Social media marketing is an integral tool to boost a business effectively and effortlessly. As nothing is successful without the right organization or planning, managing a social media account is crucial for successful outcomes. Managing a social media account is necessary to keep your account active. It needs to perform multiple tasks like new posts, audience interactions, and others. With a social media content calendar, you can do multiple tasks seamlessly. It ensures the best planning by offering quality content and regular messaging to your viewers. Here is a guide about how to create and manage this calendar.
What is a social media content calendar?
A social media content calendar is a chart of your upcoming posts with dates and times. It can be a digital calendar, spreadsheet, or dashboard. If you have multiple social media accounts across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, this calendar helps you a lot to organize everything flawlessly. Using this calendar, you can manage multiple versions of each post and decide what to post on each account.
A social media content calendar may include the following:
- The time and date your posts go live
- The account or network will go live on
- Materials such as copy, hashtags, links, and graphics are to be included
The benefits of social media content calendar:
1: Keep a consistent posting schedule
Having a centralized social media content calendar means each of your accounts is getting proper care and attention. By visualizing your past posts, you can plan for your next posts ensuring that there is no coverage gap in social media posting.
2: Fix the timing for your posts
It needs a lot of effort and thought to post on social media accounts. Without proper planning, your posts get lost easily in the newsfeed. The result is your audience can not see the wonderful content you have crafted for them. A social media calendar helps you organize all your posts to grab the attention of your audience.
3: Integrated content planning
You can include any image, link to a blog, and share new videos depending on where and what you are posting. A social media content calendar helps you fix posts and arrange these materials to attach to the correct posts.
4: Avoid big mistakes
Mistakes take your impression down among viewers. Each post should be edited and error-free. With a social calendar, you can view all your upcoming posts to prevent mistakes. It ensures that you are using the right links and images.
5: Raise cross-functional visibility
All your employees don’t have access to your social media planning tool. Thus, everyone does not have a genuine sense of what you post and when. Maintaining a social media calendar ensures access to everyone in a team to re-share, like, and enhance your posts.
6: Get started with social media analytics
To improve your social media approach, you need to keep a record of what you did, what worked, and what did not. You have an idea of what posts got the maximum engagement. However, mining through individual Instagram or LinkedIn posts cannot be the right answer to do so. Rather, look for a system to look back on past posts easily.
Tips to create and manage a social media content calendar
With a social media content calendar, you can track processes, report on past post pulse, provide visibility, and support your team. Here is how to create and manage it:
1: Identify your social media channels
It is the first step, although sometimes overlooked. Before you plan for an individual post or channel-specific strategies, consider what platforms you are using. Is your post relevant to your audience? Are you forgetting to maintain a platform that is highly effective for your business to grow? Understanding your audience helps you narrow your platforms. So, before you create content, identify social channels beneficial for you.
2: Audit your social platforms
Creating a social media calendar helps you conduct an audit of all social channels. Here is a list of factors to consider in an audit:
- What are the most thriving posts by channel?
- What posts get the most engagement?
- When your audience is active, mostly?
- How do different posts work?
- Viewers’ demographic across social platforms
Conducting an audit not only measures the skills of your posts, but with the calendar, you can report and track data. So, it helps you to improve constantly.
Decide what you want to track with your social media content calendar
When you know about the channels you need to focus on, build your social media content calendar to ensure a more specific outcome. To take things a step further, use metadata in your calendar to track additional details such as which hashtags you use, which channels you post, the exact time a post will go live, your target audience, and more.
1: Plan your posting pace
Deciding how frequently you need to post is highly crucial. Knowing the posting pace helps you figure out your capacity and optimize your content creation process. If you use supply footage, creating a library can make it easier to source images and videos.
2: Build out an analysis schedule
Take time to think and align on review rhythm with your social team. Check who reviews posts, and when. Know if your posts need any approval from a brand or legal team. A social calendar helps you build processes. It’s also a fantastic way to keep track of all of your content reviews in one central place.
3: Track and report on published content
When you use a social content calendar to track your posts, you have a fundamental source of accuracy for all past posts. Use this as a tool to look back on trends and add social media analytics data to those past posts. How many likes a post gets in the first hour? By tracking and reporting, you can refine your social media campaigns.
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To kick your social media strategy into high gear, you have multiple social media calendar tools. The best social media calendar saves you time, restructures processes, and helps you work smarter and faster.
