with the assumption that nothing will change during the project and the plan will be adhered to at all times. The project life cycle looked like this:

Project Initiating

Project Planning

Project Execution

Project Monitoring and Control

Project Closing

The project life cycle would be followed in a sequential order and one stage would follow another, that is, only once project planning is complete will the entire project shift to project execution.

Changes in Plan

As mentioned above, traditional project management has a very rigid outlook on the entire project management space we create to conduct a change or movement towards a set objective. With the assumption that everything will stay just as it is, there’s no flexibility in the plan that is drafted after the project is initiated.

With less room for any changes, even a slight change faced by the project in the execution phase or in the plan designing phase itself, it will be necessary that the project manager redraft the entire plan from scratch bearing in mind the change that has occurred.

As we now know that within the working of a project, there is a possibility of many changes. Redrafting and redesigning the entire plan would not be scalable and would cost the organization time, resource, inflation of budget, and efforts.

Roles and Responsibilities

In traditional project management, we are looking at a central figure that takes care of the entire functioning of the project. That individual is the project manager (PM). The PM looks through all the stages that the project goes through and is responsible for its smooth functioning.

With the dynamism that is offered by the project, the responsibility of updating the plan also falls in the hands of the PM, thus, overburdening a single individual with the task of steering and pushing the project on track. This can be quite a task to manage.

Productivity and Performance

There’s a lot of focus on adherence to schedule and timelines as there now lays a harsh punishment for the PM if there’s even a slight change in the project plan. This one-sided affection for project schedules disrupts the workflow of the project and the work lags back anyhow.

With minds off the actual work that takes place, there have also been many cases where quality was compromised with the view to remain on time. There was always a hush-push when it comes to timelines and not a moment to breathe and think about the work project team members are doing.

Risk Management

Though the bulk of the concentration of the team and the project manager is on timelines, with inadequate attention to risk management and anticipation of risks, the team would be reacting to risk rather than responding to them.

When there’s a reaction to risks taking place, you know you aren’t paying attention to risks at all, as you assume that change wouldn’t take place and the project will flow as per timelines. But, with firefighting taking place during the project, you are forced to go off-track and then, the cycle of redrafting the plan takes place once again.

Work Prioritization

Work prioritization can take a serious hit during project proceedings, and with the framework of traditional project management, where the authority is centralized, there’s a possibility that the team members aren’t aware of the correct priority of work. This can cause them to work on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Timelines

With weak timelines, traditional project management was at its most vulnerable end and it is now that we know why this rudimentary setup of processes was just a predecessor of the dynamic form of project management.

There’s a lot of external influence on the timelines and deadlines when it comes to traditional project management. With customers and clients dictating the deadlines, there’s no practical look-through on the estimation of work and the time needed for that work.

Dynamic Project Management

In stark contrast to traditional project management, the environment created by dynamic project management addresses all the concerns raised by the former environment. The dynamic nature of projects is perfectly handled by this type of project management as it provides for a flexible framework that encompasses the ever-changing seasons of the project plans and objectives. The approach used here, in a dynamic project management environment, is that of dividing the project into self-sustainable units that don’t have a lot of dependent factors tied to it.

Considering a software development project, you have varied requirements that are extremely volatile and are subject to massive or minor changes with every step taken. Mostly, these plans are based on hypothesis that may or may not conform to the actual happenings within the project. It’s very impractical to follow the traditional project management approach in such scenarios and hence, project management experts came up with the need for a new and flexible approach.

Dynamic project management or Agile project management happened to be just the approach needed to break the jinx in unsuccessful projects, which were caused due to the rigidity in the traditional project management approach. Being highly iterative for a project management approach, dynamic project management went the incremental way. With all good things there are aspects of the project that need to be carefully looked into to get the ball rolling. They are:

Value rendered by the project should be clear

There should be active participation by the customers to check the proceedings of the project

Visual and graphical documentation should be allowed and encouraged

Team collaboration should be the authoritative figure in the project execution

The development cycles are building blocks that allow for constant evaluation of the project and the framework allows for constant feedback and improvement on the spot to be taken up. With continuous improvement as its backbone, dynamic project management is surely the way to go ahead. Planning becomes more agile and takes place with a lot of consideration and anticipation on board.

