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What are the advantages of a social media content calendar?
A good social media calendar will be a powerful cog within your marketing strategy. There are many reasons why a social media calendar can be of use to you and your team.
1. Organization and Visualization:
The ability to see your social content strategy over time and remain organized across all social platforms is one of the advantages of utilizing a social media content calendar. It enables you to focus your social media marketing efforts on key initiatives in your sector or organization.
Rather than leaving you with no option but to post on the fly, a strong social media calendar gives you plenty of time to fill space with relevant material that is beneficial to your audience.
2. Being organized allows you to save time:
Your creative management goals are similar to many of the other goals in your day planner in that they require focus and energy on a daily basis and not just when you are feeling creative (or at 11 PM when everything else is taken care of). A social media content calendar allows you to plan ahead, batch your work, minimize juggling, and jot down all of your innovative ideas for later. Essentially, it’s the greatest method to ensure that you’ll never again find yourself frantically browsing through generic inspiring quotations to share.
And just because you’ll be publishing every day, if not several times a day, doesn’t mean you have to continuously monitor your feeds. Social media calendar templates allow you to plan ahead of time for social media posting and, more importantly, manage audience interaction from a single location.
3. Consistency of posts:
Whether you’re looking to boost your Instagram stories, YouTube subscribers, or social media KPIs, the first piece of advice you’ll get from experts is to “share consistently.” There is simply no way around it.
Why?
The key to engaging your audience on social media is to show up in their feed on a regular basis. Impressive engagement boosts your organic reach via the platform’s algorithm, resulting in more eyes seeing your posts and new individuals becoming followers.
And the only way to increase your conversions is to make genuine connections with a growing audience. Adding posts to your social media schedule ahead of time enables you to be consistent with your posting, whether it’s a quiet news week or your biggest promotion of the year.
Furthermore, adopting a social media content calendar helps you generate a cohesive voice and a constant flow of material that contribute to your long-term marketing objectives. Planning out your social media content ensures that your brand voice is constant and that your content is a trustworthy means of communication for your industry’s members.
4. Reporting back of content:
A social media calendar not only helps with planning but also with tracking and follow-up. Is the entire social media strategy in place? Are we on track to meet our objectives? What worked for you? What didn’t go as planned? This data is crucial to getting a good return on your investment.
5. Make fewer mistakes so you’ll be less likely to make major errors:
You may incorporate failsafe into your workflow by planning your articles ahead of time. Working days or weeks ahead of time makes copy-editing, fact-checking information, and even reviewing it with organizational stakeholders like the legal team or the C-suite a lot simpler.
6. Sanity:
A social media calendar makes your life easier when it comes to writing blogs because it saves you from having to dig for information. It’ll let you see all of your marketing efforts in one place and enable you to make educated decisions about when to publish on social media.
You’ll undoubtedly face curveballs along the road, but if you have a good organizing structure in place, you won’t worry when deer hunting season arrives and you need to come up with a good Facebook post to market your business during this critical period. 
7. Make your social media strategy more ambitious:
Long, medium, and short-term campaigns, paid and organic, are frequently operated simultaneously by the world’s largest social media businesses. And those are just the daily posts. Once you’ve locked down your routine, you’ll have more time to think about broader issues. Is it a good idea to hold an Instagram contest? Are you ready to start looking for influencer partners? Perhaps it’s time to get your company’s name out there on LinkedIn or start a social media employee advocacy campaign.
Taking your social game to the next level involves getting organized, whether you’re managing a five-person content team or sharing your story while preparing bleach for your 3 PM client’s pastel Ombre long-bob.
8. Keep track of what works and make improvements:
What’s planned gets done, and what’s measured becomes better. You can learn a lot from social media analysis. A social media content calendar allows you to plan and improve. Plan your A/B testing until you find the ideal formula for each social platform’s kind of content, format, post frequency, and optimum time of day to publish.
Factors to consider before creating a social media content calendar
This section will go through the principles of using a social media calendar to arrange your material so you always know what to post. We’ll also give you some tips on how to manage your social calendar internally and encourage collaboration across teams and departments.
1. Deciding on what to post:
One of the most difficult aspects of building a social media content calendar if you’re new to social media marketing is deciding what to post. Coming up with enough ideas to cover a whole calendar month in advance may be daunting. However, establishing a long-term social media strategy will assist you in setting realistic targets and make the process of creating the content calendar more feasible.
Don’t let interesting events in your neighborhood or workplace influence what you publish and when you post. There will be sluggish periods, and it’s critical to have a strategy in place to be engaged on social media through those periods.
2. How to organize and manage posting schedules:
Make a publishing schedule once you’ve decided what kind of material you’ll be posting. You’ll discover tendencies after reviewing your previous articles or those of your rivals. Look at the dates and times they were posted as well as the platforms they were shared on. Make note of any recurring themes in content. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there about how frequently you should post on social media.
To stay top of mind, some experts advise publishing as frequently as possible. Others advise only posting if you have high-quality, useful material to contribute to discussions.
Here are some general recommendations on how often to post to each social media site to get the most exposure:
- 1-2 posts per day on Facebook pages
- 3–10 times per day on Twitter
- 1-3 times each day on Instagram
- 2–5 times per day on Instagram Stories
One approach to stay in front of your audience is to post regularly, but don’t prioritize numbers above quality. Be careful of sharing useless or duplicate content merely to satisfy an arbitrary posting limit.
Every audience is different, which is why, as you continue to manage your social media content calendar, you should undertake analysis and gain a better knowledge of your audience. Look at your calendar and stats to see if there are any trends or patterns in the data. Observing trends will allow you to observe how different sorts of material and different publishing times affect individuals on different platforms.
