A social media content calendar or social media calendar is a detailed note of your next social media posts. You can prepare your plan in multiple formats such as spreadsheets, documents, dashboards, etc.
It includes the name of social media platforms, publication date and time, location tag, hashtags, post formats, etc. But without effective planning, your content calendar will not benefit you the way you want.
Effective Ways to Prepare a Social Media Content Calendar
These are some of the ways to prepare a social media content calendar that works for you:
- Choose Your Social Media Platforms
Before preparing a social media calendar, choose the correct social media platform to post your content. If you choose a platform which is not relevant to your target audience, you will not get the expected output from your content.
You can ask your social media team to research and pinpoint those platforms where your content can reach the correct target group of audiences. By knowing the platforms, you can determine the content formats like ads, polls, reels, stories, videos, etc.
- Audit Your Social Media Accounts
By auditing your social media accounts, you can easily determine which content is working best for you. Based on that, you can plan your future content. When you find the posts with the highest views or clicks, you can easily decide your future posts and ads.
In this step, you can research some important points such as your lowest and highest performing post, brand goals, best time and frequency to post on the particular platform, target audience, age group, and demographic data. Choosing the correct target audience is one of the most important aspects of organic marketing strategies.
- Choose and Prepare Your Social Media Content Calendar
Before you start to prepare your social media calendar, it is essential to choose the correct format to get better outputs. Generally, a small business will choose a simpler calendar and a large business will choose a complex one as they usually have their dedicated social media team.
Based on research and requirements, you can prepare your template, you can choose the templates available on the internet or you can use a tool to prepare your social media content calendar.
In your calendar’s template, you should add columns like channel name, date, time, day, post type, visual type, video/image, live link, etc.
If you are choosing a template from the internet, you can either use the same format or you can customise it based on your requirements. You can schedule your posts in each cell and if you have a social media team, you can also share it with them.
However, if you want to get all the things in a single place, you can choose any of the social media content calendar tools. These tools are very useful as you can schedule your different social media posts in a single place.
Using these tools you can schedule your LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, Instagram posts, and even your GMB (Google My Business) post ideas in a single place.
- Add the Correct Time in Your Social Media Content Calendar
Adding the correct time to your social media content calendar mentions the correct time to reach the correct audience by posting your content. Here you need to choose the correct frequency and correct time to post your content.
Every social media platform offers a dashboard for the creator to see this data of their social media account. If you post your content when the viewers or followers are highly active, you can get the highest level of engagement.
On the other hand, if you post too little, too much or too late, your post engagements will drop. With correct frequency, it is also better to focus on quality over quantity.
You should ideally aim to post high-quality content with helpful information and post regularly to stay at the top.
- Share the Social Media Content Calendar With Your Team
Companies have their own social media team to publish content as social media provides one of the easiest ways to get clients. Make sure your social media content calendar is shared with your team.
This collaboration can help you to fulfil the organisation’s goals easily. You can ask your team for feedback and they can help to improve it.
For example, the public relations and human resource team can help you remember important milestones and dates for upcoming posts. The product team will tell you about the new product service or features that will be launched.
- Track the Performance of Your Published Content
After publishing a post, you can track them to check their performance, engagements, impressions, clicks, etc. For instance- how many impressions, clicks and likes did your post get in the first hour?
This will help you analyse how successful your social media strategy is. If required, you can also modify them to improve the performance.
Mistakes to Avoid While Making a Social Media Content Calendar
Even if you know how to plan your social media content calendar, it is not too odd to make a mistake. These are some of the common mistakes to avoid:
- Zero Interaction
Publishing content is one side of social media engagement. If you fail to engage with your audience through shares, likes and comments can make your company seem distant. In fact, each social media platform has its distinct type of content.
- Zero Flexibility
Social media is a platform where trends and events change very quickly. If your social media calendar is not flexible enough to adopt those changes, your posts will suffer to hold their positions. If you want to leverage the platform LinkedIn, you must come up with LinkedIn post ideas that match the trend.
Conclusion
Your social media content calendar will help you to plan, post and track your old and upcoming posts. Remember, your goal is to create an adaptable, insightful and balanced schedule that helps you to strengthen the digital footprint of your brand.
Evaluation Tech 