Changes in Plan

With the latest technologies taking over the dynamic project management approach, PMs rely on project management software tools to help them go about with the different changes in plans and the different introductions in the project design and execution phases. These tools conform to the dynamic project management approach in a way so as to push a very little amount of stress on the PM when it comes to changes in the plan.

These tools enable PMs to automatically incorporate changes in the plan as there already are the various situations considered and contingency plans agreed upon for any changes that might come about. The tool immediately takes the change and reshuffles the plan in a way so as to not shift the entire plan but accommodate the anomaly that has struck.

Roles and Responsibilities

It would only be possible if the hands that contributed to the project are extremely skilled and can work brilliantly in a team. Team collaboration is extremely important in a dynamic project management space and it forms a key component that drives this dynamic framework to higher possibilities of success.

Productivity and Performance

The plan and the timelines for the plan are all now automatically handled by the project management tool and need not have dedicated eyes following them. With that, the team and the PM can solely concentrate on the work to be completed and the iterations to be looked after. More time allows for more creativity and innovation and helps the team members to always think out of the box for any hurdle found along the way.

Risk Management

Unlike traditional project management, where there was more of a reaction to the risks encountered, in dynamic project management you are looking at ways to respond to the risks that have come your way. During the project planning stage, risk management is conducted and risks are anticipated and foreseen. With these forecasting conducted, action plans were also designated to each risk, which was anticipated. These action plans are incorporated in the project plan, and if there should be risks encountered, a proactive method will already go as deployed.

If the risks are averted, the project and its team members can use the remainder time as an opportunity to pull the project schedule ahead.

Work Prioritization

Here, everyone on the project team knows what needs to be done and the priorities are already sorted. With transparency in the system and clarity in the prioritization process, it takes care of changes in plans or task priority. These immediately reflect in the project plans.

Timelines

With reliable scheduling and a flexible approach, the timeline and the project end date or milestone dates aren’t set in stone at the start of the project but are rather evolving as the project evolves with time. If dynamic project management is conducted effectively, there’s a great chance for success and savings when it comes to budget, time, and effort.

This would imply that with an evolving plan, your deadlines will always be accurate and your project end date will be based on actual rather than forecasts made way early in time.

Conclusion

The traditional project management was the very start of project management and its contribution to how we manage projects nowadays will always be applauded. Not that this article makes traditional project management an obsolete project management approach, it rather just pits the traditional with the new age dynamic. Traditional project management is still used in some industries that have a fixed timeframes for everything and for linear processing of work.

The comparison surely and evidently puts dynamic project management on the lead in this race and with times changing and reforming continuously in the industrial sector, we will surely get better at what we do and progress even further for humankind.

Content Planning For Social Media: An 8

Content planning is more than scheduling. Run your accounts like a well-oiled machine with a strategic social media content plan.

Content planning is the most important factor in the success of your social media strategy. (There, I said it.) It’s much more than choosing a photo, writing a caption, and scheduling it to post.

You can have the world’s best social media marketing strategy, but it won’t be successful without proper content planning.

Here’s why that is, and the 8 steps anyone can do to plan effective, goal-crushing social media content.

Craft perfect posts in seconds

OwlyWriter AI instantly generates captions and content ideas for every social media network. It’s seriously easy.

Start free 30-day trial

What does “content planning” mean for social media managers?

Scheduling your social posts ahead of time is great, but it’s only a small part of what makes up a content plan. Truly effective content planning focuses on the big picture: Your marketing goals.

Well-planned content is:

Created in batches to optimize efficiency.

Part of a cross-platform campaign and repurposed across all your channels for maximum impact.

