The Importance of Creating a Social Media Calendar

A Social Media Calendar, is your basic planning tool so that you’re able to collate all your social media assets.

Although your layout may be different to what I use with my clients the point is if you don’t have a social media calendar or content calendar you’re pretty much shooting in the dark.

I want to take a quick step back and talk about content planning.

As a social media manager, planning is a very important aspect of your business.

We’ve all realized how important social media is for our business, but ensuring that content is going out on the regular basis can be a challenge.

With all of the various social media applications available, it can be a challenge to manage them. That’s where a social media schedule becomes a handy tool to plan what to share and when.

Here are a few things you need to consider when planning out your social media content schedule:

1. Existing social media presence.

Your first step is actually looking at what’s already in your content. Doing a quick social media audit can help with that.

Inspect what accounts in social networking sites you already have and what content they have. Which of them are beneficial? What can you do to enhance them? Are there any social assets that turned out to be totally useless? Decide whether to work on improving them or leave them out. My recent article on How to Decided on Social Media Platform may be useful in this regard.

2. Content types

Understanding what content you are going to use to promote your business is a crucial point of scheduling your efforts.

Excellent content should be compelling and relevant to your products and services. Be realistic about costs you can allow for content creation.

For example if video is going to be the best way to promote your business, don’t be miserly about it. Ensure that you invest in good video editors. If video isn’t all that important then you can get away with amateur content.

3. Tracking tools

You can’t improve what you don’t measure!

I have seen many businesses literally disregard several “would have been” great social media options because they failed to put tracking in early.

Analytics implementation is a must for any social media marketing campaign, especially when you’re doing advertising. It allows you to measure the results of your activity. Now there are two types of analytics that you want to be aware of.

Keeping in mind that the most important activity is not necessarily the engagement analytics aka likes, hearts and shares; but the analytics that gives you gauges of website traffic and conversions.

Installing Google Analytics on your website is just step one! You’ve got to dig deep into your Google Analytics, and setup events and conversions to really get the most out of it.

If you’re looking for other type of data there are a handful of other useful paid analytic services that I can always recommend.

4. Actions

Define your future activity for each of the platforms of your choice. In other words, are you going LIVE everyday, every other day, once a week?

Are you posting images daily or weekly? Are you posting articles daily, or monthly?

In addition to posting your content, social media makes it possible to communicate directly with your consumers, professional communities, and trendsetters of your industry.

Answer questions, express your opinion, comment on relevant posts to prove your expertise and trustworthiness.

5. Schedule

Planning the frequency of your social activity, remember that too many posts annoy users.

When scheduling your content, try to keep users informed and not to be too obtrusive.

Promotional posts should alternate with entertaining and informative ones.

I’ve always been a fan of the 10-4-1 rule.

In other words, if you’re posting 15 times for the week, 10 of those posts should be fun entertaining posts, 4 of them should be related to your business, what we call industry specific and 1 is a selling post.

So if you’re spreading out your content, make sure you’re not just selling, selling and selling. I don’t go to social media to be sold, I go to scroll and laugh and be entertained!

The other thing you want to keep in mind to save your time is to schedule your content. You are not posting your content live to social media, you don’t have time for that.

Your time on social media should be spent answering questions and engaging with people. I use a tool called Coschedule for all my social media and blog content planning and sharing. But there are many other options out that you can always try.

Lastly what I will say about social media content planning is that it starts with your blog or article content.

If you do video better yet!

Social media content doesn’t just get pulled out of a hat, it starts with something. That something is usually a video or a blog post. It is from these content sources that your social media content continues to flow.

I hope this post has been helpful to you in planning out your social media content. Let me know your feedback in the comments below.

If you need some help with you social media plan drop me a message.