Are you interested in creating your social media content calendar? Well, you’ve come to the right place. This article will explain the process of creating a social media content calendar.
A social media strategy that lacks a planning calendar is like a train that lacks a track. Consistent social media engagement helps a brand to interact directly with its audience and build client loyalty. Social media is also one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, with little to no expenditures; therefore, no marketer should overlook it.
Making a social media calendar is a good start if you want to be more strategic with your social content. It enables you to focus, create a strategy, assign work to specific team members, and, most importantly, hold yourself accountable to your goals.
This guide will find everything you need to know about developing and using a social media content calendar. So, keep reading if you want to improve your workflow, manage your social media efforts, and scale your business.
What does Social Media Calendar mean?
A social media calendar is a spreadsheet, calendar, or interactive dashboard (if using a social media management tool) to organize and schedule social media content across several platforms in advance. It makes it easier for social media managers to manage campaigns and stay on top of deadlines.
You may design your calendar on any platform you like if it includes all your social media information in one location.
Each entry in a social media calendar should have some of the following elements:
- The precise date and hour when the post will become life
- The platform and account on which the post will be published
- The post’s topic
- The post’s goals
- The copy and visual materials for this post (images and videos)
- To be included in the post are links, tags, and hashtags.
- sales cycles
- Any other information
Depending on the scope of your social media plan, your social media calendar may comprise one or more social networks.
Why is a Calendar Crucial for social media Success?
You can unlock new possibilities for your social media team by designing and managing a social media content calendar. With a calendar, you can include strategy and metrics into your social media, planning to breathe fresh life into your accounts. A social media content calendar can also help you:
- It allows you to keep track of what’s working to maintain the quality and consistency of your material.
- It protected your channels against badly timed postings and missed posting dates.
- It helps to avoid spamming one social network while ignoring another.
- This prevents you from uploading poorly researched and written articles.
8 Steps to Create social media Calendar for your business
- Set your Social Media Goals
- Audit your Popular Content
- Select Topics and keywords.
- Decide your Content Mix
- Choose a Social Media Calendar Template
- Schedule your Social Media Content.
- Monitor and Assess your Progress.
- Sharing your social media Calendar with Different Teams
Step 1: Set your Social Media Goals
It would be best to define reasonable business goals while creating a social media calendar for your brand or clients. “What do you expect to gain on social media?” Knowing what it is will make creating a social media calendar easier since you will have a path to follow.
Posting content without a goal or target, whether for your agency or the consumers you manage, is a waste of creative energy since it lacks focus. Following your target determination, you can use a tool, template, or spreadsheet to record all the posts produced during a batch content production so that you and your team can review, correct, and apply any feedback.
Setting SMART goals determines how well your social media approach is working.
Step 2: Audit your Popular Content
The next step is to analyze the most popular content on your website and social media sites. Analyzing your successful content will guide you in the proper direction. Knowing what your audience wants is better before diving into content planning.
While “audit” may sound scary, performing social media audits is anything but. It’s an easy, repeatable procedure.
- Decide which social media platforms you will use first.
- Determine whether your basic profile across all platforms is consistent with your brand’s image—the identical brand colors, profile photo, bio, etc.
- Track and analyze your best-performing content. What accounts for their Success? What time do you usually post? Do your followers prefer photos or lengthy captions? Using a social media analytics tool, you may obtain vital statistics for all of your best-performing pieces.
- Assess each social media channel. Which is better for your company’s image? You may use Google Analytics to check which social media networks generate the most leads.
- Finally, monitor results frequently to uncover seasonal swings and other nitty-gritty data that will help refine your social media operations.
The goal of auditing your popular content is to find the best-performing material so that you can repeat the process and create more such content.
Step 3: Select Topics and keywords.
Conduct keyword research to determine which topics and keywords your industry and audience are most interested in. Searching for hashtags and industry keywords will help you uncover high-engagement accounts, beneficial subjects, and content ideas for your social strategy. You may also wish to check for industry-specific holidays or hashtags to assist your team in content curation. Gramyfied will help you in #Hashtags research!
Step 4: Decide your Content Mix
Just because it’s your feed doesn’t imply that you should only submit your content. Sharing various useful and engaging material is part of communicating with your expanding social media audience.
But what is the ideal mix? The answer is a mix of industry news, product news, and event promotion.
There are two famous principles for content mix, and they can assist guarantee you’re delivering variety while also making your life a little easier.
The 80-20 rule
- 80% of your posts are intended to enlighten, educate, or entertain.
- 20% of your postings should actively promote your business or generate conversions.
The social media rule of thirds
- One-third of your postings should promote your company or drive conversions.
- One-third of your postings have curated information from industry experts.
- Personal engagement with your followers accounts for one-third of your social posts.
You’ll also need to decide which social channels to utilize for what types of material and which may not be necessary at all. Don’t forget to schedule user-generated and curated material, so you don’t become overwhelmed by having to create everything yourself.
Step 5: Choose a Social Media Calendar Template
Finally, we arrive at the stage where we select the ideal social media calendar template. Do we need a template that minimizes details or thoroughly explains each post? Some calendars, for example, mention “publish on Mother’s Day,” whereas others specify “write a 100-word blog, a short 30-second video, and an instructional for creating chocolate cupcakes on Mother’s Day.” This depends entirely on the type of design you want and the level of detail you desire.
