#debating on making a chart to breakdown Top 3-20 and see how close they are

[twotales]

Stargate Atlantis | Ship Popularity Over Time Part 3: Top 11-20

Part One: Top 10 Part Two: Breakdown Top 2-10

All SGA fandom stats

Note:

The fluctuations between the ships are quite intense, which you can feel even just looking at the chart. This further shows how close in number the tags for the ships are and that any of them could be elevated easily.

*The AO3 date function starts from the day you search. This means year 2022 is actually July 2021 - July 2022 and so on. (I originally had 21/22 on the graphic but it made it look cluttered.) I could account for this if I had more time but sadly I do not. I may do a chart in January to get an accurate account. But, since SGA came out in July 2004 this is technically an accurate year count by release date.

Please do not remove my username from the graphic.

[impala-pies-and-cas]

Does Supernatural Have a Problem with Representation and Diversity: A Mathematical Study

At the end of season 12, another fan favorite minority character, Eileen, was killed. This has come in a long line of favorite SPN characters who were people of color, women, lgbt+, and/or disabled being killed seemingly before their time. This, like other instances with such characters like Kevin and Charlie, sparked outrage from many fans. Some called the move sexist and ableist. Many said it was not inherently bad that Eileen died, but the way it was done was disgraceful and unworthy of such a beloved character. Other fans fought back against these claims, citing that everyone dies in supernatural and that no one should be immune. Besides, others said, with more representation, shouldn’t that mean more death?

But is there actually more representation? And is the death count equal? Are we being persuaded by biases and personal agendas?

After the season 12 finale, I’ve set out to see if there is a quantifiable difference in representation, huge differences that can be backed up by numbers and not just perception. Much of this is going to cover gender and race, as those are the easiest diversity angles to notice, but I will touch upon other areas. This information was not compiled to confirm any set of biases, but instead answer these questions at the heart of the debate and anger. Some of the information complied is quite obvious, but having set numbers is vital in these debates.

The rest, which is a lot, is under the cut:

A few notes/disclaimers before we begin:

All information is taken from seasons 1-12. When season 13 starts the numbers on here will, no doubt, have to change.

I have not counted every single character ever put on Supernatural ever, but instead elected to take my sample size from supernaturalwiki.com. I was originally going to pull a list from imdb, but I didn’t just want to record who was in what episode, but also who lives and who dies. To do this I would have had to closely watch the entire series over again. I have school and a job, so I have no time to actually do that. Instead, I collected my sample size from a site that has that information already on it. [I may end up redoing this using imdb and rewatching the show, but that will take months - if not years].

Jumping off of the first point, I have collected about 850 characters for this experiment that uses a lot of math and percentages. Obviously, these numbers are not entirely accurate since I couldn’t find everyone, but I highly doubt the percentages would greatly tip the scale in any minorities’ favor by a recount. This is just an example, but it’s a large sample size example that still reveals a lot.

Although many characters may not inherently be the same gender/race as their actor counterparts [see angels and demons] I am using the actor’s race and gender as the character’s. This is about on screen representation, so what you see is the most important. And, before anyone asks, no, i did not go up to every actor and asked them if they were a person of color or what gender the identify as; i guessed, but they were educated guesses. I followed this up until the show directly contradicted the casting. For instance: the actress playing the angel Benjamin is a black woman, but the character was presented as using he/him pronouns, so I listed Benjamin as a man of color.

In the cases of characters with multiple actors who fall into the same category (ie Meg’s two actresses are both white women) the character is counted once under that group (Meg is a white woman). In cases were the actors are in different categories (ie Raphael was portrayed by a black man and black woman), I count the character twice under each group (Raphael is counted once as a man of color and then again as a woman of color). I didn’t feel comfortable choosing one, and saying a character is 50% one thing and 50% another seemed more harmful that just counting them twice.

There are a few characters I couldn’t pin down as either gender, as either the wiki only used neutral pronouns with them or they were a straight up genderless creature, so I have a few characters in a gender neutral category. I have listed them, but they are by and large excluded from the majority of the analysis.

This is only about numbers and percentages, not how characters are portrayed on screen. The latter is more subjective and hard to discuss without bias getting involved. After all, I am one queer woman who can’t speak for everyone. 

If you’d like to see my very annoying spreadsheets documenting all of this, click here: [x]. For larger versions of the graphs, you can find them here [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

And now onto the graphs:

[Graph 1]

When you look at a strict gender breakdown of the characters, it comes out to be about 60% men and 40% women, which is, proportionally, a bit too uneven. The show should be hovering closer to the 50/50 mark. However, when race is added, the proportions get depressing. White men (blue )make up almost 55% of the total population of the show. People of color combined make up just over 10%, with each (moc are green and woc are orange) at about 5%.

[Graph 2]

The numbers get more interesting as we break it up into percent alive (the light colors) and precent dead or status unknown (the darker). While all groups have more people dead than alive, both groups of women have 43% of their population alive. White men have about 30% percent. Men of color are the most killed off group, at 20% still alive.

