A social media calendar is essential for strategically planning all the content you’ll post on social media. Managing one social media account, let alone multiple social media accounts, can be challenging. You’re likely juggling work streams between new posts, audience interaction, and internal company amplification.
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A social media content calendar effectively brings cohesive messaging and high-quality content to your viewers, whether you plan it 30 days in advance or 365 days in advance.
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Social media calendars are the unsung heroes of social media managers, as they allow you to plan, collaborate, organize and see everything at once. With a social calendar, you’ll never have to worry about that obscure international holiday you wanted to tweet about again. This article will teach you how to create and use social media content calendars.
What Is A Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar plans, organizes, schedules, and posts social messages online. In simple terms, a social media content calendar lists all your upcoming social media posts.
Social media calendars let marketers create a social media strategy in which they know when to post, what content to share, manage campaigns of multiple posts, track deadlines, and review published content. These social calendars can be of 3 types:
Social Media Content Calendars
A social media content calendar lays out the specifics of day-to-day social media content management, such as when and what to post.
Social Media Editorial Calendars
Editorial calendars map out higher-level content strategies, such as categories and social media posts.
Social Media Marketing Calendars
Finally, social media marketing calendars tie the strategy of social media content to the larger business strategy by blocking off various campaigns and initiatives you will integrate into social media content.
Using a social calendar, your social media team can keep track of important events and deadlines, schedule posts, and manage all your projects and campaigns in one place. A social media calendar should include the following:
- Publishing date and time
- Social media platform
- Format of a post ( Instagram Reel, Story, YouTube short, etc.)
- Post copy
- Visual (images, GIFs, videos)
- Hashtags
- Location tag
What Are The Benefits Of A Social Media Content Calendar?
Organizing your upcoming social media content with a social calendar allows you to plan what to post and when. Hence, if you have this document in place, you won’t have to worry about coming up with an idea right before it’s time to start writing your next post as the deadline approaches.
Some of the significant advantages of creating and maintaining a social media content calendar include the following:
1. Keeps You Organized and On-Track
There are better methods than crumpled notes, post-it notes, and random notebooks to jot down your content topics. Also, so many ideas and things to consider can lead you to ignore what’s important.
In addition to a better understanding of your overall marketing strategy, a content calendar will help you align your post topics with your socials & email marketing content. It ensures you can meet all deadlines and content marks by failing to fix content gaps.
2. Excellent for Brainstorming
As you begin organizing your content topics, there is a good chance that new concepts will emerge, and you will end up with many new ideas. This will help you choose better topics and reserve some for later use.
In addition, you can gain valuable insights into your audience’s preferences by monitoring their engagement and feedback, which you can then apply to your content and adjust accordingly based on the results.
3. Maintains Consistency
Content marketing is all about consistency, so offer your audience educational, relevant, and entertaining content daily so you’ll always be on their radar. In addition, you can keep things in check by using a social media calendar tool if you post irregularly.
4. Attracts & Engages your Audience
In some cases, you can wing it, but it’s not a strategy that works in the long run. For example, you might not check if a repetitive topic has already been covered elsewhere when you’re in a hurry to publish it. In the same way, randomly selected topics that don’t resonate with your audience also hurt engagement.
However, a social media content calendar will help you spot such mistakes so that you can publish only relevant and fresh content.
5. Provides Visibility Across Departments
The sales and marketing departments of successful companies are aligned. Statistics show that aligning sales and marketing team increases deal closing rates by 67%. Keeping all your teams on the same page with a social media content calendar is a beneficial resource.
To better address their audience’s pain points, your sales team can see what marketing has planned and provide them with tips.
Furthermore, executives can quickly check whether the planned activities align with the marketing plan. This transparency is crucial for improving team communication and honing your content strategy.
6. Executes Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing is intrinsically linked to content. A social media calendar makes it more manageable to identify successful content pieces and utilize them in paid social media advertising.
Determine which of your e-books, infographics, and other valuable content performs best on social media organically. Then, to reach your audience, use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn ads to promote your content.
7. Keeps Track of Your Performance
By tracking your metrics, you can only assess how effective and successful your content and overall marketing efforts were. You can fine-tune your content and give your audience what they want and need if you keep an eye on these numbers. Therefore, establishing specific benchmarks is also necessary.
Many prominent digital marketing agencies suggest building a social media content calendar. If you inspect their websites, blogs, articles, and social media channels, you will see they have one.