Connected to one or more marketing goals.

Balanced between your own original content and curated content.

Why is content planning so important?

Which strategy is more likely to succeed?

Your social media marketing strategy is what you want to achieve and how you will get there. Content planning is the process of designing content for those goals to actually get you there.

It keeps you organized

Batching your content is way more efficient than trying to come up with a post on the fly every day, or for a specific campaign. Batching means you’re taking the time to specifically write a bunch of social media content at once.

Besides being a more efficient way to write content, you’ll get more out of it. As you write each piece of content, extract pieces of it to repurpose. One post can quickly become five or more without much extra time. For example:

Write an Instagram Reels script.

Create a text caption from that script to use on text-based platforms like Twitter.

Create an image or infographic from the Reel content to use as an alternative way to communicate the information.

And, of course, the most basic: Make a note to save your completed Reel video in different sizes to use on other platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook Pages, TikTok, and more. Check the current recommended post sizes for each platform before saving.

Plus many more options, including writing an article about the topic to a series of short Tweets of the key takeaways and everything in between.

Content planning saves time and gets you the most mileage out of your work.

It helps you avoid last-minute pressure (and writers’ block)

Oh, crap, it’s 10am on National Do A Grouch a Favor Day and you haven’t got anything scheduled to go out. (It’s February 16th in case you were wondering when you need to do me a favor.)

What will your customers think of you? Whether you post for every made-up holiday or only the real ones, content planning means you and your team will never stress out trying to create something last-minute because you forgot why this weekend is a long weekend.

It connects your social media activity to marketing goals

Content planning keeps your eyes on the prize. You’ve got a formal marketing strategy, and hopefully a content strategy, too. (No? We’ve got a free social media strategy template for ya.) Your content planning process is what connects those big picture documents to the day-to-day marketing work your team does.

Each social media post = not that important on its own.

All your posts together = what determines if your social media strategy will sink or swim. Fail or fly. Crash out or cash in. You get it.

How to create a winning content plan in 8 steps

Content planning is the most important part of a social marketer’s job, but don’t sweat it: It’s easy once you’ve got the right process.

Your content plan brings together 3 key elements:

Let’s create your personalized content plan right now.

Step 1: Plan themes for your content

Before you can create content, you need to choose the categories you’ll post about. How many topics you have and what they are depends on your unique business, but as an example, Hootsuite posts about:

Social media marketing tips

Social network updates and best practices

Marketing research and statistics, like the free Social Trends 2023 report

Social media marketing experiments

Product updates and features

Company news

Product education (tutorials, tips)

This is your content creation roadmap. If a post isn’t about one of the things on your list, you don’t post it. (Or, you rethink your marketing strategy and add a new category for it if it’s merited.)

Step 2: Brainstorm campaign and post ideas

With your topic list in front of you, create! Just… think! Write! Do it!

Write down all the ideas you can think of that meet the following criteria:

It’s about one of the topics on your list.

It’s connected to your marketing goals.

It’s not that simple to “think of ideas,” even for those of us who smash keyboards all day for a living. How you brainstorm is up to you, but here are a few ways I get inspired:

Scope out your competition: What are they posting? Can you put your own spin on those ideas?

Review the past: What campaigns have been most successful for you before? What elements of those campaigns were most effective? How can you replicate that for your new goal or campaign?

To know what’s worked before, you need top-notch analytics reports, right? Yes, you can piece together the information manually from each social platform, Google Analytics, and other sources… but why would you?

Hootsuite Analytics measures the real data you need to determine success, not just basic engagement metrics. It gives you a full 360 degree view of your performance across all networks with the ability to customize and run reports however you like, in real-time.

Start free 30-day trial

Cheat: Check out Hootsuite’s 70+ social media post templates

Running low on ideas on what to post? Head to your Hootsuite dashboard and use one of the 70+ easily customizable social post templates to fill the gaps in your content calendar.

