“Is Social Media Calendar important?”, “What should be your next post on social media?” – These recurring questions seem to be quite confusing for entrepreneurs who are always striving to create a unique niche for their business amidst so many competitors. And to save them from this frustration, the concept of social media calendar or Social media calendar came into being. As per a study by Hubspot, publishing 16 posts a month generates 3.5x more traffic for the companies than the ones who post less than 4.
Do you really need a social media calendar? The answer is definitely a YES! Take a look at some of the benefits of having a well-planned social media calendar by your side:
- Keep your content on track. Give your notebooks and papers a rest because a content calendar gives a better reflection of your overall marketing strategy
- Start organizing your content topics and gain valuable insights into the audience engagement with a well-planned social media calendar, where contents are based on user preferences
- Stay consistent with a properly formed calendar so that you never go out of sight and stay out of mind of your target audience
- Keep your audience engaged with well-thought-out content. Forming content at the last minute may not carry the quality you expect from your content bucket, but having a calendar makes you plan them way ahead of the posting time
- With a well-framed social media calendar, the marketing and sales department work in perfect synchronization. If statistics are to be believed, these two departments when working closely, close more than 67% of deals
- Measuring the effectiveness of social media success becomes easy with the presence of a social media calendar. With chronologically placed records, the entrepreneur will be able to have a look at the performance of these contents in every pre-defined interval
In case you are wondering what a perfect social media calendar should look like, here are
6 Steps To Creating A Brilliant Social Media Calendar For Your Business
Planning and creating a social media content calendar takes a lot of time, and most importantly, patience with immaculate attention to detail. Here are certain factors you should consider before initiating your calendar building:
- Goals of your social media campaigns
- Details of the social media platforms you have selected
- Prime days you want to post
- Links to the contents
- Empty spaces for ad-lib posting
- Distribution of posts for a specified timeline
- Advanced planning of contents
- Segregation of contents
Now, let’s take a look at the aforementioned 6-step guide
- Identify the social media channels
This is obviously the first step which is a crucial one too. Prioritizing social media posting channels helps in building campaigns. Unfortunately, this is often overlooked by many ventures. Always start by answering to the question – which social media platform should you start with? This step consists of evaluating various formats like shoppable posts, ads, polls, reels, stories feed posts, etc. To figure out which works best is actually the intention over here. Find out which platform is the most relevant to your targeted audience, pinpoint where they engage mostly, and streamline your focus on those mediums. This step ensures that your content resonates fully with your target audience.
- Conduct Regular Audits Of Your Target Audience
A great advantage of having a social media calendar is getting accurate insights into the progress of the content. It provides a reflection to the entrepreneur regarding where the business started off. As you move ahead with the audit of the social media with your content, keep a note of:
- Where your social media traction is at after starting with the calendar contents
- Which posts are engaging more audiences
- When is your audience more active
- How each kind of post performs in comparison to others
- Timely content vs evergreen content – which suits your brand
- Demographic of audience across your social media channels
In a nutshell, a social media audit will have all the data you will need for your calendar to preserve to get an idea of the most suitable creations.
- Decide What To Track With Your Content Calendar
To take things further, use the metadata created in your content calendar like hashtags in your content, links to the channels you are posting your content to, the specific times of the posts to go live, relevant mentions with ‘@’, and more.
- Planning Your Post Cadence
When it comes to building posts, decide the frequency of each of them and how advanced would you be forming them for future posting. Knowing the cadence helps entrepreneurs figure out the capacity of their content creation process which inherently gives you the space to optimize it. Here, you can create an asset library with the contents of the competitors that clicked with you. This helps in the ideation of the content process. Once you can grasp the taste of the tight content from your social media handles, it becomes easier for you to form them from time to time. You can build the asset library on the content calendar sheet by saving those links for quick access.
- Build A Review Schedule
Content review is a crucial task for a successful social media content posting. Decide on who will review the post and at what time, 0does any of the post require approval from legal teams or brands? The social media calendar helps a lot in this process and it is a great piece of tool for reviewing the content from one centralized place.
