Social media is a game-changer when it comes to getting you more business.
True or False?
71% of small-to-mid-sized businesses use social media for marketing themselves. Social media helps business owners of all sizes to gain more traction on their website, increase brand awareness, boost engagement and earn more loyal customers. But unfortunately, it’s easier said than done! As with our experience with several businesses, most of them say that they often struggle with good, high-quality content when posting on social networks. Because social sites require a company to be consistent with its efforts (in terms of posting regularly), the challenge amplifies and leaves marketers with a content block and a poorly driven social media marketing strategy.
But luckily, there is a turnaround for it. You can better manage your content needs for social media by organizing it beforehand. As a social media marketer, you have a powerful tool – social media calendar.
So what exactly is a content calendar, and how does it help?
Simply put, a social media calendar is a written schedule that helps you and similar businesses to organize their upcoming content by detailing what and when to post on social sites. A calendar helps determine and monitor the quality of the posts, manage campaigns, and track deadlines. Depending upon your business needs, you can either take a traditional approach and use spreadsheets or opt for a software service that automates this task for you. No matter what method you choose, having a content calendar by your side helps you in more ways than you can think:
- Provides you with a better perspective of your overall social media marketing strategy
- Helps to identify content gaps and prevents you from hitting a deadline
- Brings consistency in terms of posting on social networks
- Surges creativity and helps to generate more ideas to produce relevant posts
- Helps to identify successful content pieces to be used for paid social media advertising
How to plan out a content calendar to maintain a consistent posting schedule
Managing and following a content calendar is not rocket science, after all. These tips will help you create yours like a pro.
Circle back to your social media goals
Your social media goals are like your ‘Holy Grail.’ Remember those SMART goals you created when you started? If not, now is an excellent time to do so.
Planning a social media calendar depends on what your business wants to achieve on social platforms. Do you want to create more brand awareness or promote a new product or both? Whatever it is, we recommend saving one column in the calendar for your goals.
A consumer behavior stats report for 2021 reveals that out of several reasons, audiences’ unfollow brands on social media – irrelevant content accounts for 45 percent. Dividing your social media goals for each quarter and writing them down in the calendar will help you track the KPIs and produce more relevant content.
Pro-tip: If you have a scattered bunch of ideas and need more inspiration for your content calendar, Fraise.io is your go-to. The tools help you create a successful content strategy for your targeted keywords.
Do a Content Audit
A content audit is like a self-reflection.
Whether you are revamping your social media marketing strategy or planning the way forward, the benefits of an audit are two-fold.
- Past performance metrics can decode what worked for your business and what not
- You will probably get more ideas in terms of producing more relevant content
An audit will also help you figure out the scope for improving your content. For instance, your Twitter blogging strategy is driving the desired response. But your Facebook posts aren’t driving expected sales. A content audit can help you optimize your social media calendar and guide your efforts to produce thumb-stopping posts.
Pro-tip: Creating content is a continuous process and can be laborious. Exploding topics provide you content themes to plan your calendar by helping you stay updated with upcoming trends that are about to become popular.
Create Content Categories
Have you ever followed your favorite brand on social and got bored soon enough? The chances are that it rolled out repetitive content.
Moral of the story? Keep your audience engaged with different types of content. Go awry with varying types of content on social media. Don’t be shy to experiment, learn and repeat.
Creating content categories is another excellent tip we emphasize for a well-crafted social media calendar. From blog posts to polls, experiment with a wide range of content formats that you think your audience might be interested in. If you have religiously followed tip number 2, this one should be easy. A content audit will give you better insights into putting different content types for your social media.
From there, give meaningful titles to your content categories and list them at the top of your social calendar. For convenience, assign each category a specific color. Color coding post drafts will help you see different content types quickly, especially if you want to plan a long-term content strategy. You can also assign this task to our experts at Edkent, who will take care of all your content needs and help your business strategize for success.
Pro-tip: Answer the public is an insightful tool to learn about various topics that your audience might be interested to know.
Have a platform-wise strategy
When it comes to social media marketing, it is not like a one-size-fits-all. Each platform is unique and has a very different kind of audience. With that being said, you might want to consider creating a platform-wise strategy and planning your calendar accordingly.
Does this mean you have to create different types of posts for various platforms? Yes and No.
The idea is to repurpose a gated content and use it in multiple ways. For example, if you created a blog post for LinkedIn, then convert it into a quick carousel for Instagram. But having it written down means you know how much content you need for a week, for a month, for a quarter, and so on.
Keep it Simple
The whole concept of a social media calendar is to save you time and help you plan your social media marketing strategy. There is no right or wrong in doing it but keeping it simple will help you and your team to stick to it in the long run. Here are a few things you might want to include in it.
- Key dates – Give yourself a 30% buffer time. Sometimes rolling out a post takes longer than you think. Set an internal deadline and an actual date of release.
- Keywords – Mention all relevant keywords that are crucial for your SEO
- Graphics – Mention links to the post’s final images
- Writer/ Editor – If you have a fully cross-functional team involved, mention names of people and set deadlines accordingly.
Over to you
When it comes to social media, it all boils down to a few keys factors like consistency, relevancy, and measuring efforts. A content calendar is more than a schedule and covers all of this.
Need support with planning and marketing your content on social media, Edkent Media happy to help! Feel FREE to book a 30-minute creative strategy session with us or speak to us at (647) 352-8700.
