Have you ever encountered a disorganized social media marketing team? Probably not! because such doesn’t exist and shouldn’t exist. People are aware of the benefits of Social media marketing, so the teams should be up to date with the trends as well as their own content.
Among all the keeping up with the trends and content, the social media calendar is the inevitable part of any social media strategy. The calendar serves as the organizing and tracking tool for social media marketers. It helps you track the current, scheduled, and published content. With a social media calendar, your marketing strategy is internally visible to the execution team as well as the reporting authority.
- Planned content reduces the chances of error and gives the creator ample time to re-check or rephrase the content
- A social media content calendar creates ease for the graphic design to catch up before the deadline eliminating the chances of any late posting. It streamlines the workflow for the department.
- Planned and scheduled content serves an important task achieved for the month which means a marketer has more space to work on other assignments.
- A social media content calendar keeps the marketing implementation in the loop. with each platform post scheduling feature, you can always post high traffic time without missing a beat.
- Content calendars can include blogs, email newsletters, several types of social media posts, templates, youtube scripts, and even podcasts.
Practical Tips on Creating Social Media Calendar
Creating a social media calendar isn’t about highlighting headings and coloring the columns. A content calendar should be strategized according to the convenience of your department/employees. Initially, there are three pillars of creating a social media calendar including content creation strategy, serving target audience better, and the unified distribution of the content access the channels.
Template and Content Organization:
The first task is to create a template that suits your social media tracking requirement. You can generate your own format on excel or you can go for any online template. On Microsoft Excel, you can generate up to 255 sheets which means there is plenty of space for organizing the content.
You can organize the content according to type, project, date, or platform. The organizing of your content completely depends on your coordination with the team. If you have too many projects/ clients we suggest creating a monthly sheet with multiple tabs including every project.
Some of the mandatory columns you should add to the content calendar includes:
- Scheduling date
- Due dates / Late content
- Target achieved
- Platforms for publishing content
- Content type
- Post engagement statistics
Always remember that your content calendar should be simple and concise. Create ample space on the calendar so at least the headings are easy to read. Do not overflow the sheet either since you have the option to create multiple sheets.
Audience Specific Content:
Is your content generic or audience-specific? If it’s both, how do you differentiate the content strategies? It’s better to always experiment with your content to enhance the quality. For every social media strategy clicks, engagements, conversions or reach is more important. Creating a section for audience-specific content can help you differentiate your strategies and help you track the trends and third-party content.
To keep in the loop of what resonates with your audience more helps you create content for the future.
Storing Your Social Media Content:
Storing your finalized design content is very important. The purpose of storing includes audience data collection and storage, campaign tracking, and results comparison. Knowing your content consistency and stability helps enhance your strategies. With the collected data you can even experiment further with the social media campaigns.
Scheduling Your Post:
The frequency of social media posting a lot. Posting too many clusters to your account and posting inconsistently. Finding the right consistency of posting is crucial and with a social media calendar, you don’t have to count on your fingertips.
As we know each social media has a peak time for engagement. Using the calendar add a column of several posting hours and over a period of time note the timeframe with the most engagements per month. Tracking the chart you can schedule your post weekly or daily.
Create a chart that shows when a post is scheduled and afterward also add the engagement statistics aligning the post to analyze each content quality and performance.
Another thing you can look into is the editorial calendars. Editorial calendars are used to highlight extensive content themes, plans, and opportunities for social media marketing. This content can be used up to yearly content highlights. However, with the impending changes in the trends of social media marketing, it is better to create weekly or monthly content. Editorial calendars are mainly used by the company with several divisions to market and monetize.
Last Words:
Social media marketing is an essential service provided by digital marketing agencies and you particularly can’t mess it up as a marketer. The SMM calendar is the first step in achieving your Social media marketing goals. Stay organized and up to date with the simple steps mentioned above.