Social media is already challenging when it comes to creating content and building an audience.
Posting haphazardly on social media when you don’t have concrete goals on what you want to achieve with your social media may leave a bad impression not to mention leaving the audience feeling scattered and disorganised.
Even worse, the biggest question you have to ask is, did you actually gain anything from the time you have invested in your social channels?
Facing this kind of challenge, what can you do?
Have you heard about Social Media Calendars?
If you thought it’s like placing appointments on paper calendars, then you’re on the right track!
Social media calendars help you track your social media posts. It doesn’t get you to the extent of Marie Kondo-ing your entire social media strategy but helps to put things in their place, so that you will have HARMONY from the Chaos.
Rest assured, whatever time you spend now on getting a social media calendar in place, you will get it back in the future. And probably save you from a panic attack or two.
So how can you use a social media calendar to revitalize your social media presence?
What Is A Social Media Calendar?
When you manage several social media channels at the same time, things can get really chaotic.
A social media calendar is a system to organise and streamline your social media content across all of the channels you use. You use them to plan when and which content will be shared, manage campaigns, and track deadlines.
It also doesn’t matter whether your social media calendar is a spreadsheet or an app, as long as it helps you outline your upcoming social media content in one place.
In fact, you can make your social media calendar as simple or complex as your business or brand needs it to be.
Read on to know why you should use a social media calendar!
Why Use A Social Media Calendar?
There are some compelling reasons why social media calendars are needed. Just have a look at these reasons why…
Get Organised
Social media calendars solve clutter. After all, posting to social media is not just about the latest cat videos or the trending quotes on Twitter.
You need to have a clear goal in mind for your campaigns. Matching what goes where and crafting content and images into something legible is already hard enough for one social media channel.
But doing it for multiple social media channels all at the same time without a point of reference is where everything can go sideways in a flash especially once you get tangled in that ball of yarn.
Turn this chaos into harmony with a social media calendar or suffer the consequences.
Accountability Matters
You’ve got 3 social media posts coming up and no content on the horizon. What happened?
Social media posting is not a matter of shaking a magic 8-ball. Oh how we wish…
If you’re flexible with deadlines every day, then procrastinating gets in the way of creating content. Once it’s been assigned, teams need to be accountable for the work they’re supposed to do.
Social media calendars help you set timelines, and build a clear plan for what content goes next on your social media channels.
Your executive team and other colleagues can also get a clear view of what’s going to be posted next and give you feedback on corrections needed way ahead of time.
Plus, the calendar shows that the social media team aren’t just sitting pretty.
Time is Money
What do you do spend most when you struggle with one post?
It’s TIME and once you spend it, you can’t get it back.
If you have to spend a half hour crafting one post on one social media channel before you move to the next, when will you ever finish?
Planning with a social media calendar at hand allows you to make the most of what you have and easily make changes if there’s something to fix.
After all, if you’re able to create your content beforehand in a calendar, it’s just a matter of minutes to copy and paste it in the channels you publish to.
Measurable Results
You may be efficiently doing things by posting at certain times or a number of times a week, but are your posts really achieving the goals they’re meant to?
Efficiency without effectiveness simply means you’re producing lots of poor quality content.
Use a social media calendar to make your posting consistent and effective.
Consistency is key to showing up in your audience’s feed and getting them to engage with your brand. The more engagement you have, the better your organic reach.
Creating a genuine down-to-earth connection with your growing audience will also lift your conversions.
With proper planning, you can fill up your social media calendar with quality content, have it take advantage of global events or the latest trending topic, and let the team that handles your social media creatives have the breathing room to do their best work.
After that, who’s to say you can’t get a little ambitious?
Who Can Use A Social Media Calendar?
Literally anyone who is creating social media content can use a social media calendar. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business, media company or a serious blogger.
Just to give you an idea, these are the most common users of social media calendars:
- Marketing teams – Calendars can keep your marketing and other supporting teams organised and in line with your marketing campaigns.
- Small businesses – Staying organised with a calendar allows your business to save time and maintain consistency. In a resource-limited environment, it’s extremely important to ensure your time is spent effectively.
- Consultants – Managing one client is fine, what happens when you have multiple clients all with their own brand of social media chaos? Get them organised with a calendar for each one.
- Media companies – Social media posts and promotions usually accompany editorial content releases. Have it all visible in one place so you can see how it works together.
- Bloggers – Blogging is serious business. Plan your posts together with their promotions on a calendar so that you don’t waste time on irrelevant details.
How Can You Make A Social Media Calendar?
Now we come to the real deal, how do you go about setting up a social media calendar?
