Social media has become a crucial and indispensable platform for business marketers who aim at increasing their incoming organic traffic through enhanced social media content and infographic posts. However, it’s not easy to manage the social media content; especially when you are a professional dealing with everyday tasks.
When you manage a team of content creators, be it SEO experts or keyword researchers, you need to schedule everything in an organized manner so that no irregularities will arise in the near future. However, creating a proper schedule, which contains in-depth detail of everyday tasks pertaining to social media content, isn’t easy.
This is the reason why social media content calendars have been introduced to the business groups. A content calendar is a shareable calendar, which you can customize according to your own needs and then prepare a complete schedule for a week or a month. This saves a lot of time in remembering the job, gathering the details, understanding what you need to do, and then finally creating the content for the specific social media platform.
- Role of social media content calendar in maintaining a proper business schedule
Social media calendar has proven to be quite helpful for maintaining a proper distribution of the tasks related to social media posts. You can never simply write a text and post it on Facebook or Instagram randomly. Utilizing certain content design strategies which include the use of hashtags, keywords, etc. can fetch you better results.
It is the content calendar that helps a marketer in arranging a proper schedule, which he can share with others, thereby establishing a well-organized schedule for posting on social media.
So, here are the reasons that make the social media content calendar an important business tool!
- You never miss on the crucial dates
- Helps you in posting regularly
- Helps you in creating a balanced blend of interesting contents
- Encourages collaboration with other team members
- Reduces time consumption
- Designing a Well-Organized Social Media Content Calendar
When you are planning a social media content calendar, you must take care of certain elements, which act as the deciding factor for the quality of your schedule. So, here we have presented some of the most important steps which will guide you in creating the best social media content calendar.
1. Conduct a social media audit
A social media audit contains crucial information like the platforms you will be using, which platform will give you more success, whether you should publish continuously on them or not, whether any imposter is holding a social media account on your name, and activities which can get you penalized on a social media platform.
Critical elements of a social media audit include checking the following:
- Social networks on which you have a presence
- Identify the accounts which are truly beneficial for your business
- Check the 'Activities' page to track consistency in posting
- Identify high performing posts (Use social media analytics tools)
- Delegate social media account management to a single person or a team
- Securely store passwords at a single place for easy access
2. Don’t forget about the content audit
In the content audit, a similar type of questions must be answered. For example, questions like is your content relevant with your business, how much time you will be spending in forming a single post (about which your content generation team can enlighten you), what are the similar posts your competitors are posting, are your contents plagiarised, and so on should be answered in the audit.
3. Consider the demographics of the different social media
Numerous social media platforms are there for you to promote your own business. However, before using those social media platforms, you need to consider the demographics that determine which platform is better than others, the rate of success, and other strategic plans.
Following are the benefits 4 major social media platforms can offer to your business:
- Facebook:
This most popular social media network has loads of tools that helps businesses in marketing and gaining in-depth insights into analytics. With innumerable customization features, businesses can easily display contact information, operating hours, and the products and/or services they deal with.
- Instagram:
This number one visual platform floating on photos and videos is best for all businesses dealing with art and aesthetics. Provided you are able to post high-quality images and videos related to your products to attract the attention of your audience, Instagram can be the most profitable platform for your business.
- Twitter:
Those having a business where visuals don't matter and run a blog can use this platform to establish their brand. If your business needs interacting regularly with customers, then Twitter can be a great tool for interacting with them. If you have some WOW content, then go for this platform as it is great for sharing interesting and relevant content and in turn, attract the attention of customers.
- YouTube:
Businesses can utilize this video sharing platform to share artistic, visual, and informative content. Creativity is a driving factor of this platform. If you have interesting videos, which explain your products and services in-depth, then this platform can help you get higher engagement levels.
4. Determine the frequency of your posts
After having a look at the demographics, the next thing, which you need to consider, is the number of times you will be posting on each social media if you are using multiple platforms. You need to be very precise about the frequency of your posts because irregularities of the same will definitely hamper your online reputation. Posting frequently may make the audiences wink at your posts while posting rarely may hardly make your business visible.
The below image clearly depicts the number of times you should ideally post on various social media platforms.
According to me, there is no ideal number of posts you should make per day or per week as it highly depends on each individual business. The number of times marketers should post on various social media platforms varies from business to business. As mentioned before, the social media audit you conduct will throw light on which posting frequency is yielding you higher benefits.
5. Determine the type of content you want to post
Different types of content can be posted on different social media. For example, you will have user-oriented content, promotional content, and also some content for special occasions. Therefore, it is better to decide the content types with which you wish to engage your customers and then move ahead for creating a well-organized social content calendar.
For instance, if I have created a Facebook page for my company that provides quality content, it would be worthy for my business to post content related to how quality content can benefit a website or a blog. It will depict business owners the importance of using only high-quality content and thus, help me gain more projects. This type of content would be referred to as "Promotional Content".
6. Fill out a proper content spreadsheet
In the spreadsheet, you need to look for the things that you want to include in your social media post. Name, introduction, body, and so many other columns are there which you can include in the content.
Creating a calendar schedule might seem to be easy but in reality, a social media calendar needs precision and quality. The calendar is responsible for making work easier and lucrative for every business person who deals with social media.