[Graph 3]

I further broke up the categories into how many episodes these characters have been in [this is not separated into alive or dead]. The brackets are 1 episode (top left), 2-3 episodes (top right), 4-6 episodes (middle left), 7-9 episodes (middle right), 10-12 episodes (bottom left), and 13+ episodes (bottom right). The columns go from left to right with white men, men of color, white women, and women of color.

NOTE: there are always far more characters in only one episode than any other grouping, and numbers of characters in each group constantly get lower on a bell curve. However, it is important to look at the percentages and comparable representation in each grouping.

As you can see, white people always have higher columns than people of color. You may also notice that at the 7-9 episode mark the graph loses columns. As of the season 12 finale, no woman of color has been in 7 episodes. While there is one man of color who has been in over 13+ episodes (Kevin), there are currently no men of color in 10-12.

I decided to break this up further into individual graphs for the different race/gender categories: first there are pie charts showing the group percentages in each number of episodes bracket . The second is a bar graph looking at the alive/dead status of characters in each number of episodes bracket.

[Graph 4]

There are so many men in 1 episode I had to log the graph. They currently have more characters in every category, save for 7-9 episodes where white women lead. Also, as of the end of season 12 there is at least one white man alive in each number of episodes bracket.

[Graph 5]

While they have far less characters in total than white men, white women do have a similar percentage breakdown.They do beat white men in the 7-9 episodes bracket, and like white men have at least one person who is alive in each group.

[Graph 6]

The graphs for men of color look very different than the other two. The do have a lower percentage of characters in only one episode, but that is mainly due to the lack of characters overall. Further, there are far more dead men of color than alive; the number of dead men of color in one episode is at a 78% death rate, far higher than any other group. They also don’t have any currently living characters past 2-3 episodes.

[Graph 7]

Women of color have, quantifiably, the worst record for representation in these categories. As I said earlier, no woman of color has been in at least 7 episodes. While they are tied for the group least killed off, they have so few characters introduced that it hardly makes a difference.

[Graph 8]

I also wanted to look at the number of people of color I could find in each season [once again i’d like to reiterate that this is based on the characters I could find from supernaturalwiki.com]. This bar graph has men of color in green and women of color in orange, tracking the number of each and both of them combined per season. While I give credit to season 12 for having the highest number of characters of color, that’s still at a lousy 16 characters, and when you can easily find over 100 characters per season, 16 is nothing to applaud. Further, if you count up all the characters listed in the graph, you reach 98. Not even 100 characters. That’s less than one new character of color being introduced every two episodes, which should be ridiculously easy to do. Supernatural still cannot do that.

I did also want to look at lgbt+ and disabled representation in the show.

NOTE: while characters like Hannah and Raphael have been in different gendered vessels, the show has never confirmed them as trans or non-binary, and I couldn’t find any human characters that were definitely not cis. I have decided that because of this lack of clear information not to collect stats on trans/non-binary characters on Supernatural, but that might speak for itself.

I found 17 characters who were confirmed in show to experience some form of same gender attraction. That makes up 2% of the show’s character population. Of these characters, 5 of them have been in multiple episodes. As of the end of season 12, 5 are dead (3 of the five in multiple episodes are dead). 5 of the 17 are people of color (only 1 of them has been in multiple episodes so far).

Tracking disability is harder, as many disabilities are invisible, so I stuck with characters with physical disabilities in multiple episodes, of which are only 3: Pamela Barnes, Bobby Singer (in season 5 he was in a wheelchair), and Eileen Leahy. They make up 0.35% of the show’s population. 2 of these characters were cured of there disability before their last episode on the show. All three are white. All three are dead.

So does Supernatural have a problem with representation and diversity?

Yes. It most certainly does. But not in the way people expect or often perceive.

Women aren’t being killed off at higher rates than man. Actually it’s quite the opposite. And white, straight, able-bodied women are pretty good in terms of representation.

The real problem is with the representation of people of color, disabled people, and the lgbt+ community.

And really, it’s not in the rates of them being killed off (well, men of color need to be killed off less). The problem lies in that these characters aren’t being introduced in the first place. It really doesn’t matter if 30% of white men are alive verse 43% of women of color when that comes out to 141 total living white men and 19 total living women of color. It’s not fair playing field.

Supernatural is a show set all across The United States of America and lives in it’s culture and lore. Nearly 40% of the United States is made up of people of color: black, asian, native, latinx, arab, etc. The show should reflect that. While the numbers on lgbt+ representation is still being disputed, the perception is that 4-10% of the population has same gender attraction and 0.6% are transgender. The show should reflect that. According to the US census, about 19% of the population has some sort of disability. The show should reflect that. It’s more than just adding in a few new characters of color and lgbt+ characters in season 12; tptb need to purposefully write in more diverse characters, cast diverse actors, and keep these characters around longer.