Developing a posting schedule that works is a never-ending process of trial and error. Ultimately, this will pay off not just with a successful social media content calendar but also by allowing you to acquire a deeper grasp of what your audience wants. Play around with different posting hours and the number of times per week you publish as you fill in your social media schedule. It will offer you a lot of information about what works best for your target audience.
3. Your content mix:
Every post does not have to be a sales pitch. Consider providing a range of materials to assist your company to connect with its target audience. The following are examples of shareable content:
- News that is relevant
- Inspirational quotes
- Posts on the blog
- Promotions
- Announcements or events
Aim for a content balance that is appropriate to your audience when organizing your schedule.
4. What is your posting schedule?
Don’t forget to consider the day of the week and the time of day when planning your posts for social media. For example, publishing promotional content around 4:30 PM on a Friday afternoon may not be the best idea. People are more than likely thinking about their weekend plans rather than online buying at the time. Also, keep in mind that not everyone who follows your company on social media will see every post you make, so don’t be afraid to repost good material.
Research the ideal times to post on social media and schedule your posts appropriately.
5. Social channels:
Different populations are attracted to different social media platforms. Targeting your audience on the appropriate channel is an important part of a successful social media publishing strategy. However, you must first identify your ideal consumer before you can successfully target your audience. A business avatar is a term used to describe this type of consumer.
If you own an online clothing company, for example, your business avatar may be a stylish 20-something lady who uses social media and has the disposable money of a rising young professional.
6. What should be your overall alignment of social media pages?:
Social media planning and scheduling is only one part of a bigger marketing strategy that should eventually reflect your larger business objectives. Make sure your company has clear S.M.A.R.T. goals, just like you defined your audience.
Every social media platform comes with some built-in analytics, and third-party analytics solutions are also accessible. Use them.
Finally, remember to factor in holidays and promotional events when aligning your social calendar with your business and goals. These events can be used to promote themed or seasonal social sharing.
How to create a social media content calendar
To make a successful social media calendar, follow these eight steps:
1. Examine your social media platforms and content:
Establishing a good picture of your existing social media activities will help you discover areas for improvement as well as new opportunities. An audit is essential for fine-tuning your content strategy and increasing your return on investment. Begin by doing a social media audit. As a consequence, you will gain precise, up-to-date information on:
- accounts that aren’t real and profiles that aren’t up to date
- passwords and account security
- by platform, goals, and KPIs for each sponsored account
- your target market, demographics, and personalities
- who is responsible for what tasks on your team
- your most effective publications, campaigns, and strategies
- gaps, disappointing outcomes, and areas for improvement
- critical success factors for each platform’s future success
Set aside some time to check all of your social media assets. Then you can rest confident that you’ll be approaching your new social strategy with the most up-to-date knowledge, that is, data that is specific to your audience, accounts, and brand.
2. Select your social media platforms:
It requires a deliberate effort to find the time to keep up with new advancements in the midst of the daily grind. Should your company be concerned about Instagram Threads, for example? Is your target audience even using TikTok? This is why you should take a moment to review the demographics of each social media platform’s users.
We’re not suggesting that you go into full-on freshman-year-organic-chemistry-exam mode and cram everything in at once. Take some professional development reading breaks during that post-lunch slump, and you’ll be bursting at the seams with fresh ideas and insights in no time.
3. Decide what you want your calendar to track:
You’ll want to map out the knowledge and capabilities your calendar tool will offer you as you figure out what this gorgeous beast will look like (and where it’ll dwell, a.k.a. a permanently-open Chrome tab between Gmail and Slack). Perhaps you’re beginning from scratch for your side gig running social media for local independent rappers. In that situation, a simple spreadsheet may suffice.
However, if you’re in charge of a seven-person team with a dozen distinct consumer-facing brands, you’ll need something that can tell you who’s doing what, when it’s done, authorized, and published—as well as how effective it was. As a result, we recommend that you begin with the fundamentals:
- Platform
- Date
- The passage of time (and time zone)
- Copy
- Visualizations (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)
- Assets to link to
- Links to previously published articles
4. Make a library for your assets’ content:
These content repositories are sometimes known as media resource databases or digital asset banks. Whatever you name it, your visual material shouldn’t be stored on your iPhone or in a jumble of desktop files like “misc social” (at the very least, don’t keep them there indefinitely).
You can utilize Dropbox, Google Drive, your company’s internal network, or database software designed specifically for your needs. There are a few important aspects of a social media content library:
- It has ample room for big files.
- It can be accessed from both your phone and your computer.
- It’s simple to share with colleagues, yet you can rely on its privacy safeguards.
5. Make a plan of action:
Now that you’ve acquired all of the necessary data, it’s time to begin sketching out the bones of your daily, weekly, and monthly social media cadence.
Consider the following:
- When you want to post to each channel; how often do you want to publish to each channel.
- When is the ideal time to publish to each of your channels?
6. Begin designing your posts:
You’re definitely bursting at the seams with ideas at this point, right? Take some time to browse through your old “misc social” folder and start putting some articles together. Consider how your calendar feels while you work. If it’s too demanding and picky, you might want to tone down some of the specifics.
Perhaps it’s inadequately detailed, and you’ll need to add a few columns.
7. Invite your team to examine and provide feedback so that you can improve:
Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your company’s empire, it’s time to show it off to the rest of the world, or at least your coworkers. Send an invite to the individuals who will need to use your calendar every day (or every day you’re on vacation) if you want it to be reasonably simple.
8. Begin the publishing/scheduling process:
You’ve set out your social media calendar and are ready to go. As you begin to publish on a regular basis, you may notice that sitting down and manually publishing your content still takes time. This is especially true if you’re dealing with a lot of content. You could use an automated post-scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to make content posting clinical and manageable.