How to Create a Social Media Calendar: 6 Things to Keep in Mind
The following six steps will guide you through creating a social media calendar process:
Decide Your Social Media Channels
Even though it seems obvious, it is one of the most crucial steps you can take – and it is often overlooked. If you have a social media team, take a step back and discuss which social media platforms we should be on before you focus on individual posts and channel-specific strategies.
You can narrow your platforms by identifying your target audience, which is the first step to creating audience-specific social media strategies.
Identify Your Audience
Knowing where your audience engages with your brand is essential to utilize your social media calendar effectively. You probably already know what platforms these will be, but check out the social media management tool before the social media posting schedule.
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Your social media platform has an analytics tool that you can use to track your audience engagement, so be sure to pay attention to it and track your progress on social media.
Understanding your demographic and talking to your audience is crucial to effective social campaigns. The better you comprehend them, the better you will be able to reach them.
Determine the Right Time to Post
Posting is about interacting with your audience, so you’ll want to post when they’re most active. However, your brand shouldn’t simply post whenever it’s convenient for you to do so. For your social media campaigns to succeed, the time you post is crucial.
Exactly when should you post to social media? You can connect with your customers on many social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and more. However, to succeed in your social media efforts, you must first select the right social media platform.
Generally, the best time to post on social media is 10:00 a.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. These are the best times to post:
Facebook – 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Instagram – 11:00 a.m. on Wednesdays.
Twitter – 8:00 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays.
LinkedIn – 9:00 a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
TikTok – 7:00 p.m. on Thursdays.
Organize your Posting Schedule
Having decided what to post, you need to determine when to post it.
As you build out your posts, decide how frequently you’ll post and how far in advance you want to write your posts. Knowing your cadence will help you determine your capacity and optimize your content creation process.
It would be best to determine your publishing schedule based on your business goals, available resources, and audience engagement patterns. Social media experts suggest the following frequency of posting:
Instagram posts: 3-7 posts a week
Instagram reels: 5-7 reels a week
Facebook: 3-5 posts a week
Twitter: 10-20 tweets a week
LinkedIn: 3-5 posts a week
TikTok: 5-7 a week
Understand What Content Does Your Audience Like?
One of the best methods to determine which content garners the most engagement on your social channels is to review your past posts; one of the best ways to determine what content is successful is to examine your past posts.
Make sure you look at your posts from the last couple of months when determining these factors, as analytics will be the most helpful tool. Plan so you can continue to deliver what your audience enjoys most by shooting short videos/reels ahead of time if you notice you’re getting great engagement on your socials.
Monitor & Report on Published Content
The calendar provides a foremost source of truth for all ex-posts. Use that chance to look back on trends and incorporate social media analytics information into those past posts—for example, how many likes and impressions the post received in the first hour.
Are there any notable metrics for audience engagement? You can use this to track what works and refine your social media marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Creating a consistent schedule requires an itemized content calendar which aligns all your content with your marketing and branding strategy. Several spreadsheet templates are available online. In contrast, if you are an SMB or budding agency that posts social media frequently, stay on top of your social media content schedule using social media calendar tools.
It can be very profitable for your business to invest in social media calendar tools that help you stay on top of your social media presence. To further ease the process, you can utilize a social media calendar template to assist you and your team reduces some of the stress of keeping your social media channels up-to-date.
With the help of a social media calendar, each post will be best crafted in content with great timing, resulting in a more effective campaign across all channels. In addition, using a social media calendar will allow you to grow your audience, produce quality content, and distribute it effectively.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your social media or digital marketing team can also manage the calendar to provide you with insights and metrics. But, in general, social media marketers handle the social media calendar. They organize, plan, schedule, and post social messages online.
Here are the top social media calendar tools for 2023:
SocialPilot
ContentStudio
Trello
The social media calendar helps you keep all your social media ideas and posts in one place. Using the calendar, you can also plan when to post everything in advance.
Social media calendars help keep your content marketing well-organized, manageable, and on track. They allow you to brainstorm, prevent last-minute disasters, and ensure content consistency.
Each social media post on a calendar includes one or more of the following elements:
1. Date and time of the launch.
2. Where and on what social network you will post it.
3. Copy of the content and creative assets (such as photos or videos) are required.
4. Links and tags
As an effective content calendar tool, SocialPilot offers a variety of features that make it a robust tool for diversified needs, such as team collaboration, social media calendars, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and monitoring tools.