As we mentioned before, you don’t have to go crazy about setting up your social media calendar using a specialised app or software, that just takes you down a whole new rabbit hole!
To start with, a spreadsheet or paper will do just as well. All that matters is that you can use it to outline all of your upcoming social media content in one place.
Once you get the basics down, then you can go on to make your calendar as complex as you need it to be.
Let’s get cracking!
1. Audit Your Social Content
To start with, you need to know everything about your social media efforts. This allows you to have a clear picture of areas that you need to improve, and know what opportunities you have for new content.
Give yourself some time to go through all of your social assets especially for the areas below:
- Impostor accounts and outdated profiles
- Account logins, security and passwords
- Goals and KPIs for each brand account, by platform
- Your audience targets, demographics and profiles
- Your team’s focus as well as their accountability
- Your most successful posts, campaigns, and strategies
- Gaps, weak results, and opportunities for improvement
- Key metrics for measuring success of your social media efforts by platform
2. Choose Your Social Channels
Amidst the daily grind of churning out good quality content, it’s hard to stay on top of new developments.
It’s probable that you’ve caught snippets of things like the rise of TikTok, or Instagram Insights but would it impact upon you and your brand?
Take some time to clarify which audience you’re targeted to, and know which social media platform contains your target user demographics.
Don’t forget to grab some minutes to review best practicess for business marketing strategies if you can.
It’s often that such reading will spark new ideas and inspiration for the next great social media post.
3. Decide What Your Calendar Should Track
It’s a work in progress as you start to map out the information and functionality your social media calendar is going to provide you.
At the very basic, these are some details that you should have in your calendar:
- Platform
- Date
- Time (and time zone)
- Copy
- Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)
- Link to assets
- Link to published post
You might find additional details to be more helpful, such as:
- Platform-specific format (e.g., feed post, IGTV, Story, poll, live stream, ads, shoppable posts, etc.)
- The campaign it’s associated with (e.g., product launch, event, contests, annual dinner, general brand awareness, customer service, etc.)
- Geo-targeting (e.g., is it local, country-specific, regional, global, etc.)
- Value (e.g., is it a short-lived topic or an evergreen showpiece that could be recycled or cannibalized for parts down the line?)
- Paid or organic? (If paid, then additional budget details might be helpful)
- Has it been approved? (Especially when you work with teams and clients)
- Has it been posted?
- Analytics and results (Generally at this level of complexity you probably will need to refer to your analytics reports for more detail.)
4. Have A Repository For Assets
In the course of creating a social media post, one tends to collect visual content that can adequately or accurately depict the topic you’re writing about.
If you dump all of your visual content into folders on your desktop and don’t make it available to your teammates, chances are, they’re going to duplicate the effort in looking for some image that you’ve already downloaded.
It’s more efficient to have a repository for housing all of your visual content so that it can be shared across the team or company as needed.
A repository or content library in this case should be:
- Spacious enough for large files
- Accessible from phone and computer
- Easily shareable to team members
- Secure
- Able to provide individual links to files so that it can be directly linked in your social media calendar.
- Logically arranged so that visual content can be found easily.
5. Establish A Workflow
Here’s some things you should note down once you have the previous steps sorted out:
- How often you want to post to each channel;
- The best times to post to each channel;
- What your content ratio is going to be;
- Who needs to approve posts (e.g., copywriters, legal team, CEO, the client), and how communication will work between all parties;
- What needs to happen in the process for brainstorming new content, including assigning and creating it.
It may look a little complex once it’s outlined, but you can document it in a separate tab of your social media calendar to form a guideline for your team. This helps in pre-empting that all so important question of, “What do I do next?” being asked while you’re busy thinking up the next trending post of the day.
6. Start Creating Posts
When you have everything in place, you can feel the churn of new ideas, right?
It’s a great time to sit down and start digging through stuff you can use for your posts.
As you continue to update your calendar, continue to evaluate how it works for you. If something doesn’t have enough detail, feel free to add the columns you need until you get to your ideal structure.
7. Review and Improve
Once the structure of your social media calendar is complete, its time for the great reveal.
Let your team have a test drive of your social media calendar, especially those who will be using it on a daily basis.
Schedule a meeting to discuss their findings and what can be further improved. Make those changes and test drive again.
By the end of the day, you should have a document that everyone is satisfied with and can be used from your most senior team member down to your newest.
8. Start Publishing
Everything is set in place, so it’s time to publish!
Once you get the ball rolling, you may find that brands with high-volume feeds would still take up some time to get everything scheduled.
As we said, if you need it, go for it. There’s always social media calendar options out there with scheduling functions.
