How to Make a Content Calendar for your Social Media

 

How to Make a Content Calendar for your Social Media

One of the best ways of efficiently organizing your upcoming content for online social media platforms is creating content calendars. Designing a social media content calendar is like reaching the apex of efficient organization when it comes to implementing a social media strategy.

It seems like quite a daunting task at first, and to some extent it is, but we assure you that the time and effort will be well worth it.

Whether it’s a simple grid or an advanced dashboard, your calendar can be as simple or complex as your brand demands.

In this article, we will guide you through the steps necessary to make your own content calendar as well as some sites you can use to do the same. 

But first, we will begin by understanding the importance of having a social media content calendar in the first place. Knowing its importance will help you commit deeply to working on creating a useful calendar for your marketing needs.

Why use a social media content calendar?

1. Time Saving

Your social media marketing goals demand constant effort and attention. Maintaining a social media calendar will help make some of this workload lighter by letting you plan ahead of time, assigning duties to your team, avoid frenzied last-minute multitasking, and jot down your creative ideas lest they be lost.

It is one of the best ways to make sure you’ll always be prepared with fresh, original content that never disappoints. Even if you need to post multiple times a day, you can just schedule posts ahead of time using one of the calendar tools so that they are automatically posted whenever you want.

2. Consistency

The first tip that every expert on every platform, be it Instagram, YouTube or Facebook, provides is “Be consistent”. And there is no getting around this advice.  

It’s because consistently popping up in your audience’s feed is key to increasing audience engagement. Constantly engaging with your audience increases your reach through the platform’s algorithms. This helps you in being discovered by new people. Building real connections with a growing audience is a sure shot path to raising your conversions.

Marking your social media content calendar with posts ahead of time will allow you to post consistently and with a clear plan and purpose in mind.

3. Reduce risk of mistakes

Planning ahead of time means you can leave room to adjust any mistakes or delays so that they don’t impact your actual workflow. Editing the text, checking the authenticity of information, or checking in with your organizational stakeholders, are all a lot easier when you’re working well in advance.

A social media calendar can help you prevent embarrassment or social crisis by getting rid of the hotchpotch of last-minute scrambling.

4. Get more ambitious

Once you have your daily schedule nailed down, you can start thinking of more bigger projects to embark upon. With your basic plan ready, you can shift from a survival-related mind-set to a growth-related one. You have enough room to research upon new ideas like getting on a new platform, partnering with an influencer or running a social media contest. Really, there are no limits.

If you want to get to the next level, you have to be organized.

5. Don’t miss out on the changes happening around you

Your social media calendar gives you the time and space to observe opportunities relevant to your brand and incorporate them into your strategy.

With your daily schedule all planned out, you would have enough creative as well as logistical flexibility to accommodate some unexpected event into your calendar.

6. Make higher-quality content

Social media is invaluable to businesses nowadays. Gone are the days when social media was a frivolous past-time of a few. Today, social media holds immense marketing potential.

To tap into this potential, big brands hire whole teams of professionals, comprising of copywriters, designers, video editors and photographers to create high-quality productions for social media.

In such a competitive scenario, unplanned and delayed posts are not going to win hearts. A social media calendar will help you allocate whatever resources, human or digital, you have to do their best uses.

7. Tracking your work

When you are able to get work done according to the schedule, you would be able to measure and analyse the results too.

Social media analytics can provide you with a lot of useful insights by the use of which you can improve your performance further. You can schedule experiments, plan out your content and keeping on tracking the performance until you find the right mix of content, format, timings etc.

How to create a social media content calendar?

The following 8 steps will help you create an effective content calendar for various social media platforms:

1.   Auditing your social networks and content

2.   Choosing the relevant social channels

3.   Deciding what needs to be tracked

4.   Creating a content library

5.   Establishing the workflow

6.   Making your posts

7.   Inviting feedback

8.   Publishing

1. Auditing your social networks and content

To know what your content calendar needs to accomplish, you have to know where you stand now. This will help you identify areas for improvement and potential opportunities.

To maximise the returns from investing in a content calendar, you need to do an audit of your current situation.

You will need to collect the latest and accurate data on the following:

·        Impostor accounts and outdated profiles

·        Account security and passwords

·        Goals and KPIs for each branded account

·        Your audience and their demographics

·        Individual responsibilities in a team

·        Your most successful posts, campaigns and tactics

·        Gaps and underwhelming results

·        Opportunities for improvement

·        Key metrics for measuring future success on each platform

Set aside some time to go through all these pointers as well as what social assets you have. This information will help you come up with a relevant strategy as it will be unique to your situation, audience and brand. Without this research in the beginning, any step you take towards creating a calendar would just be a shot in the dark.

2. Choosing the relevant social channels

It is hard to keep pace with the new developments taking place in the world of social media. If you are a marketer, you have to struggle with a variety of questions: Which trends are the next big thing? Which features are cropping up? Which platform is your audience shifting to?