The template library is available to all Hootsuite users and features specific post ideas, from audience Q&As and product reviews, all the way to Y2K throwbacks, contests, and secret hack reveals.

Each template includes:

A sample post (complete with a royalty-free image and a suggested caption) that you can open in Composer to customize and schedule

A bit of context on when you should use the template and what social goals it can help you reach

A list of best practices for customizing the template to make it your own

To use the templates, sign in to your Hootsuite account and follow these steps:

Head to the Inspirations section in the menu on the left side of the screen.

Customize your caption and add relevant hashtags.

Add your own images. You can use the generic picture included in the template, but your audience might find a custom image more engaging.

Publish the post or schedule it for later.

Learn more about using social media post templates in Composer.

Step 3: Decide when you will post

We’ve got our why and what, now we need the when.

Why: Why are you posting this? (What business goal is this content serving?)

What: What will you post? (The actual content you brainstormed.)

When: When is the best time to post it?

Sometimes, the when is obvious: Holiday content, a product launch, etc. But there’s a lot more to the when than the day you’re scheduling it for. You also need to consider your overall posting frequency.

You’ll need to experiment with how often you’re posting every week, how many posts per day, and the times of day. And, platforms change their algorithms all the time so what’s working now might not in six months.

Thankfully, you can back up your experiments with personalized intelligence, thanks to Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature. It analyzes your unique audience engagement patterns to determine the best times to post across all your accounts.

Going a step further, it also recommends different times for different goals. For example, when to post awareness or brand-building content, and when to push hard for sales.

Start free 30-day trial

Need to get your social marketing started quickly and hit the ground running? Add your posts, either individually or via bulk upload, hit AutoSchedule, and Hootsuite does the rest. Boom—your social media for the month done in under five minutes.

Of course, AutoSchedule is great for those pressed for time, but you should still experiment with different numbers of posts per week and times of day to find what works best for your target audience.

You can customize AutoSchedule to only post during set times or days of the week. Once you decide how often and when to post, either with Hootsuite Analytics or other tools, modify your AutoSchedule settings and now you have effortless social media post scheduling. Nice.

Only want to post once a day at a specific time? No problem.

Step 4: Decide on your content mix

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel daily. A successful social media and content marketing plan contains a mix of original and curated content. But what should you curate? Where from? How often?

Great curated content is:

Relevant to your audience.

Related to one of your content themes (from Step 1).

Connected to a business goal.

How each piece and type of content fits in with your other social media content is more important than how much of it you share, but a standard content mix is 40% original and 60% curated. Of course, adjust that up or down depending on your preferences and production capacity for your own content.

Some weeks you may share more curated content than others, but on average, stick to your plan. A surefire method for ensuring you don’t overdo it? Share one post, create one post—repeat!

With Hootsuite, you can easily add content from around the web to build a library of quality content to share later. When you find something to share, create a new post with the link and save it to your Drafts section.

And, you can use Streams to easily capture content from social media accounts you follow to re-share later.

When it’s time to schedule out your content—more on that later—you can just drag and drop from Drafts straight into your editorial calendar in Hootsuite Planner.

Step 5: Assign responsibilities

It can be easy to lose track of planning content ahead of time and end up in that familiar “Oh, crap, we need posts for tomorrow!” space, right? It’s the planner’s job to ensure the work that needs to get done flows down through to everyone else.

Clear expectations around who’s doing what are essential for content planning (and, so I hear, life). If you’re a lone content manager and don’t have a dedicated social marketing team with writers, designers, customer support peeps, and so on, now’s the time to build one.

If you’re on a tight budget, find freelancers to outsource tasks to as you need them so you can control expenses. For in-house and larger teams, you need to plan your planning. It’s redundant, and truly true.

So spell it out: Literally put it on your calendar. Assign a planner/strategist to manage the overall content planning process and assign each week or month’s work. Then, assign a designer, writer, project manager, etc to each client and/or campaign you’re managing.

