Uses of Social Media Content Calendar & Steps to Create It
Social Media Content Calendar is the heart and soul of your whole social media strategy. It is exactly what it sounds like – a calendar for scheduling social media content. However, it is not just limited to this. There are plenty of benefits it brings along, and here in this blog, we have discussed its uses in brief.
You can make your social media content calendar as simple as you want – a simple grid with a few links or as complex as you need – a customized dashboard that can plan many feeds. Once you are aware of its brilliant uses, you would definitely want to invest in it.
What are the uses of the social media content calendar?
- Save your time
Just like any other task in your daily planner, your social media marketing needs constant attention and effort. Not only when you feel motivated to do so or at the end of the day when everything else has been taken care of.
Social Media Content Calendar enables you to pre-arrange your work, jot down all your creative ideas for later, and steer clear of multitasking. You will be posting daily, perhaps multiple times a day, without having to babysit your feeds now and then. Some social media content calendars have a special tool that lets you schedule posts ahead of time and also allows you to manage your audience engagement from one place.
- Post frequently
No matter what social media platform you are using, whether it is Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, the one and only expert tip to increase following is to “post frequently.” No shortcuts! But why?
Appearing in your audience’s feed regularly is a great way to engage with them. Better engagement with the audience will increase your organic reach as per the social media platform’s algorithm. Your posts will start showing up to new people and will eventually grow your following. The genuine connections and increasing audience will ultimately lead to more conversions for your business.
Scheduling social media posts ahead of time will allow you to post frequently even if it is the busiest week of your year or slow news days. Your audience engagement will not be compromised.
- Reducing big mistakes risk
Having your posts planned days or weeks ahead of time will allow you plenty of time to foolproof it. Whether it is editing your texts or checking facts, you have enough time to take care of it.
Some social media content calendars have a special built-in feature of team members’ approval. This feature is a savior from any kind of embarrassment that can come from mistakes like posting the same message across media channels.
- Get your social strategies organized
Once you have got your social media posts scheduled for let’s say a week-long, your innovative brain can get some time to relax and think about new strategies. Should you do a Twitter poll? Maybe it’s time to make an official LinkedIn profile of your brand? Or hire an influencer partner!
Whether you are managing a ten-person content team or posting stories with a face mask on at 4 pm, taking your social media game to the next level means getting your strategies organized.
- Never missing any relevant events
Social Media Content Calendar lets you observe the global events worldwide that could be relevant to your target audience’s interest. Also, having your daily posts planned out, in case some hot topic comes up – for instance, Kristen Stewart joins Instagram or something like the most liked egg, you will have enough time to engage with the moment.
- Develop higher quality content
Recently, social media production values have escalated real high. So it is not surprising when we say that one single social media post has a whole creative team behind it. Whether it is the designer, copywriter, or video editor, every person has their roles assigned.
Asking your whole team to drop their tasks for an emergency twitter post will not cheer them up obviously. Also, it is not guaranteed to bring engagement if it seems too pushy. With a social media content calendar, you can track your digital as well as human resources. This way, your team will have some time to breathe before they get back to work.
- Track your Analytics and improvise accordingly
Whatever you schedule, gets posted. However, the analytics of your social media content calendar has a lot of insights for you. Track it constantly to see your progress and make enhancements accordingly. See what kind of posts are getting the highest engagement, at what time your posts are getting most engagements, and post frequency.
So here were the seven best uses of Social Media Content Calendar. Moving forward, let us discuss how to create one for yourself.
How to create a social media content calendar?
- Examine your social networks and contents
Examining is the best way to polish your social media strategy and boost your return on investment (ROI). This will give you a much clearer image of your current social media efforts and spot the areas that need improvements. You can also figure out opportunities for new efforts.
Invest some time to be thorough with all of your social resources. Doing so will help you to pursue your improvised social strategy.
- Choose your social media platforms
It takes a lot of concentrated effort to make sure you remain at the top of new developments. For instance, should your brand bother about the new Instagram threads? Or be on the new application? Is your audience even using it?
Therefore, it is essential to be aware of the user demographics of each social media platform. Not that you need to spend hours researching through it. Just spend a few minutes whenever you get spare time, and rest assured you will come up with new business strategies.
- Decide what your content calendar should track
If you have a ten-person team to manage, you will need to have a proper track report about who is doing what, when it was completed, when it was approved, when it was posted, and finally, how successful it was?
So to ease this trouble, you can start by keeping details like:
- Platform in a specific format (IGTV, twitter post, Facebook post, etc.)
- Date
- Time with time zone
- Paid or Organic
- Copy
- Visuals whether it is photo or video
- Link to resource
- Link to published post
- Analytics
- Create a content library for your assets
Your content should not be living in your smartphone or a folder on your desktop, at least not permanently. You can store them in Google Drive or your company’s internal network or on your Social Media Content Library!
It has plenty of space for large files; it can be accessed from any device (phone or computer), it can be shared easily with team members, and provides links to individual files so that you can paste them in your calendar.
- Set up your workflow
With all the obtained information, you can start preparing your workflow by considering the following points:
- Frequency of your posts on each platform
- Best posting time for each platform
- Your content ratio
- Who will be approving the posts and how communication will take place
- Process of creating and assigning new content
- Evaluating your calendar
Once you are done with all of this, it’s time to evaluate your calendar. Go through some of your old posts and insert them into your calendar. Evaluate its look and feel. If it requires much effort or looks fussy, you may want to go back and make some changes there, maybe add a few more columns.
- Let your team review it
Once you have approved the calendar yourself, invite your team members and show them your work of art. Inviting people who are going to use this calendar every day will be a smart choice. Take their feedback about it and see if it needs any improvements. Check if your team is clear on how it works, whether they know how to access it or download files, and so on.
- Start scheduling
Well, after all these efforts and hard work, finally, your calendar is all set to run. Start publishing or scheduling posts. It may take a few days to get used to the idea. But rest assured, this is worth every penny.
So give wings to your social media strategy and level it up. With all these steps by now, you will have enough information to provide you with a headstart. Prepare your calendar and run things smoothly. This is all you need to know about the social media content calendar. We hope this information helps.