Step 6: Schedule your Social Media Content.
After all of your efforts, you have finally arrived at the section that will begin to save you time. Allow your calendar to assist you in scheduling your content ahead of time so that you are not required to submit new content every hour and be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Below are some recommendations based on the most recent research on how frequently to publish to each social media network for maximum visibility:
- 1-2 Facebook pages per day
- 3-10 times each day on Twitter
- 1-3 times per day on Instagram
- 2-5 times a day on Instagram Stories
- 3-20 times per day on Pinterest
- 1-2 times per week on LinkedIn
Developing a workable publishing schedule requires ongoing trial and refinement. In the end, this pays off with a successful social media content calendar and by allowing you to continuously develop a deeper grasp of what your audience is looking for. Play around with different posting hours and the number of times per week you publish as you continue to fill out your social media calendar. It will provide you with a wealth of information about what works best for your audience.
Step 7: Monitor and Assess your Progress.
You may use the Social Media Content Calendar to track and measure your social strategies and campaigns in addition to planning them. Examine each platform’s metrics, just as you did throughout your social audit, to evaluate how your postings performed. You should also check your website analytics to discover how much traffic is coming from social media. Remember that each platform provides a particular purpose.
- How many people are commenting on your posts?
- Is there content that performs better on one platform than another?
- Have your followers grown?
Step 8: Sharing your social media Calendar with Different Teams
Many firms’ marketing plans include social media, and social teams typically collaborate with other teams to build campaigns and acquire content. Collaboration from all departments within a firm is required for successful social media marketing.
Graphic designers, videographers, and copywriters may work with the social media team. You need a simple and reliable method to ensure everyone is engaged and has access to the appropriate tools, accounts, and deliverables.
Platforms such as Gramyfied, which contain tools that encourage cooperation, can assist you in granting access to key areas of the social media calendar to employees in different departments.
Social Media Calendar Examples
At Gramyfied, we now use Miro for high-level publishing planning. On this platform, we track high-value items such as campaigns (holiday campaigns), contests (thought leadership), and special announcements (Embed Mobile acquisition).
This enables our social media team to identify what types of material are being shared, which days have insufficient content, and which social media channels we publish. The sort of content submitted may be less important than posting it, but this is not the case.
It’s critical to keep track of the kind of content we publish every month to:
- Please make sure we diversify our posts.
- Learn how different content types perform (this plays into reporting big time)
- Based on performance
- Decide which content to prioritize on which platform.
- Understand the KPIs underlying each content category and assist us in meeting all of our objectives.
Social media platforms are the foundation of any social media strategy; you must understand where and why you share your content.
Tip: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify. Don’t put all your (meta) phorical eggs in one basket. Consumption patterns shifts, and platform policies and algorithms are regularly modified. Maintain your adaptability.
When developing your social strategy, consider the following:
- Make sure that you can reach and engage your intended audience.
- Learn how your target audience uses various social media channels.
- Include insights in your monthly planning.
- You’ve planned out your monthly approach. What happens next?
- Put your strategy into action.
To accomplish this, our team at Gramyfied uses Sprout Social to schedule content. As a result, we have one calendar for visualizing and planning our big-picture monthly strategy and another for implementation. This method of segmenting our planning provides clarity and visibility into what’s happening on our social platforms.
Why does GramyFied’s Social Media Calendar Template Works Better?
Centralize your Content Hub
Ensure that all of your images, videos, and prose are housed in a single, centralized location. Track the progress of projects to ensure you’re ready to edit and publish every tweet, story, or post.
Add Even More Details
Create subtasks to add granular data to your social media schedule. Organize and manage projects and subtasks across your calendar, and never forget to include necessary details when sharing or assigning tasks.
Strengthen Collaboration
You can easily invite internal marketing, customer service, or product team members to participate in the process. Ensure all stakeholders, including your clients, access any project specifics.
Get Started with Gramyfied
Because social media managers understand the difficulties of modifying on the fly, why not utilize a social media calendar template that works with you rather than against you?
GramyFied’s template, like other Gramyfied products, is customizable; it can and should be repurposed, reviewed, and altered to meet your evolving requirements. Collaborate, improve, and grow with our team!
Begin saving time and energy on your social media management today! Check out GramyFied’s free trial to help you schedule, track, and measure all of your social media efforts.
Wrap Up!
We hope that this guide will assist you in creating the ideal social media content calendar template for your company or agency. It will be easier to implement and adjust later if you get it right. It will be considerably easier with Gramyfied.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I maintain my social media calendar?
You can keep your social media calendar maintained by:
- Establish your objectives.
- Make a calendar template
- select your channels.
- Begin with the calendar year.
- Keep evergreen content on hand.
- Utilize previous content
- Set a posting frequency and time limits
How do I create a digital calendar?
You can create a digital calendar by:
- Open Google Calendar on your computer.
- Click Add more calendars on the left, next to “Other calendars.”
- Give your calendar a name and a description.
- Select Create calendar.
- If you wish to share your calendar, select Share with particular individuals from the left bar.
How do I organize my content calendar?
9 Steps for Creating a Social Media Content Calendar
- Perform a Social Media Audit
- Select Your Social Media Channels
- Consider what your calendar should track.
- Make a Content Library.
- Establish a Calendar and a Workflow
- Start Scheduling Your Social Media Content Add Post Content Share with Your Team