When people complain about Kevin, Charlie, Eileen, or others’ deaths in the show, this isn’t a matter of being sad a character is dead and not understanding how the supernatural death toll works. It’s being frustrated at a show which has so little representation and having one of the few characters in that category being ripped away from us, often in ways that are easily avoidable and/or disrespectful to the character. It’s characters being killed early on so we don’t have characters of color, lgbt+ characters, or disabled characters to go through the seasons with. It’s getting the bare minimum of representation and being told that’s enough and we shouldn’t complain any more.

There are people that aren’t bothered by the lack of diversity, and that’s fine. You’re in the full right not to care. But telling those who are frustrated and upset that they are overreacting, being childish, and are not true fans is beyond rude. It’s a silencing tactic, and it needs to stop.

No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, I hope people will read this and gain a better understanding of where Supernatural’s diversity is and why people may be mad. And, no matter what, the proportions tell us a change needs to happen.

[mediacalling]

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new research and stats and a cool new infographic.

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing strategy could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media.

Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan like a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage

Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

For the first part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last year, of the demographics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the major social media platforms’ user demographics.

For Snapchat’s user demographics, you can check out this “Who’s on Snapchat, anyway?” blog post by Snapchat.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our profile photos, cover photos, bio, and profile info are up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our cover photo on Twitter is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Crello or Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.

Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”

Tailor your keywords to your audience

Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords

Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”

Be personal and personable

Revisit often

Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. But for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier.

Start with questions like these:

If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?

If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)

Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.

Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?

How do you want your customers to think about your company?

At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track:

Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

The push toward video content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse your Facebook News Feed and Twitter timeline, you’re likely to see videos all over. There’s data to back up this trend: Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

If you want to get started on creating social videos, here’s our video marketing guide on creating epic content on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:

Start with the basic six types of updates we all post: Links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates

Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares

Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety

This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might not want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

Facebook – Once or twice per day

Instagram – Once or twice per day

Instagram Stories – Eight to 16 Stories, twice per week

Twitter – Three to ten times per day

LinkedIn – Once or twice per day

Pinterest – Five to ten times per day

Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, which compiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).

Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays

Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays

LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm

Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best

Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

I would recommend experimenting with these times (in your local time) and a few randomly-picked times as you’re starting out.

Once you have been posting a while, you can use your own data and tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Followerwonk to find your brand’s best time to post and refine your posting strategy.

Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, Likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Facebook account. Do Facebook Live videos get more views than non-live videos? Does the video length matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate posting of your social media content.

Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose. Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too.

When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to follow up with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply your followers.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

Pick your networks

Fill out your info

Find your voice

Choose your strategy

Analyze and test

Automate and engage

Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Want more social media tips? Take our free email course!

I’ve put together a list of 25 practical social media strategies that work for us here at Buffer—and I’d love to share them with you via email.

Join here

—

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it with new research, statistics, and a cool new infographic on September 2017.

Image sources: Will Scullin, MailChimp, Crello, SumAll, and Pew Research

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch posted first on http://ift.tt/2qbaJ0t

[mariemary1]

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new research and stats and a cool new infographic.

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing strategy could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media.

Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan like a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage

Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

For the first part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last year, of the demographics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the major social media platforms’ user demographics.

For Snapchat’s user demographics, you can check out this “Who’s on Snapchat, anyway?” blog post by Snapchat.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our profile photos, cover photos, bio, and profile info are up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our cover photo on Twitter is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Crello or Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.

Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”

Tailor your keywords to your audience

Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords

Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”

Be personal and personable

Revisit often

Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. But for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier.

Start with questions like these:

If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?

If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)

Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.

Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?

How do you want your customers to think about your company?

At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track:

Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

The push toward video content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse your Facebook News Feed and Twitter timeline, you’re likely to see videos all over. There’s data to back up this trend: Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

If you want to get started on creating social videos, here’s our video marketing guide on creating epic content on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:

Start with the basic six types of updates we all post: Links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates

Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares

Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety

This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might not want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

Facebook – Once or twice per day

Instagram – Once or twice per day

Instagram Stories – Eight to 16 Stories, twice per week

Twitter – Three to ten times per day

LinkedIn – Once or twice per day

Pinterest – Five to ten times per day

Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, which compiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).

Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays

Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays

LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm

Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best

Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

I would recommend experimenting with these times (in your local time) and a few randomly-picked times as you’re starting out.

Once you have been posting a while, you can use your own data and tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Followerwonk to find your brand’s best time to post and refine your posting strategy.

Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, Likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Facebook account. Do Facebook Live videos get more views than non-live videos? Does the video length matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate posting of your social media content.

Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose. Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too.

When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to follow up with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply your followers.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

Pick your networks

Fill out your info

Find your voice

Choose your strategy

Analyze and test

Automate and engage

Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Want more social media tips? Take our free email course!

I’ve put together a list of 25 practical social media strategies that work for us here at Buffer—and I’d love to share them with you via email.

Join here

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This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it with new research, statistics, and a cool new infographic on September 2017.

Image sources: Will Scullin, MailChimp, Crello, SumAll, and Pew Research

Thank How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch for first publishing this post.