The best approach to plan and organise future content is to use a social media calendar for content. Learn why you should have one.
Social media has become an important part of any modern business. However, it can be hard to keep up with the flow of new content and ideas. That’s where a social media calendar comes in!
A social media calendar is a great way to stay on top of all your posts and keep track of what’s happening with your followers. It also helps you avoid missing out on opportunities for engagement.
In this blog post, we will discuss ways to create an effective social media calendar for your business, but first:
What Is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar is a schedule of social media posts that you have planned out for the future. It’s basically an overview of everything happening with your social networks. A social media calendar can help your social accounts look more active, and it can also ensure that your audience doesn’t miss any important information from you.
The best social media calendars will include detailed information about what’s posted, when, and where. They can also function as a social media time-management tool, so you can share the right content at the right time to get more engagement from your social audiences.
Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Calendar
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It Ensures Consistency
Social media posts should be engaging, unique and easily shareable so that they cut through all the noise on social media. A social media calendar can help you accomplish this by ensuring that all your posts follow a similar style or tone of voice (i.e. informal or formal) and that the content relates to one another thematically. This way, everything you share online will be more cohesive.
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Improve Engagement
You can’t just create content and hope that it will be engaging. It’s a good practice to have a plan, so you know what topics you want to cover.
By planning the topics beforehand, you can ensure that each piece of content published has a good chance of being well received by your audience.
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Keep Up With Relevant Moments
Social media is a great way to connect with your audience and drive traffic, but it can also be hard to keep up with relevant moments. A social media calendar will help you stay on top of trends and topics, so your company doesn’t miss any opportunities.
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Reduce the Typos
Editing social content is much easier when you’re working days or weeks in advance than it is when you are creating the copy at the last minute. A social media calendar helps prevent embarrassing typos and reduces the risk of mistakes like duplicate messages across channels.
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Avoid Overlaps
If you have a large team and multiple departments involved in your content creation process, then the chances are that there is some overlap in what each group is creating.
A content calendar can be your editorial schedule for your company social media accounts. This will ensure that your efforts aren’t overlapping with someone else’s.
With all these benefits in mind, you might be wondering how you can create your social content calendar.
How to Create a Social Media Calendar That Works
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Set Goals
Before you start the social media calendar process, it’s important to have goals in mind. What are you planning to achieve through your social media channels? Is it sales? More exposure? Targeted traffic?
Put some thought into it and choose a goal that is measurable and attainable. Once you know your social media goals, you will be able to create an effective calendar and determine what works best for each social channel.
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Audit Your Content
The social media landscape changes rapidly, so it’s essential to keep your social media calendar content fresh. To do this, you’ll need to begin by auditing your existing social media posts. This process will let you identify areas for improvement and opportunities for new efforts.
While an audit can sound like a daunting task, the goal isn’t to find social media errors. On the contrary, social media audits are an excellent opportunity to enhance your social content plan while optimising your ROI in the process.
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Outline Content Post Types and Categories
A social media calendar provides your team with an editorial road map, ensuring social channels are always active with engaging content.
Before outlining content post types and categories, start by determining the social networks to share relevant content.
Once that is covered, you can now think about the most relevant content types to your audience and brand. Common content types include blog posts, images/videos, announcements, quotes, promotions, etc.
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Determine Your Posting Frequency
Your social media workflow has a significant impact on the social activity of your brand, and posting on social media at the right time and frequency is an integral part of that process.
First, you’ll need to determine how often you should post. It’s important to post frequently enough to provide relevant content to your audience and improve engagement. However, posting too frequently can have the opposite effect.
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Create a Content Library
An essential part of content marketing is creating and managing the assets you will use to create your social media posts. Keeping them in an accessible location is crucial to this task. This way, when you need your content library to make a post, your creativity won’t be hampered by having to hunt for images or videos.
However, storing your social content library in a smartphone or hard drive might not be the best idea. You can use tools like Dropbox or Google Drive to create your content library.
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Take Note of Special Events
As the year goes by, there are always special events that take place. Some of these include Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Remembering these can be challenging; that’s why it is crucial to plan so that you can take advantage of each unique event.
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Choose Your Social Publishing Tool
You no longer need to schedule your social posts manually.
There are now many tools that allow you to schedule your posts in bulk. This means that you can create multiple posts and schedule them all at once, instead of one post at a time.
You can use tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social for this task.
If you’ve been putting off creating a social media calendar, now is the time to start. With so many channels and content formats available across each one, it can be challenging to keep up with your posting schedule without having some sort of organisational system in place.
Creating an effective social media calendar will allow for more time on strategic activities like analysing analytics data or generating new ideas to post about, instead of frantically scrambling around trying to find something interesting enough that should go out right this second. So give yourself the gift of less stress by starting today!
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