Staying on top of your social media game is not an option anymore for businesses. The leading companies and top social media marketers prefer planning and organizing their content way before the date of posting to avoid confusion. They use tools like social media content calendars to stay on the top of their game. If you are planning to create a social media content calender for your business, we have some tips for you!
P.S. We have also created a social media content calendar template for you that you can use for free to plan and organize your social media strategy. Scroll to #4 to download now.
8 Tips to Create an Efficient Social Media Content Calendar
1. Conduct a social media & content audit
Before even beginning to plan your future content using a social media content calendar, try answering the question: what’s the main goal of it and what your audience will get from it? Depending on your answer you will be able to better gauge and understand what’s the right social media channel and content format suitable for your business.
If you are already pretty active on your selected social media channels, put additional effort in identifying what’s working for you and what are some key areas of improvement. This ‘audit’ is crucial as it will fine-tune your game plan as well as help in maximizing your return on investment.
Whether you’re new at social media or been on social platforms for a while, you need to understand how you want your audience to react to your content. Do you want more engagement (likes, shares, subscriptions and saves), do you want more leads or want to drive more traffic to your website.
When conducting a social audit, look into things like:
- Your audience: demographics and buyer personas
- Most successful posts, videos, campaigns and other tactics
- Underwhelming posts
- Key metrics you use for measuring success
- Who is responsible for which work in your team
2. Pick the right social channels
We cannot stress this enough: go where your audience is! Analyze all social media platforms with an open mind and finalize one or two social platforms that align with your marketing plan and overall business strategy. Take some time to have clarity on each platform’s user demographics. It is also recommended to glance through best practices for each platform’s best practices.
Try understanding things like should you publish more pictures or videos on Instagram or should videos be shorter or longer than 3 minutes on Facebook. Make sure you publish different kind of content on different platforms. However, make it a point to prioritize your resources for the platforms that serve your purpose the best.
3. Plan content theme for the year
Planning your social media content calendar for the entire year might seem a little overwhelming. However, there are repetitive multiple events that can be added to your calendar to fill it up quickly.
A few popular events you must add to your social media content calendar are:
- Events: events in your company, local events or national events
- Holidays: Look for holidays using your country’s national calendar
- Sales: Posts around discounts, offers, sales, like Black Friday Sale
- Product launches: if your company is launching a new product, or coming up with a new feature, creating social media posts and campaign around it will be a great idea
4. Use a social media calendar content template
Creating a social media calendar can be challenging and surely takes a lot of effort. Writing, creating and publishing content after coordinating with all team members involved isn’t an easy task. For everything to be smoothly executed, everyone in the team had to be on the same page and know what exactly is going on and do they have to do. Social media calendar content templates can help you do that easily. We have created a social media content calendar template that you can use for to create your social media content strategy. Feel free to download it.
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5. Establish and follow an efficient workflow
Now that you know what you’ll post and have a basic content strategy in mind, you will need to ponder in deeper and decide what exactly will happen on each day and who will be responsible for which task.
Following are the things you need to finalize to design a workflow:
- The process of coming up with new ideas for content
- Who will create what type of content
- Your content ratio
- Who approves the post (social media manager, copy-editor or CEO)
- What time will you post your content (should be based on each platforms analytics and insights)
- How often should you post your content
As for the content publishing frequency, here’s a suggestion on how often should you post to each social media platform to get maximum eyeballs:
- Facebook pages: 1 to 2 times a day
- Instagram: 1 to 3 times a day
- Instagram Stories: 2 to 5 times a day
- LinkedIn: 1 to 2 times a week
- Twitter: 3 to 10 times a day
- Pinterest: 3 to 20 times a day
There is a lot of competing and contradicting information available on the internet on how often you should post. Some experts say post as regularly as possible in order to stay top of your audience’s mind. Others professionals recommend only posting content when you have high quality, valuable information to add to the conversation. Though posting frequently might be a good way to stay in front of your audience, do not make the mistake of prioritizing and emphasizing quantity over quality.
SEE ALSO: 12 social media marketing tips + Free social media budget template
6. Make a content repository or bank
A content repository is also often called a media/content library, a digital asset bank or a resource database. Doesn’t matter what you call it, the point is: content you’ve created with the help of your team and other resources shouldn’t be available in a desktop folder named ‘social media misc’. Use cloud data servers like Google Drive, Dropbox or even your company’s internal network for safely storing your digital assets.
Make sure whatever content library you choose has the following features:
- Enough space to save
- Accessible from your smartphone and other devices
- Easily shareable with other team members
- Privacy features you can trust
- Provides links to files so you can dump them in your social media content calender
7. Re-share well-performing content
Frequently look at your analytics to see which posts have performed well in the past. You can also re-share and repost your top performing content. You don’t always have to create great content from the ground up. Old blog posts and content in other formats can be reused on different channels. You can also convert blogs into short videos and try if it works with your audience. You can also re-share content as it is. This will keep your social media content calendar full on days you don’t have anything great to post.
8. Curate content from other sites and blogs
Don’t just post your content, share relevant content from other sites and blogs as well. You don’t have to share content posted by your immediate competitors. You can find content creators and blogs that work in the same domain that aren’t your immediate competitors and are complimentary to your business. Make sure the content you are curating is similar to your domain and creates good quality, valuable content.
SEE ALSO: Content distribution, channels & categories + Free content marketing budget template
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