Growing your brand online entails endless social media planning. You need to set up and execute strategies to make your network profiles visible, attract as many followers as you can, consistently engage your audience, and then convert your followers into customers.

And it is not enough to build a brand on just one social platform. To achieve maximum reach, you need to create and maintain accounts across all relevant social media platforms. Because that is how popular brands become well-known across the globe.

To be practical, social media managers use up every tool in their arsenal to make their work easier. One very helpful tool they resort to is a social media calendar. We will elaborate on this invaluable aid and explain how to create a social media content calendar. We’ll throw in additional pointers to maximize your content calendar.

What Is a Social Media Calendar?

It is basically a digital organizer for your social media content strategy. With a single look at your content calendar, you can easily see a layout of upcoming media posts and when they will be uploaded to your social profiles.

What program or application you utilize as an organizer is up to you. The commonly used ones are Google Calendar, Google Sheets, or a social media management tool. Choose which form is easier for you and/or your marketing team to operate. Because, in the end, they are meant to ease your daily workload, not complicate it.

The key elements included in a content calendar for social media are the following.

●   Date and time to publish

●   Social media accounts the post will be uploaded to

●   Social copy, a.k.a. Your text

●   Media (photos, videos, audio clips, GIFs, etc.)

●   SEO (hashtags, links, and tagging other accounts)

Use a template that has all these details to have a well-organized calendar. Employing such ensures that you won’t forget anything, even if you are going through a very busy work schedule.

For a more organized calendar, you can also incorporate the micro details that go into each scheduled post. Create content calendar templates to keep these in mind.

●   Network format (Feed post, Story, My Day, Reels, Shorts, etc.)

●   Geotag or location

●   UTM links for tracking analytics

●   The campaign it belongs to (ex. New merch launch)

●   Organic or paid post (add the budget for paid posts)

Audit Your Social Channels

The first step before you can create a content calendar is to audit your social channels and assess your current state. Once you have determined what worked in the past and what flopped, that’s the time you can start planning content that should go into your social media calendar.

The important things you need to look into during your social media audit are as follows:

●   Brand goals – Every social platform has different factors, such as the audience demographic, types of content, and engagement applicable, etc. Because of these variations, you need to define your goals for each network. Once you do, you can determine if you are hitting your goals on every platform.

●   Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics – These indicators measure the engagement and other factors in hard numbers, which can show the amount of your success on a specific platform.

●   Target audience – Review the demographic of the people you want to reach. Does it match the followers you currently have? If not, then you need to change your strategy.

●   Performance of your campaigns – Look at the number of engagements on each post. Based on those, identify which ones performed well and those that did not. Then assess why it is so. Doing this will reveal what type of content should be in your next campaign.

●   Frequency of your posts – How many posts do you upload in a week? Is your audience asking for more? Your current frequency might not be sufficient anymore. As your brand grows more popular, you can increase the number of posts per week to give more instances for interaction with all your followers.

Set Goals

After assessing your social accounts’ performance, the next step is to set new goals for your next campaign strategy. This time, your objectives should aim to reach for more success.

Establish measurable goals such as having at least X amount of followers, getting at least X number of likes and shares, and earning this large amount by the end of the year. Easily attainable numbers won’t challenge you, so set the bar higher. Just make sure you keep it realistic yet high enough to ensure your brand’s growth.

Having a set number of objectives makes it easier to determine if you’ve achieved them or not by the end of the campaign. If the strategy was successful, then continue in that direction.

Define the Best Times to Post

To get the most exposure for your posts, timing is still the key. Aim for the time when your target audience is active on each network.

As we’ve established before, each social platform has its own quirk, and even the best times to post varies on each one. The platform’s characteristics define when and how frequently you should upload content.

For example, your Twitter content calendar can have hourly posts scheduled during a big event. Then, your Facebook calendar can have a short live video uploaded to My Day as the event is happening. On the other hand, your Instagram calendar will have a video summary of the event after it has ended.

On regular days, these are the best times to post, so you can reach as much audience on these social media channels:

PlatformBest Day to PostBest Time to Post
InstagramMonday9:00 AM PST
FacebookMonday & Tuesday10:00 AM PST
TwitterFriday9:00 AM PST
TikTokSunday1:00 PM PST
LinkedInMonday1:00 PM PST

A social media scheduling tool can greatly assist you in keeping posts uploaded on time even if you’re busy working on something else.

Conclusion

Some real talk: managing multiple social media accounts will get hectic and confusing. Imagine, you need to keep track of social media campaigns on different networks. It can certainly leave you frantically scrambling for deadlines.

But by making use of a social media content calendar, you can pull through the tedious task of planning and uploading scheduled posts. With very detailed content planning, your content ideas will have maximum reach, engagement, and success.

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