What is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar is exactly what it sounds like- a calendar created to organize and schedule all your social media content. It sounds like a big deal at first but it’s the only thing that can make your social media managing awfully easy.
Social media posting calendar is basically a preplanned schedule for your social media for a limited period of time which you can choose according to your need. You can make it for a week, a month, or a year, it totally depends on you.
Social media content calendar is not a new thing for content creators but isn’t used by everyone. If you’re a content creator and want to lower your stress drastically and make your social life easy, you should try using a social media calendar once. I know it sounds a bit complicated but trust me, it isn’t.
When you’ll have a habit of organizing your social media through a social media content calendar, you won’t need anything else to make you any happier.
Why use a Social Media Content Calendar?
Many people work in the digital marketing industry but they don’t use a social media content calendar. A social media content calendar is like a Good Samaritan on your computer whom you can consult every time you create content.
Social media calendar helps us to:
Be Organized
Being organized not only saves time but relives a humongous amount of stress too. While using a social media posting calendar you’ll already be aware of what kind of content, what topics you’re going to post. It will save you plenty of time to utilize something rather than thinking about the topics and the content that you are going to make for the day and then post it or postpone posting it.
Be Customized
A social media content calendar helps you prevent spamming of the same content on all of your social media platforms. You can customize the content for your different social media sites and create content for them accordingly. If you’re posting the same things on all of your social media, people would get bored and begin unfollowing or unsubscribing you which will lead to less traffic and degradation of your social image.
Able to Post Regularly
A social media calendar will not only help you prepare your content but help you post it regularly too. When you’ll know what you have to create then you won’t have to waste your time thinking about it. You will just have to create the content and post it on your social media. This way you will be regular with your content and have a cordial impression on your audience. It will help you engage with your audience on a regular basis.
Plan Bigger
When you’ll have your schedule for further weeks already prepared, you have the time to tackle bigger things. You can think of ways to introduce your content creating skills on bigger platforms such as LinkedIn or you can increase traffic on your blogs by doing a giveaway or something or hosting a competition on your Instagram that’ll help you increase your followers. Thus, you can invest your time in something big that’ll help you grow.
Never miss out on pertinent occasions
Even if you forget or ignore the occasions relevant to your brand on purpose, by using a social media calendar you won’t have reasons to miss them.
In a social media content calendar, you can plan your content for the days when you can post on relevant topics that can help you engage with your audience more. You can strategize your content according to the worldwide occasions which will attract audiences from different regions too.
Like, for instance National Robotics Week.
Analyze and Improve
All social media have the option to check your insights. You can log your insights into your social media calendar to help you track the feedback of the audience to your experiments and newly introduced strategies. You can then have complete data to analyze and improve your strategies according to what your audience wants.
Who Can Use a Social Media Content Calendar?
Any social media content creator may use a social content creator whether it’s for a business, brand, blog, promotion, etc.
- Marketing teams
Marketing campaigns often have a lot of movement, including social components. They can use a social content calendar to make sure everyone gets involved in the project and remains on the same page without making the work any more difficult as “teamwork is the key”.
- Small businesses
For small businesses, managing a social media content calendar is easy and it can save them a lot of time to grow their business across social media and maintain consistency in the progress. Limited resources often lead to degradation of the business but by using a social calendar they can do great by organizing them accordingly.
- Media companies
If you’re creating editorial content, it’ll definitely need social media promotion. Keep it organized in a social media content calendar and it can do wonders.
- Blogger
If you’re a blogger and don’t want to waste your time in thinking about the topics, events, your social media strategies, then you definitely need a social media content calendar as it can save you a lot of time by keeping it already organized for you.
Tips to create a social media content calendar
Identifying goals
Identifying the goals is a crucial step for creating a social media content calendar. You need to be clear about your reasons for creating a social content calendar like increasing your followers on Instagram and Twitter, increasing your subscribers on YouTube, popularizing your brand, product sale, etc. You should know what you expect from the outcome after following your schedule. If you haven’t set any goals for your content calendar, it will just be like a roster.
