Wondering about how to plan and organize your content on social media platforms? Find out how to create a social media calendar and what are useful tools that help you get started.
Table of content:
- Social Media Content Calendar: A Planned Approach
- How To Create Social Media Calendar
- Social Media Content Calendar Tools
You won’t like to scramble at the last minute regarding the quality of content as well as posting the content over social media. Neither you would like it that your followers’ count will go down or don’t take interest in your brand anymore. That’s where the social media content calendar helps.
Social Media Content Calendar: A Planned Approach
A social media content calendar or you can call it social media editorial calendar is a spreadsheet or app used to plan the following:
- Which social media platforms will be used?
- What content will be shared on each social media platform?
- When will each post be published?
- Social media campaign details including ad copies.
Using social media calendar software, you can also schedule your posts in advance, thereby, making it easier for you to organize and manage social media content from a single platform.
Now, if you’re wondering about how a social media calendar will help, let me tell you it’s interesting benefits that you’ll get using it:
- Managing multiple social media accounts without any chaos.
- Eliminates excuses regarding social media content posting within set deadlines.
- Saves your time by planning your social media outreach.
- Measuring outcomes to figure out the best possible way of improving social media presence.
That’s not it! The more you explore, the more you learn!
How To Create Social Media Calendar
Now, let’s plan on how to create a social media calendar. Just follow the step by step process below:
Step 1. Understand the psychology of your audience
You can’t just publish any type of content on social media. Rather, you should first understand what your audience likes and where they are most interested in. Accordingly, you can plan your awesome content strategy.
Step 2: Decide the type of content or campaign
Plan your social media campaign type of content that you would like to create and publish across all social media channels. For example, it can be a holiday campaign, holiday social post, social media ebook, webinar, blog post, slide share, product launch, or any other content type as per your business need. The content should be such that encourages your audience to engage with your brand.
Step 3: Specify Time Duration
Next, you need to specify the month and days on which you will launch your social media campaign. For example, if it’s October, it is beneficial to plan your Halloween campaign as Halloween is the ultimate holiday season celebrated in the US and Canada with great joy. Similarly, you can also plan how many campaigns you would like to run during a particular month or week.
Step 4: Content Repository
Next, create your content repository that includes all the content that you would like to publish on social media to engage your audience. Your content can be evergreen or it may not be so. If the content you’re promoting is not evergreen, be sure to include an expiration date next to the relevant content.
Step 5: Plan Out Your Content According to Each Social Network
You have your content repository ready and you know which social media campaign you have to run during a particular month or week. Now, it’s time to plan what content should be delivered on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social network.
Identify when your target audience is most likely active on social media. In the morning? In the evening? Or late at night? According to their time zone and preference, you should plan and schedule your content. This way your posts will appear in their newsfeed at the time when they are active and the chances are high that they will engage with your content.
Step 6: Use Social Media Management Tool
Social media management tools will help you plan, manage, schedule, and publish your content in real-time across social media channels. You can perform all of these activities for multiple social profiles at one time.
Social Media Content Calendar Tools
Now, let’s check some useful tools that will help you build an effective social media content plan.
1. Google Drive
Google Drive provides you with Google Sheets and Google Docs that you can use to organize your content. Besides, you can also share the files with your team members with specific user roles and allow them to collaborate in real-time.
2. SproutSocial
This tool is perfect for planning, managing, scheduling, and posting your content on social media. Even you’ll also track your social performance using meaningful insights provided by this tool. Add-ons like Query Builder, Listener Insights, Listener Dashboards, Listening can help you uncover trends and insights from social conversations.
3. Loomly
This tool allows your team to collaborate flawlessly to build a successful brand on social media. You can manage every aspect of your social media communication. From idea inspiration to measuring success, everything will be done in one place.
4. Evernote
Basically, it is a note-taking app. You can use this tool to plan your ideas, keep records, manage projects, deadlines, collaborate with your teams. Popular features include web clipper, multi-device sync, search handwriting, notebooks & tags, document scanning, PDF & document search.
5. Trello
Trello allows you to create boards, lists, and cards and can organize your projects in a flexible way. Work with your team, add comments, attachments, set due dates. And, built-in workflow automation will make your work a lot easier.
6. Hootsuite
This tool allows managing all your social campaigns on one platform. You can easily plan and schedule your content and track your social performance. Manage all your conversations and streams and take advantage of a shared content library. Assign tasks to the team members to boost your response times and efficiency.
7. Agorapulse
Agorapulse will help your content organize on social media. Simply connect your profiles and get scheduling tools, clear and concise reports. Assign tasks to your team members. Collect all incoming posts, comments, tweets, and private messages into your inbox for easy management and team collaboration. And, explore a lot more with this social media management tool.
Time to Organize Your Social Media Calendar
No matter where your audience is and which social media management tool you use, all should start with proper planning. As is rightly said; “People never plan to fail; they just fail to plan.” Hence, make sure you’re not that kind of person.
We hope you liked the blog and got some inspiring tips to plan your social media content calendar. Stay tuned!
