Create a Content Calendar for Social Media Marketing
It’s 2020 and social media has never been more important for businesses. With more than 91% of the US population using social media platforms, it’s clear where your customers are easiest to reach.
The bad news?
More and more businesses are investing heavily in building and promoting their brands on social media. Fierce competition makes the likes of Facebook and Instagram a war zone.
Worse still, keeping up with your rivals by producing content and distributing it effectively across all social media platforms can be exhausting. To stay in the game, you need to be really on top of things.
And that’s where the idea of creating a social media calendar comes in. It lets you organize your processes and keep track of your content, from publishing to distribution, so that you stay ahead of the curve with zero headaches.
In this article, we will teach you how to create a successful, easy-to-use content calendar for your social media platforms.
Ready?
Let’s start with the basics.
What is a social media content calendar?
Essentially, a social media content calendar is a system to organize your activities around your social media platforms. It’s used for enhancing your social media strategy by keeping track of everything in one place.
It can be simple or complex, depending on what your company needs. You can create the calendar using spreadsheets, tables or simply by using apps (we will cover the best social media apps below).
Why your social media strategy needs a content calendar
Now that you understand what a social media calendar is and in what form you can create it, it’s time to learn why your business needs one.
- It saves time
With a social media content calendar, you don’t have to waste time coming up with an eye-catching post every time you publish something. Preparing all your posts in advance makes it way easier (and faster) to share your content across all social media accounts.
Essentially, you only need to put in the time and effort once – when you are writing your posts for the future and then either schedule them in the app or post the ready-to-go content manually. No more need to summon the creative gods all the time!
2. Everyone in the team is on the same page
If you are working in a team, it’s crucial that everyone is updated on all ongoing marketing activities. For example, producing content for your blog should be closely tied to your content distribution plan, including sharing it on social media.
This helps to minimise mistakes and creates a steady and consistent workflow, from initial content ideas to promotion. It also means there will be less delays.
Not just this, but keeping everyone on the same page is important for employee engagement because your team’s morale and productivity will go up.
3. Your posts are consistent
Active social media accounts win the social media marketing game. Without a tight social media content calendar, you might find that your posts aren’t consistent in terms of your output. Maybe you release a new Facebook post today but don’t get around to releasing another one for another 8 days. Then, you smash out another one 2 days later before disappearing for a further 12 days.
This sort of thing only confuses your customers and alienates them from your brand. They can’t build a proper relationship with you. Think about the best online marketers you know: They push out the content consistently.
Consistency also means creating content that builds towards your goals and your customers goals. If you promote content about one topic this week but a completely different topic the next week, it could confuse readers. And this can easily happen if you don’t plan ahead what content you need to create each month.
Here’s an example of how to organize the process in excel spreadsheet.
This is important to note because the best brands pump out content that is quintessentially their brand. In other words, their customers become so familiar with their content that they expect to see certain things – images, GIFs, specific calls to actions or whatnot. And when something is missing, it can create a disconnect.
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Not just this, but different social media platforms have different requirements – for example, in terms of images – that must be adhered to. By following guidelines such as these, you can create consistency. Luckily there are tools such as Canva, Venngage or Visme that allow you to create professionally looking templates for your posts. This will not only save your time and money but also increase your brand awareness across those channels.
4. You can spot trends
Hot trends drive traffic because trends are what customers jump on. If something is trending in your niche over the next month, it’s important that you spot them ahead of time and punch in the content so that you’re ready to dominate. That’s why it’s so important to keep an eye on the social media statistics and analytics data, both your own and those publicly available.
A content calendar helps you to visualise your content marketing efforts. In doing so, you can spot patterns and trends before jumping on them – and even setting some of them yourself.
5. More effective future-planning
The truth is that social media marketing isn’t going anywhere. If anything, we will observe an increasing number of social media platforms popping up over the years. With a solid social media calendar in place, you can plan ahead much better.
After all, last minute things never work. It’s like Christmas: When we buy gifts for people at the last minute, they never hit the spot as much as gifts that have been thought-out in advance.
Content calendars, then, help you plan for key dates in the future so that you’re not rushing around and dropping the ball at the last minute. For example, it comes in really handy when you want to prepare your campaigns for BlackFriday or Cyber Monday. Moreover, you can plan for any potential ‘slow months’ by filling in the gaps with awesome content that helps to maintain your relationship with your customers.
How to create a successful content calendar for social media
Now that you understand how a content calendar can help you work more efficiently, it’s time to learn the subtle art of designing a suitable social media content calendar for your business.
Here are the steps you should take to get you started.
Conduct a social media audit
Before you move on to developing your brand content calendar, it’s crucial that you audit your already existing process, as well as your social media strategy. Perhaps there is something that’s already working pretty well which you could include in your new system.
Analyzing your current situation is also useful for spotting new opportunities for growth.
To carry out an audit, you might want to use this template, or go step-by-step with your own checklist.