Categorize
Divide your content into categories so that you won’t post the same things daily on all of your social media. Categorizing your social media content calendar will help you create different things daily. If you post the same content repeatedly and spam all of your social media accounts with the same content, your audience will get bored easily.
People always want something new and different and for being a good digital marketer or a content creator you need to provide them what they want.
Be Persistent
While creating content you need to fix some things that you can share anytime without having the hassle to create it differently for different social media.
Like, for instance, if you are a content writer, you can fix articles and blogs for persistent posting.
Add Something Extra
As you’ve already categorized your social media content calendar and added some persistence to it, you still need to come out of the box sometimes to share something different.
Like, if you’re a content writer, you can try quotes and poems.
Add Events
To engage your audience on your social media you need to have something exciting too. You can do that by organizing different events at your sites. Adding events in your social media content calendar will not only help you to memorize what event you have to organize but also make you remember when to organize them.
Hosting events like competitions, giveaways increase the interest of the audience in your content.
Establish a System
Now that you know what your social media content calendar consists of, you need to strategize some other important things like:
- How often you will post on your social media; you have to fix the number of posts for your different social media like posting 1-2 times daily, weekly, monthly, or more.
- Finding the best time to post; you can check the insights of your social media accounts and find the most suitable time to post your content so that it could engage with the audience as much as possible.
Team Review is Crucial
While being a digital marketer or a content creator it’s not unusual to have a team. When you prepare your social media content calendar don’t forget to share it with your team because you want them to work accordingly, right? And also, they can give you more things to include for your convenience.
Tools to create a Social Media Content Calendar
Now that we’ve collected all the things that we need to make a social media content calendar, it’s time to build it using those things and some tools:
Google Calendar
If you own a Google account then google calendar can naturally be the first choice for you. Well, google calendar was originally not designed to be a content calendar but you can easily use its features to make one and plan an entire month for your social contents.
It’s very easy and basic to use and you can make a content calendar in very less time.
- When you log into the google calendar, you’ll see the calendar you already have access to. First you need to create a new one. This is how the layout will look in the beginning.
- Now you have to add contents into the calendar and voilà your social media content calendar in google calendar is ready. This is how it will look.
Google Sheets
Google sheets are the most popular tool for building a social media content calendar. Most of the content creators are already familiar with the features of google sheets. And are accessible by less experienced people too. You can even plan a calendar for a whole year in google sheets. By using google sheets you’ll also know how to create a social media calendar in Excel.
Let’s discuss an example of creating a social media content calendar using Google sheets:
Refer the screenshot below to know how you can use this. This tab is for the whole year and you can see a little mini calendar at the left. In this you can see how clearly it is organized and easy to understand.
Trello
Trello is another popular organizational tool that you can use to make a social media content calendar. It has some amazing features like flexible assignments “cards”, customizable “boards” and “lists”. These features make it easy for content creators to make a social media content schedule.
Let’s discuss an example of creating a social content calendar in Trello:
- This is a screenshot of a Trello board that a social media content team can use for an upcoming week. You’re not limited to only one board. You can have customized boards according to your need.
- Trello cards give you more customization for your content calendar and they can also be assigned to different team members which make it really easy to share it among your team and get your work efficiently done.
- Trello also offers a full calendar view for a year in a weekly and monthly manner which helps you get updated about your schedule for upcoming weeks.
So now you know how to create a social media calendar and you can create one by using any of the above tools or you can just download free templates from the following links.
https://marketwithfirefly.com/2020-social-media-content-calendar-template/
Adding a personal touch
You can create a social media content calendar using the tips stated above and the tools. Or you can download free templates from the link but how would your calendar be completed without your personal touch? Every tool using which you’ll create a content calendar has customizing tools. You can customize your calendar the way you want to. It will not only make it easy for you to understand but will also make it unique in its own way.
Why is being dependent on a social media content calendar doesn’t harm?
We’ve heard this a hundred times that being dependent on something or someone hurts in the end but trust me, a social media content calendar isn’t like everyone.
You can totally depend on your content calendar as you’ve created it for your own convenience. In this boisterous life of ours, we surely deserve some comfort. An average human brain doesn’t have the capacity to remember the schedule for a very long period of time but a calendar does, so why not use it for good?
