As much as we hate (or love) to admit it, social media has become a core part of our lives, and as a result, our marketing strategies. We’ve learned to fine-tune our skills and become pros at figuring it all out but we all dread the day when we aren’t sure what comes next. One strategy for solving this? A social media calendar.
What is a Social Media Calendar and Why is it Important?
A social media calendar helps you maximize your marketing efforts by outlining your content strategy and organizing the content you plan to post in the upcoming months. This can look like a physical calendar with notes jotted down, whiteboards with sticky notes, or a digital planner with the ability to upload and store assets. The best ones out there are ones that function seamlessly with you and your team’s work style.
Having a calendar is important because it helps you stay consistent. There’s a lot to manage when it comes to social from a quick one-off post to comprehensive campaigns. This keeps you on track and on top of all the accounts you’re managing and is highly useful in creating cohesive messaging.
Benefits of Using a Calendar
We can’t stress enough that a calendar can make a difference in your efforts. Even the best marketers with the best organization skills can benefit and here’s why:
Consistency & Planning: A good social media strategy is like exercising to stay healthy. You can’t spend three hours getting the best workout in, targeting all your muscles, and eating right only to neglect it the rest of the month and expect to see results.
The key with social media is staying consistent. While being active is important, consistency is key. So whether that means posting every day if you have the capacity to or twice a week, a calendar helps you manage that schedule.
Efficiency: A good calendar can get you far. You can expect a streamlined workflow and more time which, for marketers like us, is huge. When you have a pre-planned schedule in front of you, you’re able to work through tasks faster, know exactly what comes next, and how you can prioritize or even consolidate items to get things done more efficiently.
Collaboration: Some people love their mental calendars and they’re useful to a degree but one thing that they don’t lend themselves to is collaboration. A physical or digital calendar that can be shared opens up opportunities for discussion and ideas. You can easily include other team members in your thought process and they’re able to jump in without prompting. It’s also a useful way to show stakeholders what you’re up to and why it’s important.
Optimization: A social media calendar doesn’t just help you plan ahead; it can be a valuable tool in helping you track the present and reflect on the past. Reflecting on past campaigns and engagements becomes a quicker process because you’re able to reference them easily and pull up the analytics that go with them. Looking at these successes and even “failures” can help you learn what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to adjust and optimize where you see fit.
Social Media Content Schedule
While it’s exciting to jump right into your vision for design or content, it’s best to start by defining your goals. Content needs to have a purpose. Like we always say, posting just to post doesn’t work. Instead, designate what each piece of content is meant to do. Are you trying to encourage engagement? Build loyalty? Entertain? Teach? Later on, with your content calendar in hand, you can label each of your posts with a purpose and have a clear idea of whether you’re accomplishing what you set out to do.
Now that you have an end in mind, you can move on to the fun part — creating your content! There are plenty of ideas to go around here. Take some inspiration from some of the brands who are doing it well:
Weekly Themes
Consistency becomes a lot more manageable when you have pre-planned theme days. For example, maybe Tuesdays are used to highlight employees or Fridays are designated for customer testimonials. Pick something general or industry specific and then easily batch create your content months in advance. It’s not just content spotlights that work here. If you’re feeling stuck, pick a hashtag — something as simple as #ThrowbackThursday or #TBT could be your theme.
Showing some love on #ThrowbackThursday. <3 #TBT pic.twitter.com/oIfjYx0O6m
— Pepsi (@pepsi) December 12, 2013
User-Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content is not only fun, it can save you a lot of time in creating content of your own. UGC is valuable because it gives you audience relatable content that’s not only informative or entertaining, but also builds trust.
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Industry Trends
We all hope to be leaders in whatever industry we’re in and there’s no better way to do that than to stay up to date with the latest trends. For certain companies, this may look like sharing important updates — which marketing company hasn’t touched on AI lately? For other companies, this might look like sharing innovative products or useful tips for utilizing something in a new way.
The Takeaway
A social media calendar is an essential tool for any marketer and can help you maximize the impact of your efforts. Remember, having a plan in place is how you stay checked in with how you’re doing and how you can loop others in on the process to help you out. Looking for more content on content? We’ve got your back — check out our article on content that converts and more on our blog!
