How do I plan a social media campaign as a single piece of work?

Start from a brief that fixes the brand, audience, voice and what you must never claim. Then plan the whole campaign as a table of posts, each with a format, a call to action and a topic, before anyone writes a caption.

Write, check and approve against the whole campaign rather than post by post, schedule it in one go, and measure each post against your own median.

A campaign planned one post at a time is really a string of separate decisions, each made with less memory of the others. By the seventh post nobody is sure which hashtags have been used, whether the formats really alternated, or whether a figure has already led a post.

Planning it as one piece moves those questions to the start, where they are cheap to answer, and leaves the writing to focus on the idea in each post.

1. 1Write the brief. One page: what the brand is, who the posts are for, how it sounds, and the claims it must never make. The last part becomes your blocked-phrases list.
2. 2Set the goal and the length. One goal per campaign: awareness, sign-ups, a launch. Then the number of posts and the dates, which together give the cadence.
3. 3Choose topics and their shares. Three to five subjects the campaign will cover, each with a target share of the campaign. The shares follow from the goal: a launch leans on product, a trust campaign on customer proof.
4. 4Sequence the posts. Give every post a format, a call to action and a topic, following the rules in how to plan posts so nothing repeats: no two formats back to back, never the same call to action twice in a row, the next topic the one furthest behind.
5. 5Draft each post. Now write, inside the constraints already set. Give each post one idea and, if it has one, one headline figure.
6. 6Check against the whole campaign. Every draft against the blocked-phrases list, the reused hashtags and figures, and the platform's limits on length, slides and tags.
7. 7Get sign-off. Send the final versions for approval and record each decision. See how to run client approval.
8. 8Schedule the campaign. Place every approved post on its date and time, in one agreed time zone. Re-check anything edited since approval.
9. 9Measure and feed back. Read each post's numbers at a consistent age and compare them with your own median. Carry what you learn into the next campaign's brief. See how to measure against your median.

One spreadsheet with four tabs covers it. Brief: the one page above, plus the blocked-phrases list with reason and alternative for each entry. Plan: one row per post with date, format, call to action, topic, audience, working title, status and approval. Ledger: every hashtag and headline figure used, and the post that used it. Results: one row per published post with its metrics and the median they are compared against.

Status is worth defining once: planned, drafted, checked, sent for approval, approved, scheduled, published. A post only moves forward one status at a time, and anything edited after approval goes back to checked.

Fill the Plan tab completely before the first caption is written, even if half the working titles are placeholders. The value is in seeing the whole campaign at once: whether the direct calls to action bunch up at the end, whether a topic disappears for two weeks, whether the launch post lands on a bank holiday. Those are five-minute fixes on a plan and painful ones once the artwork exists.

Keep the Results tab going between campaigns. The median you measure the next campaign against comes from it, and it is the one part of the spreadsheet that gets more useful every time you use it.

• Writing the first three posts before the plan exists. They set the pattern the rest has to work around.
• A brief without the claims you must not make. It is the part that saves you from the post you have to delete.
• Checking each draft only against the one before it.
• Judging posts against platform averages instead of your own history.
• Treating approval as the schedule. Sign-off records a decision; someone still has to check it before a post is scheduled, unless a tool's approval gate, if you turn one on, enforces it for you.

CampaignFlow follows the same order in four steps. Start with a short brief: six required questions about your brand, category, offer, audience, goals and tone, then optional steps that include what you must never claim and connecting your accounts. Plan a campaign, and every post gets a format and a call to action. Generate and revise: say what is wrong and only that changes, with every earlier version a click away. Then schedule the campaign and watch the numbers.

Scheduling uses weekdays and a time you pick, in your own time zone. You preview where every post lands before confirming, and posts can be dragged to another slot and gaps closed. Each post is re-checked 15 minutes before it goes out, retried if a platform hiccups, and held back at sending time if it is not ready. It publishes to Instagram, Facebook Pages, YouTube and Threads; LinkedIn and Pinterest are pending platform review. Pricing is on the pricing page.