The formula for going viral

Everything you need to make engaging content. Post templates, an AI hashtag generator, and access to Canva and Grammarly Pro in Hootsuite.

Get 60 days for $0

Step 6: Write post captions

Whenever possible, it’s best to write your social media post content before the campaign goes off to the design team (the next step).

This has a few key benefits:

It gives context to the designer so they can work efficiently.

They will have a better understanding of the entire campaign’s structure and goals.

While writing the posts, you may think of more ideas to add to the campaign to fill gaps.

It saves time by allowing copyediting and approvals to happen simultaneously with design, so you can publish it sooner.

Did you know that Hootsuite comes with OwlyWriter AI, a built-in creative AI tool that saves social media pros hours of work?

You can use OwlyWriter to:

Write a new social media caption in a specific tone, based on a prompt

Write a post based on a link (e.g. a blog post or a product page)

Generate post ideas based on a keyword or topic (and then write posts expanding on the idea you like best)

Identify and repurpose your top-performing posts

Create relevant captions for upcoming holidays

To get started with OwlyWriter, sign in to your Hootsuite account and head to the Inspiration section of the dashboard. Then, pick the type of AI magic you want to see in action.

Start your free 30-day trial

OwlyWriter will generate a list of post ideas related to the topic:

And that’s it! OwlyWriter never runs out of ideas, so you can repeat this process until your social media calendar is full — and sit back to watch your engagement grow.

Start your free 30-day trial

Step 7: Create (or source) design assets

This is often where content plans get bottlenecked. You can think up all these amazing campaigns, but without the creative assets that get it noticed, like graphics and videos, you can be stuck in your drafts forever.

But this is exactly why assigning responsibilities is important. Having a dedicated person for each part of the content planning process keeps things moving along and everyone’s on the same page.

Here’s how everyone can work together inside Hootsuite to bring a campaign from idea to finished:

Last but very un-least, scheduling. I don’t need to tell you scheduling your content ahead of time is important for basic efficiency. But it’s also the one thing that can make or break your entire social media marketing strategy. No pressure.

But really, what’s the point of content planning and following all the steps here if you’re not going to schedule out that content ahead of time in an organized, efficient, strategic way? Exactly.

You can create single posts in Composer or dial up your efficiency to 11 with the much-loved bulk upload tool, where you and 350 of your best posts can be scheduled in under 2 minutes flat.

Hootsuite is your content planning partner in success with robust scheduling, collaboration, analytics, and smart insights like the Best Time to Publish feature to make your job easier. Sign up for free today.

Get Started

Save time and grow faster with OwlyWriter AI, the tool that instantly generates social media captions and content ideas.

Tiktok Planning On Opening Warehouses In U.s.

More than a dozen recent LinkedIn Jobs postings suggest social media platform TikTok is getting into the warehouse and logistics business.

According to the listings, which were first notified by Axios, the Chinese-owned company is reportedly looking into building “global fulfillment centers” and seeking employees for locations in both Seattle and Los Angeles.

“The ecommerce industry has seen tremendous growth in recent years and has become a hotly contested space amongst leading Internet companies, and its future growth cannot be underestimated,” TikTok said in a job posting. “With millions of loyal users globally, we believe TikTok is an ideal platform to deliver a brand new and better e-commerce experience to our users.”

According to the postings, the short-form video-sharing platform is seeking to provide warehousing, delivery, and return services for merchants. They will also include customs clearing and supply chain systems.

TikTok Committed To Ecommerce, Live Shopping

In August 2023, TikTok developed a partnership with Shopify that allowed merchants to connect their Shopify storefronts with the social media platform. This was intended to help retailers promote their brands and sell their products by using with organic discovery and shopping tabs.

The platform has also ventured into live shopping, a phenomenon incredibly popular in China and other Asian countries, but slower to catch on in the rest of the world.

