A social media calendar is an invaluable tool for Social Media Marketers. It helps you plan, collaborate, organize, and view all your content at a glance. By using a calendar, you'll never be caught off guard by an obscure international holiday you intended to post about. This article will guide you through everything you need to know about creating and utilizing a social media content calendar.
What is a social media calendar?
A social media calendar, also known as a social media content planner, is a tool that organizes all your upcoming social media posts by date and time. This planner can take the form of a document, spreadsheet, or dashboard, allowing you to arrange content for various social media platforms. Social media marketers and managers rely on calendars to plan their posts, manage advertising campaigns and monitor their overall strategies. This is especially useful when managing multiple social media accounts.
Think of a social media calendar as an editorial tool that helps you create a schedule of upcoming posts, set deadlines, track important events, and maintain an overview of all your campaigns and projects in one centralized location.
Select your post types and formats
Unsure what to include in your social media content calendar? The key is to incorporate a variety of content types (such as images, videos, gifs, articles, and reposts) and formats (like carousel posts, reels, polls, stories, and live videos).
Begin by populating your with regular events. Here are some content ideas for post types you can plan in advance:
Holidays: Utilizing a social media event calendar ensures you won't miss any significant dates. Choose the holidays relevant to your region and brainstorm content ideas around them.
Events: Consider anything relevant to your brand at the national, local, or internal level.
Feature/Product launches: If your team is developing a new feature or product, it's a great idea to generate excitement on social media with teasers and major announcements.
Company news: Keeping your audience informed about the latest developments within your company is always beneficial.
Q&As: These are easy to organize and schedule, and they provide an excellent way to engage your audience.
Roundups: Since many people may not have the time to consume all your content, a brief, weekly summary can be highly appreciated.
Establish posting frequency
Understanding when to post is just as crucial as knowing what to post.
A well-defined social media posting schedule serves two main purposes. First, social media should enhance your existing marketing initiatives rather than replace them. Second, due to the fast-paced nature of social media, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and either overpost or underpost. Both scenarios can lead to reduced engagement.
Your posting frequency should align with your business objectives, available resources and the engagement patterns of your audience.
Which platform is right for you?
Are you planning to publish on one or multiple social networks? Consider your business goals and resources. What do you want to achieve, and how much time and money are you willing to invest?
Start by closely examining your competitors: where do they post most frequently, and which platforms are they ignoring? Then, dive deep into your target audience: where do they spend their time, and what does their behavior indicate?
Don’t feel compelled to be on every social media platform; you’ll only spread yourself too thin with little to show for your efforts. If you’re unsure which platforms to start with, consider the three most popular ones—Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn—and then expand from there.
Schedule and monitor your posts
By planning and scheduling your posts ahead of time, you can incorporate failsafes into your workflow. This scheduling allows your team and collaborators ample time to edit copy and fact-check information. Using a social media calendar for planning ensures that organizational stakeholders can approve the content, verifying that it aligns with brand guidelines, including tone of voice and design elements.
After your posts go live, track their performance to identify which ones garner the most engagement and drive results. Leverage these insights to conduct tests on various platforms and experiment with different elements that resonate with your audience, such as content types, posting days and times, copy length, hashtags, and multimedia assets.
Do you need some help putting together a social media calendar? We’d be happy to help you out - just drop us an email and we’ll take it from there!Â
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