5-Step Social Media Calendar: What, Why, And How

Organizing every aspect of marketing is integral to success. An essential aspect of online marketing is social media marketing (SMM). The social media calendar is a tool for organizing your SMM. It allows marketers to schedule, plan, and refine content. This leads to higher levels of audience engagement.

Everyone connected with online marketing should know about social media calendars: what they are, why they should be used, and how to create them. This article addresses the what, why, and how of social media calendars. At the end of the article, you will have a better idea about posting content aligned with trends, events, and holidays during the calendar year. If you want scaled content creation, consider social media content creation services.

Benefits Of A Social Media Calendar: Why Use It

There are ten main benefits of using a social media calendar. These are:

1. It optimizes marketing: It reduces the time spent on social media marketing. This happens as a result of batching content and planning posts. This leaves more time for follower engagement and answering comments.
2. Keeps content fresh and diverse: Because you have a ready list of past posts, you can easily avoid replications. As a result, your posted content is always new.
3. It helps to promote products: A social media calendar enhances your promotional efficiency. You can align promotions with events/holidays. In addition, your marketing stays on top of trends with a social media calendar.
4. Leads to increased consumer engagement: A social media calendar allows for consistency in your posts across social media. This means followers are more likely to engage and connect with you.
5. Allows measurement of social media performance: A comparison of the social media calendar, month-on-month, lets you assess the relative success of each campaign. This lets you understand the reasons for better/worse performance. It also allows you to assess the performance of future posts. When you track what works, you can improve it.
6. Allows social media platform alignment: A social media calendar allows you to post at the perfect time across platforms. This aligns with cross-platform marketing efforts.
7. Leads to consistency in posting: By planning the posting of content, a social media calendar leads to consistent posting. Also, it leads to a better understanding of what to post and when to post it.
8. It gives you time off: A social media calendar can give you a much-needed breather.
9. Reduces errors: Due to the nature of planning involved in a social media calendar, it ensures that your workflow has a safety net. It reduces both minor and major mistakes.
10. Gives you partnership/sponsorship opportunities: A social media calendar helps you spot partnership opportunities. It allows coordinating organic and paid marketing to make the most of the ad spend.

5-Step Social Media Calendar: How To Do It

Step 1 Planning & Assessment

The first step in creating a social media calendar is assessing your current social media plan. Determine what elements of the current social media plan are working and what elements aren’t. Do a recce of the platforms that will be used.

Check previous posts; what the engagement was like. Examine what made successful posts successful. Plan out the current state of your brand’s online presence and what you want it to be.

Step 2: Personify Your Social Follower

After step 1, make a persona of your ideal social follower. When you know the kind of follower you want, you know the type of content you have to create. To create a follower persona, you need to relate the type of product you sell with the psychographic/demographic of the person who will buy it.

Are you selling Omega watches? Then your follower is probably young, male, upwardly mobile, and (perhaps) watches James Bond films. Are you selling baby products? Then your follower is probably young, female, and has a soft spot for everything cute.

Step 3: Plan The Frequency Of Posting

The ideal frequency of social media posts depends on many things. First, list the platforms that the posts will appear on—next, research data on the frequency and timing of posts that work best for each platform.

Every social media platform rewards different times and frequencies of posting. It may be best to post at 5 pm once a day on platform X, while platform Y may reward posting four times a day. This will also affect how you plan your social media content writing.

Step 4: Make Content Posting Ratios

Some ratios work best with your social media content posting. To appear genuine for Brand A may involve a certain posting ratio, while another ratio may work best for Brand B. One brand may post 90% of the time about its brand and 10% of the time about others. One brand may use 80% of posts for engagement and 20% for promotion.

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Step 5: Create A Maintenance System

For a marketing team, allocating responsibilities to the social media calendar. These include:

• Which team member will update the social media calendar?
• Which team member will alter posts based on trends and feedback?
• Which team member is responsible for posts across which platform?

Extra!: Checklist For Creating A Social Media Calendar

• Customize posts as per platform: Use language, emoticons, and other expressions based on the platform you are posting on
• Use content batching: Take out a day or two to plan and batch-create content for the next month. Don’t spend an hour on it every day.
• Aim high with your posts: Do everything it takes to achieve viral posts.
• Use the cloud for coordinating your social media calendar: Keep the marketing team on the same page with cloud-based systems.

Every successful corporate organization achieves success due to its systems. Social media marketing is no different. A crucial part of achieving success in SMM is using a social media calendar.

Use the above guidelines to create and apply a social media calendar successfully. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Succeed in your social media marketing by planning right with a social media calendar.

A smart option in social media marketing is using social media content services. They are dedicated to providing high-end social media content services at scale. They also apply the above principles to the T, enabling businesses to concentrate on the business aspects they do best.