Hence, it is extremely important to take some time to figure out the user demographics on each social media platform and which are the best strategies to target them. You don’t need to panic and jump right into readings of marketing strategies of LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook etc.

Rather you should take some small breaks to read about each platform’s users and what works best for them, observe new developments and try to take in different ideas with a fresh mind.

3. Deciding what needs to be tracked

After all the preliminary research, you need to put the insights gained to use and figure out what functionality you need out of the calendar.

For example, if you are a small hustler on social media, a simple spreadsheet should be enough for you. But say, you are a manager of a team handling a number of different brands. In that case, you will need an advanced structure for your calendar to keep track of who is doing what, when it is to be done, when it is going to be approved, where will it be published etc.

So, you might need to keep track of the following basic details:

·        Platform

·        Date

·        Time

·        Copy

·        Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)

·        Link to assets

·        Link to published post

You can further add more advanced details to enhance the functionality of your calendar:

·        Platform-specific format

·        The vertical or campaign it’s affiliated with

·        Geo-targeting

·        Value

·        Paid or organic? If it is paid, you might want to add the additional budget details.

·        Has it been approved?

·        Has it been posted?

·        Analytics and results

4. Creating a content library

A content library is like your media resource database. It is a digital repository of sorts containing the supply of your visual content.

You can use Dropbox, Google Drive, or a made-to-purpose database software to keep all your digital content at one place.

A social media content library has to have the following features:

·        It should be spacious enough for large files;

·        It should be accessible from both, your phone and computer

·        It should be easily shareable with your team members, but also have some privacy features

·        It should be able to store links to individual files so that you can keep incorporate them into the calendar when needed

The content library should be set up in such a way that you can make do with as little searching around as possible.

5. Establishing the workflow

Once you have gathered all the necessary information, it’s time to start planning out your schedules for different time periods, such as daily, monthly and even yearly.

You will have to answer the following questions to create a strategy:

·        How often you want to post to each channel

·        The best time to post to each channel 

·        What your content ratio will look like

·        Who needs to approve posts

·        How this communication will work

·        How to come up with new content

·        Who will create the new content

Once you are done creating an outline of your social media workflow, consider writing out the procedure in some place where your team members can easily view it. Breaking down the outline into different processes will help everyone to understand their responsibilities and the chain of command.

6. Making your posts

At this point, you need to brainstorm for ideas. Take some time to go through your old resources and start putting together posts that meet your marketing goals.

While working, keep on evaluating the content calendar. If you feel that’s it’s too vague, you might want to add a few details in regards to the posts. If you feel that it’s quite rigid and perhaps a bit too detailed, you might want to take a step back, rethink and leave some space for flexibility’s sake.

7. Invite Feedback

Once you have a basic plan of your social media content calendar, it’s time to share it with your team to get their feedback.

Ask your team members to review the calendar and try to find any gaps that might have snuck in. Things like:

·        Having the requisite passwords to access the various functions

·        Understanding the UTM Parameters

·        How to find, download and upload the highest-quality content

Once all these queries have been addressed, your document for the content calendar should be detailed enough for even a newbie to understand.

8. Publishing

Congratulations!

If you have successfully cleared each and every step, your social media content calendar is ready to be implemented.

When you start publishing consistently, you may discover additional features that your content calendar needs for successfully following through with your brand’s marketing strategy. Maybe, you need a calendar with a scheduling function because manual publishing is too time-consuming.

Whatever it might be, once you start publishing your content, you will discover ways you can further improve upon your content calendar.

 

Social media calendar templates

It may be that you still have doubts as to what a content calendar looks like. In that case, we have two Google Sheets templates for you to take a look at. These are pretty basic templates and are just meant to get you started in the right direction.

1.    Editorial Calendar Template

If you are creating content on a small-scale individually, you can make do with the following Google Sheets template:

 

As you can see, this is a very simple and easy to use template. You can have a separate tab for each month and plan out your editorial content for each month on a weekly basis.

 

2.    Content Calendar Template

If you are working on a slightly larger scale and have a presence across various major social media platforms, you can utilise the following template:

 

This template separates the weekly work into categories for different platforms.

 

Social media Content Calendar Tools

1.   Google Sheets

Google Sheets needs no special mention. The easiest and simplest way of creating a calendar is Google Sheets. It may take a little time to familiarise yourself with different organizational features, if you are absolutely new to spreadsheets, but it is a great way to plan out your calendar.

2.   Trello

Trello is a free and easy-to-use social media calendar tool. While it is a very visually appealing tool with easy features for adding files, links, notes etc., it has a downside when it comes to flexibility.

3.   Hootsuite Planner

Hootsuite Planner has all the functionality of Google Sheets, plus a bit more. You can post directly from the calendar or schedule posts for later. You can use it to engage with your views and track the success of your strategies. You can also get a visual overview of all your digital assets in your content repository by using this tool.

 

We hope this article will help you in your journey to organizing your social media marketing campaigns and turn out the best results!

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