Creating an effective social media calendar is a simple but important step to staying organized and consistent with your social media marketing. A good social media plan should include content ideas, strategies, and regular maintenance of your accounts. By following the steps below, you can easily create a comprehensive social media calendar that will help you stay on track with all of your plans for success.
What is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar is a tool that can help you plan, organize, and execute your social media strategy more efficiently. It allows you to schedule your content in advance, ensuring that you are consistently posting high-quality content that aligns with your brand message. It also enables you to plan for important dates and events, ensuring that your social media efforts are in line with your business goals. By using a social media calendar, you can save time, stay organized, and be more strategic with your social media marketing efforts. Plus, you can track the performance of your content and adjust your strategy accordingly, leading to better engagement and a more effective social media presence overall.
Step-by-step guide on how to create one:
Step 1 – Outline Your Goals: Before you start creating a social media calendar, it’s important to outline the goals that you want to achieve by using the platform. Is the goal to drive more website traffic? Increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Knowing what your goals are will help you come up with content ideas and strategies that will be tailored to achieving those objectives.
Step 2 – Choose The Right Platforms: Not every platform is right for every business or organization, so it’s important to choose the right ones for your specific needs. Consider factors like who your target audience is and which platforms they use most often. Once you have chosen the platforms that fit best, create separate columns in your calendar for each one.
Step 3 – Schedule Content: Now it’s time to fill in your calendar with content! Start by creating evergreen content such as blog posts or videos that can be shared regularly throughout the year. You should also add seasonal or holiday-specific content when appropriate. Finally, try to incorporate user-generated content as much as possible; this type of content is great for boosting engagement on social media.
Step 4 – Monitor Your Results: When it comes to social media marketing, analytics are key! After posting new content, take some time each week or month to monitor how well it performs in terms of likes, shares, comments, etc.. This will give you valuable insight into what types of posts work best with your audience and which ones don’t so that you can adjust accordingly in the future.
Our Favourite Tools to create a Social Media Calendar
1) Trello
With Trello, you can create boards for each platform and use lists and cards to organize your content ideas and schedule. You can also add due dates, labels, and attachments to each card, making it easy to keep track of important details and assets. Trello also offers collaborative features that allow you to work with your team and streamline your workflow. Plus, its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to move cards around and adjust your schedule as needed. Trello is a user-friendly and flexible tool that can help you stay organized and on top of your social media content planning.
2) Social Sprout
With Social Sprout, you can easily create and schedule posts across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. It also offers a built-in content calendar that allows you to visualize your entire social media schedule in one place. Social Sprout also includes powerful analytics tools that enable you to track your social media performance, measure engagement, and identify opportunities for growth.
3) Airtable
With Airtable, you can create a variety of views, including calendar views, to visualize your social media schedule in a way that makes sense for your business. It also allows you to create custom fields and tags, making it easy to track important details and organize your content. Airtable also offers collaborative features that allow you to work with your team and share information in real-time. Additionally, Airtable integrates with a variety of other tools, such as Zapier and Slack, making it easy to automate your workflow and streamline your social media management.
