What Is a Social Media Calendar?

Are you worried about what to post and when to post on social media platforms? A streamlined planning and organized social media strategy is required which is a challenging task for any business owner. Here the social media calendar comes out in picture. It is a detailed plan of your upcoming social media posts, well organized by date and time. It gives you clear idea of what and when you are posting on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Planning content with a social media calendar, you can easily plan daily to-do list and focus your energy on many other aspects of running your business.
In this blog, I will share some important tips to built an effective social media calendar.

How to create an effective social media content calendar?

Creating a social media plan for a whole month might appear tough, but it’s simpler if you follow the correct steps to promote your brand and boost engagement with your audience.

1. Identify your audience

Finding right audience on social media is a crucial task. Figure out who is your audience, look at competitors whom they are targeting. Creating buyer’s persona will help you to find correct segment of your idle customers. This helps to put efforts on right path and saves your time. Create different buyer’s persona for each segment with the help of Semrush or Hubspot.

2. Set your Goals

You need to have a clear plan of what you want to achieve. Is your goal is to get more traffic or brand visibility or more video views or you want more conversions from social media. This helps you to figure out which post can get better engagement, and which can drive more traffic? Having correct goals help to measure performance on better way.

3. Use a template to create social media content calendar

An attractive template is always better than boring spreadsheet. Lots of websites offer Free Social Media Templates to save your time and efforts. It helps to visualize how your monthly content output will look like. A customized template will allow to create content, publish it and even you can measure results.

You can download Free Social Media Calendar Templates form Hootsuite and HubSpot

4. Use different content framework

Each social media platform has different parameters and trends. Facebook has different peak time than Instagram. Choose what type of content you want to post each day. This could include memes, blog posts, images, videos, or carousel. Tailor and schedule your posts as per audience behavior.

The type of content is equally important as you cannot always post to sale. Use 80% of your content as information, entertainment or audience engagement and only 20% content will have intention of conversions, promotions or sales.

5. Select your social media channels

There are 5 billion social media users worldwide and across several platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.
Choose the correct channels and type of content you want to post. Brainstorm with google for content ideas and identify the channels and categories to determine the type of content your will schedule in the content calendar.

6. Social media calendar tools

Social media calendar tools help you streamline your social media planning and improve collaboration within your team. Here are some of the best tools to consider.

• Hootsuite
• Buffer
• Sprout Social
• Later
• Asana
• Google Calendar

Conclusion

A well-planned social media content calendar helps to organize your posts ahead of time, connect you with the right audience on right platform. Start building your content calendar now and watch your social media presence flourish.