Having a social media calendar helps you keep your strategies aligned with your business goals and also lets teams work in a more organized manner. With a systematic social media calendar, you can take benefits from special occasions and generate higher revenue for your business.
If you are new to social media marketing and calendar, we have you covered. In this article, we will have a look at some smartest tips to create a social media calendar in five easy steps. It will help you outperform your competitors and gain more traction from the users. Whether you are a startup or a small business, these tips will help you streamline the entire process effortlessly.
1. Analyze all social media platforms
The first step you need to take is to step back and analyze which social media platforms are working the best for your brand. Several social media platforms are freely available to use and it’s not important that all will bring results to your brand. That’s why you need to check which platforms are generating the highest returns for your brand.
Once you identify a couple of platforms that are working hard for you, it’s time to change the social media calendar strategy accordingly. You can shift the focus from less performing platforms to these high ROI social media hubs. Most business owners never step back to check the social media performance as per their content calendar. You can evaluate this once a month to ensure the efforts are invested into the right channels.
2. Elements of social media calendar
While creating the social media calendar, it’s important to keep things simple so that all the team members can be on the same page. You need to decide on all the important elements that you will include in the calendar.
You can include elements like date, platform, content document link, link to the landing page, approval, and published link. These are some of the important elements that you can include and even add some extra if you feel that they will make the work more organized. If you want to have a more information-rich content calendar, you can also subdivide these elements and add more sections based on your requirements. These elements will help you in tracking the process in a much better way.
3. Roles and responsibilities
Here comes one important thing that needs to be done right at the very beginning of the social media campaign. Only a single person or two people can not handle all the activities of social media as it will become more time-consuming and tedious. To simplify this, you need to carefully divide the roles and responsibilities for smoother execution.
You can divide the responsibilities like content creation, editing, publishing, social media optimization, and customer interaction to your respective team members. When every team member is clear on their responsibility, the entire execution becomes faster and free from any type of confusion. By distributing the roles earlier, you can then check what are the other tasks that you can automate to help the team members. Automation of social media via social media marketing tools can help you optimize the entire process without dropping the quality of work.
4. Posting frequency
How frequently you publish content plays a major role in online success and you have to crack this thing right. You have to decide how many content pieces you are going to publish on which platform. While finalizing this, always keep the business goals aligned with it.
Having a fixed frequency throughout all the social media channels helps you establish an element of attention among the users. When you keep posting on the fixed time, the followers also get more engaged as they know when the post is coming. Social media is all about quality content and consistency — when you hone these two skills, you can generate higher traction.
5. Scheduling and posting
Now, it’s time to schedule the content and let the audience interact with them. If you are not scheduling the posts in advance, set a reminder to publish them on the due date. It is because, when the posts are getting published as per the schedule, it will help you in accurate engagement calculation.
In the social media calendar, you can also create a separate tab in the same sheet for jotting down all the important metrics for evaluation. Every social media platform will have a different set of engagement metrics and it’s smart to only keep those that matter to your business. Overcomplicating things will make the entire process much slower and tedious.
These were the top five tips to create a compelling social media calendar and organize your processes in a much better way. If you were not leveraging an organized structure to post content, it’s high time to prepare a social media calendar and start improving the overall results.
Author Bio –
With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings – SEO Company India. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.