However you do things, this is the kind of data you should be looking to gather:
- Outdated profiles and/or content
- Your audience’s profile – demographics, used devices, time spent on your profiles, etc.
- Best and worst performing channels and content
- KPIs’ progress
- Most successful campaigns
- Areas with new potential or areas for improvement
- Most efficient and least efficient processes for managing social media
Once you’ve identified what works and what doesn’t, you can get a clearer picture of how to optimize your social media managing efforts – and how your content calendar can help you do that.
What’s next?
Analyze competitors and choose social media channels
Knowing what works well for your competitors can give you a good idea of what kind of strategy can work well for you, too. This is helpful in designing a structure for your social media content calendar, as it might turn out that some platforms are completely irrelevant for your business and niche. Therefore, you can discard them and double down on the rest.
You can use tools such as BuzzSumo to check what kind of content and platforms are performing best for your competitors at the moment. Having this knowledge can help you decide what direction your social media marketing strategy should be heading towards in terms of output and distribution.
For example, let’s take a quick look at Bid4Papers who wrote a great post on writing a strong thesis statement. However, despite solid content, the article didn’t get much engagement on social media:
When we look at how other similar articles performed, we notice 2 important things:
- Facebook was the platform driving most of the engagement
- Most of the best performing content was produced on Youtube
This gives us valuable information with regards to the type of platform we want to be publishing our content on (in this case, Youtube). It can also be handy when deciding to update the content and promote it again – perhaps with more focus on Facebook.
Use the right tools
There’s an abundance of tools you can use for both creating social media content and running your profiles. However, you don’t need to use them all – so how do you choose which ones are right for you?
Depending on the kind of content you’re going to be focusing on, you can consider sharing infographics, GIFs or even explainer videos. Don’t limit yourself only to written content. With a shorter attention span, you have very little window for engaging your audience.
You can ask yourself a few questions that will help you identify the tools that will suit your business:
Does a tool have a clear interface that gives a straightforward experience?
You don’t want to spend endless hours educating your team on explaining how to use new software. The ideal is a tool that’s easy to get to grips with from the start, and which is simple to use for everyone on your team.
If a tool looks clumsy and awkward, and if it takes you way too long to set up, it’s probably a massive red flag.
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Does it provide all the necessary functionality?
This is very important as you need a tool that really has everything under its hood. The best way to ensure that it has the right set of features is to write down a list of tasks that you want to solve with the help of an SMM tool and then simply check its feature page.
For example, Hootsuite lets you schedule your posts, curate content, promote your content, analyse your performance and more.
Does a tool that you selected provides decent customer support?
Customer service is super important for businesses, especially those who are immersed in the content marketing game. For example, if you’ve got a big launch planned for the next week but your key SMM tool has gone haywire, you could be in big trouble.
The best SMM tools offer excellent customer support, such as live chat. Live chat is always a feature to look out for because it helps you to resolve problems quickly so that you’re back on track.
Here are 5 of our favorite tools for managing your social media accounts effectively:
- Buffer
- Planable.io
- Hootsuite
- Sendible
- Social Pilot
Measure, review, and adjust
Literally any SMM tool allows you to see how your engagement, activity (the number of posts you published) and audience have been growing month over month. It’s really important that you monitor these metrics so that you know what’s working, what isn’t – and what you need to change. For example, take a look at the screenshots taken with SEMrush SMM tool that shows the engagement and activity.
Plus, you can compare your own performance vs your competitors. This will help you understand whether you’re as effective as your rivals. If you’re not, you can fill in the gaps with a new strategy going forward.
At Digital Olympus, we used an SMM tool to monitor our engagement on Twitter, and the results surprised us. While our Twitter audience is more than 8X smaller than Brand24 and Nimble, our engagement on Twitter is relatively similar:
Besides analyzing the general performance of your SMM accounts, you should also take into consideration the traffic flow that you bring back to your site, as well as links.
Links are a great way to benchmark your social media performance and research your competitors. By using a tool like Rebrandly URL Shortener to create custom short links, you can collect and analyse another layer of data to help you identify your best-performing areas, and which ones might need a little bit of a push.
You can go one step further here and break down this data to see how each individual piece of content you’re sharing is performing, which will ultimately help to inform your content calendar and strategy moving forward.
On the competitor analysis side, if you find that your competitors are using generic, unsecure short links (like bit..ly/492746), you can simply add a plus (+) symbol to the end of the URL string to see their analytics.
Custom short links, on the other hand, are completely secure. You can choose whether your click stats are publicly visible or not, protecting you from being spied on by your competitors.
Conclusion
Your performance on social media will likely determine a major part of your online success for years to come. Now is the time to create a social media content calendar that will help you stay organised, consistent and on-track so that you pump out awesome content without getting stressed.
The next step is to decide which tools you want to use to aid you along the way, and to then make a start.
Image Souce: Pexels
