You cannot deny that social networks are essential tools for communication and content sharing. But, there are massive amounts of information, ideas, and news on social media. Due to the enormous information, managing social media accounts can become a complex task.
Switching to a social media calendar can be the best way to manage your workflow. But how can you create a social media calendar for your business?
It is what we will precisely discuss in this article.
What is a Social Media Calendar?
Today, no business can run without a social media account. And if they do so, it will amount to running your business without telling anyone.
There is also a famous saying that if businesses today are not on social media, they should be prepared to go out of business. And that sums up the need for companies to be active on social media.
The need for businesses to be active on social media arises from the need to connect with their target audiences so they can share information and receive feedback consistently.
Many businesses develop social media strategies to define how their audience uses social media, what platforms they prefer, and the content they like to see.
You can regard a social media planning calendar as a visual representation of your social media strategy. Usually, businesses use social media calendars to schedule posts, social media campaigns, and upcoming content deadlines.
You can also use social media calendars to track and test different marketing strategies. It becomes easy for you to review previous posts or campaigns and the corresponding engagement with such a calendar.
Why Should You Plan Social Media Content?
One of the critical elements of a successful social media strategy is planning with a social media calendar.
You can reap many benefits from the usage of a social media calendar, such as:
Better Team Organization
With a social media calendar, you can determine your upcoming workload and anticipate any project needs. Moreover, you can maintain a publication frequency and avoid last-minute surprises with a social media calendar.
Tracking Post Engagement
When running a social media campaign, you should track how your posts perform with your target audience. So, it would help if you ran A/B tests or similar experiments to figure out:
- The best days and times to post
- Tastes and preferences of your target audience
- The types of posts your audience prefers
- Your best-performing CTAs
- The ideal post frequency
It is a good idea to hire a trusted and reputed agency experienced in developing social media strategies to run your campaigns.
Steps to Create an Effective Social Media Calendar
You can create an effective social media calendar with the following steps:
#1.Understand Your Audience
The first step is to understand your target audience and your social media platforms. You can get many tools to help you gather important audience demographics, like their average age, gender, or interests.
With this data, you can figure out the social media platforms your target audience uses the most. And you should not fail to be present on those platforms.
You should not try to be present on all social media platforms. Instead, present on those platforms where your target audience is present. Or else, you will be wasting money and time reaching out to an audience that does not exist on a particular social media platform.
#2. Start With Social Media Calendar Template
You can regard a social media calendar template as a shortcut to help you focus more on creating and scheduling your posts.
Although template features can vary, you can easily visualize and plan your content to ensure posting regularly.
#3. Decide the Content to Post
Often, it becomes confusing to decide what content to post. As a result, it creates a significant barrier to creating an effective social media content calendar.
But, that is not a thing to worry about as there are ways out. It will help if you analyze your postings in the past to track the postings that received the highest engagement from your audience.
Moreover, you should research each platform by searching for relevant keywords, hashtags, and topics your target audience follows on social media platforms.
You can also do competitor analysis to understand the keywords and topics your competitors are targeting.
There is another trick you can try out. You can plan your social media marketing themes for the year. For example, you can start with adding holidays and important dates on your social media calendar and then build posts from the key date.
You can also add popular events such as national holidays or events, company or local events, sales dates like a Black Friday or Cyber Monday, or even product or feature date launches.
#4. Decide the Frequency of Postings
After choosing your social media calendar template and forming an idea of the types of content you will post, you should create a posting schedule.
You should start by fixing your daily, weekly, and monthly social media posting frequency. Bear in mind that there is nothing such as the right frequency for publishing content.
However, it will help if you consider the following factors:
- How often your audience stays online? What are the peak times and days for audience engagement?
- Choose your social media platforms wisely because a platform that works for your competitor might not work for you.
Conclusion
Bear in mind that creating a social media calendar is not enough. You also need to track your social media campaign across all platforms you use. So again, it will help if you use an available tool to track your campaign.