- Track & Create Report On The Published Content
Once you start using the content calendar for tracking posts, you will have a central source for all past posts. Take this as a chance to look back on the social media trends. Also, get social media analytics data for these posts from the past. Get impressions on the engagement of the post, for say in the first two hours, any notable audience engagement metrics. Tracking content’s progress gives an opportunity to the brand to hone and refine its social media campaign thinking skills.
Your exposure to the concept of social media content calendar creation is new, and you are also about to start with it, after reading the tips mentioned above. Look out for these
Common Mishaps That Take Place While Using A Social Media Content Calendar
Creating an effective calendar for social media marketing streamlines all your digital marketing efforts, but there are some certain challenges that hamper the potential social media schedules. If you are aware of these common mishaps, chances are, you can maximize the efficiency as well as impact of the social media planning calendar. Take a look at them below:
- Skipping interactions
Posting is an intrinsic part of your social media marketing campaign, but failing to communicate with the audience through comments likes and shares will make your brand an unreliable one. Schedule a time for interaction for your content in the calendar to foster a strong connection with the audience.
- No Space For Flexibility
It is crucial to stick to the calendar but without being rigid as it can be detrimental. Social media is indeed dynamic but sometimes, people need to quickly adapt to the current events and trends for accommodating to spontaneous posts when needed.
- Ignoring Analytical Figures
Data is always the for refining social media strategy and hence neglecting insights from the analytical tools like co tent calendar can lead to missed opportunities for content engagement and optimization. Always review the analytics to understand what works the best and what does not.
- Overlooking Platform Specifics
Each of the social media platforms caters to unique audience factors for various contents. A common mishap is making use of a single approach for all platforms. Create customized content for specific audiences and each platform’s formats. When you search for a social media calendar template on Google, you will come across various examples that would help you.
Thinking Of Managing The Social Media Content Calendar By Yourself? Think Again!
Trust us when we say that deciding what to post on social media is as tricky as figuring out what to eat! Jokes apart, if you are thinking of constructing and managing a social media calendar by yourself, chances are, you will find yourself in a completely challenging phase, from which you can barely come out without professional help.
But, when you have a dedicated team or a professional with you to manage your brand’s social media, this confusion is something you will never have to deal with. With a solid team of experts by your side, expect timely conception and posting of your social media content, aligned perfectly with your social media calendar.
Now the question arises, who are the best professionals for this job?
- Freelancers – Freelancers are cost-effective professionals who work on their own time and terms. When they are hired by brands, they try to give their 100% towards the project. But history has various instances where hiring freelancers has become a risky move. The inefficient ones fail or choose to follow the client’s instructions and feedback and even abscond midway. Hiring them is risky.
- Dedicated In-house Employees – In-house professionals are dedicated employees who focus on the company’s work only. They are a perfect fit for organizations that have the budget for recurring expenses like providing salary and associated benefits to an employee or a team. If you are a small entrepreneur with a limited budget, then this is something that you should avoid.
- Remote Working Extended Team – Hiring Remote or Virtual Assistants from Virtual Assistance providing organizations like Curingbusy, comes with a series of benefits like:
- No physical infrastructure required
- No salary required
- No bearing space renting or bills
- 24/7/365 availability of Virtual Assistants
- Professional handling of each and every project in half the price
- Skilled professionals conducting research, creation, development, and posting of social media content as well as the social media calendar. Want to Take your Social media calendar planning to the next level with CuringBusy social media Experts? Book a Free Meet Today!
Scale Your Digital Presence With Social Media Calendar
As an entrepreneur, your time is extremely valuable; so rather than spending a significant amount of time on deciding what to post every day, hiring a Virtual Assistant or a team who will develop a well-planned Social media calendar and align the posts with it, will enable you to focus on other aspects of your business. The social media content calendar templates that you will come across, are actually very popular and used by many companies. In case you want it customized, ask professionals to build you a social media content calendar, and Google Sheets. Take your planning to the next level with Curingbusy’s brilliant social media experts. Mail at contact@curingbusy.com to know more about them.
Discover more resources: Your Handy Guide To Hiring Social Media Manager, How To Hire A Virtual Assistant For Entrepreneurs: 2024 Guide.