Reports over the summer claimed TikTok was abandoning its live shopping plans for the U.S. and Europe after it struggled to gain a foothold, but more recent reports indicate the live shopping initiative is back on.

On October 1, the Financial Times reported the social media company is headed for a partnership with TalkShopLive to launch its live shopping platform.

Details have reportedly not been finalized, and no contracts have been signed, but this would allow TikTok to outsource its live shopping operations. This partnership could allow TikTok to leverage TalkShopLive’s technology to provide content creators with the ability to host live shopping sessions while broadcasting their own streams.

Though joining the ecommerce market has been slow-moving in North America, the social media platform already has a successful blueprint that has been proven in Southeast Asia and other regions.

TikTok Warehouses Could Challenge Amazon

With more than 1 billion active monthly users, TikTok is a powerful online player. By creating its own ecommerce supply chain system, it could pose a serious threat to Amazon’s hegemony, which has long dominated online shopping.

“By providing warehousing, delivery, and customer service returns, our mission is to help sellers improve their operational capability and efficiency, provide buyers a satisfying shopping experience and ensure fast and sustainable growth of TikTok Shop,” the social media company wrote in a job listing.

Featured image: Shutterstock/Koshiro K

Planning To Embrace Big Data? Here Are Real

Embracing analytics is much tougher when it comes to confronting what real-time challenges mean in this field. Your data has to be very appropriate at each moment. A single minute can cost you millions of dollars if misplaced. That’s how tough is analyzing big data, researching firms and putting it up all together into a single vertical. There are times when the minutes and seconds count in to be very crucial and no delays can be accepted. Like in flight landing, a single delay can harm lives. Big data analytics has been taking the picture up from science experiments, sensor detection, radar communications to social media activities and what not. Every single action is determined by what was done previously or how was it done earlier. With this forming the major layout, challenges are also gearing up. You need to have elite communications and predictions that could actually help. The intelligent transport systems, financial market trading or military operations demand real-time decisions to hit the performance factors. Now, these real-time insights could vary from organization to organization. Some might accept delays; some might look for slight delays to set the other variable on time and some might not even handle a nanosecond delay. This vague real-time definition is the biggest challenge to overcome. Big data differs from other forms of data as it is categorized with 3 V’s: Velocity, Variety and Volume. Data is usually collected from various sources and is then processed further according to the demands. Decision-making, organizing and accessing are some major works to be then related. Each application has got some architecture to follow. Such in a way that it is able to handle data spikes, shortage and is able to scale up with the growing data whenever necessary. We need an architecture that does not fade away with the usage like if it’s of no use after 1 year then probably having it right now isn’t a good option. So, scaling up with the architecture is again a challenge to tackle. Having the work done should not be the only goal when we are into analytics. Why because, if your system breaks at some time or is unable to process some data at any point of time your internal processes should have some backup. If the only goal you had was your external outlook, probably then maintenance would be an issue. If the system fails, there should be some good internal processes that could have the capability to back up the entire failure. If some random internal processes are there, then it would be very difficult to handle the issues at runtime. The last big challenge is to make this entire shift. Employees working on the old traditional work practices have to be somehow convinced to take up this way. There are a variety of escalations that can be stepped onto and huge tasks can be very efficiently affected by this. Gradually the entire paradigm would be stepping into this so why not now? If there are areas where the employees aren’t comfortable enough to look for, then trainings can be organized. Managers could probably scale up some traditional issues and make the entire team realize how analytics can help them ace. So, there has to be some change to be taken care of and it’s better to experience right now then to be late and struggle at further stages. Coming to the gist of what we have is: Real-time analytics demands much more of our efforts and hard work. There are still challenges we need to look after. The faster we grow at this, the better we would be later. So making a change is the need of the hour and scaling up with the market trends is what is required the most.

Update the detailed information about Strategic Planning Vs Strategic Management on the Katfastfood.com website. We hope the article's content will meet your needs, and we will regularly update the information to provide you with the fastest and most accurate information. Have a great day!