Social media platforms can help build a brand or a page in very little time. But it can be puzzling to manage and maintain the audience traffic regularly. Keeping your audience engaged in your content is a hectic task. The constant pressure on social media content creators/users to create content that can be engaging enough to drive traffic and attract a new audience is hard, but not impossible! Here is where a social media content calendar comes in handy. It can be a fun process to track and keep a constant check on all the social media content in one place.
What Is A Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar can help you visualize all your social media content for the next weeks/months and build an effective content strategy to drive the desired traffic. Plus, it also helps you create content in advance so that you always have something to post at a given time.
The Top 3 Ways To Manage A Calendar
- You can maintain a traditional pen and paper calendar and take care of social media post scheduling manually.
- Use Google sheets or excel spreadsheets.
- Use a social media management tool to save time and energy for scheduling posts in advance.
The traditional method can be messy as there is manual work involved and, making changes on paper every time can be hectic. The other option is to maintain a google sheet or an excel spreadsheet, which is the commonly used content calendar worldwide. It can be time-consuming to make a sheet and feed all the details for every week/month.
These days, most social media users are obsessed with a social media management tool. Computer/mobile operation is less time-consuming and saves energy for other tasks.
Some of the most-used social media management tools are:
- Socinator
- Buffer
- Sprout Social
- Sendible
- Oktopost
- Hootsuite
- MeetEdgar
These tools will help you with:
- Getting a complete report on social media performance.
- Scheduling posts regularly auto-publish them on multiple networks.
- Tracking conversions performed on multiple platforms.
- Measuring ROI for all your activities on social media
- View your scheduled posts anytime and save your precious time. It is easy to use and helps you to have better collaboration with your team.
- Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Quora automation, and much more
Why Exactly Do You Need A Social Media Content Calendar?
With a social media content calendar, you get to plan and schedule your social content in advance. It lets you know what to publish, when to publish, and where to publish.
Here are the brief reasons to use it:
Working smartly:
Scheduling posts and publishing them auto-posting is the latest smart way of content posting. You only need to sit down once and take out some time for your whole week’s plan. Hours will get saved that would have to get wasted every day to plan the same.
Saves time:
Auto-posting saves time and lets you work on other projects and content while the previous posts are all lined up for a scheduled posting on different social media platforms.
Make an impact on different social media platforms:
When you work smartly, you are more likely to get the results in the desired time. It creates an impression on your audience. With the help of social media calendars, you can check out what you have published. It will help you make changes to upcoming uploads if required.
Effective team collaboration:
When you are working with a team, social media calendars become a destination where all have access to work with it. There will be less chance of miscommunication if you use a content calendar smartly.
Now, let us get into the effortless ways to create a calendar to handle all your social media accounts.
6 Effective Steps To Build A Social Media Content Calendar Effortlessly!
Extract information about your social media networks
This is the first step when you think of creating a calendar for social media content. Conduct an audit on your social media posts with the following points-
- The post has been the most prosperous in your channel.
- Most winning posts to date.
- When your target audience is active on their social media?
- Compare evergreen and up-to-date content. Which gains more fame?
- Audience demographic.
Choose a strategy
The next step is to plan a strategy for all your social media handles. It can also eat up a lot of your time, and using a tool can help you to revise and update your marketing strategies through the following-
- Facebook marketing strategies.
- Instagram marketing strategies.
- Linkedin marketing strategies.
- Pinterest marketing strategies.
- Quora marketing strategies.
- YouTube marketing strategies.
- Reddit marketing strategies.
Make sure your content calendar tracks this
Based on your requirements and needs, make sure that the calendar/tool tracks what is going on-
- when the work is approved
- when it gets scheduled
- when it gets posted
- whether the post was successful or not.
Planning is essential
Before scheduling your posts, you need to know how frequently you will post. It is most important to know your content capacity to help in tuning your overall content posting process smoothly and effectively.
Reviews
Another important task is to go through your content review to know the progress and faults. Also, you can use social media calendars to follow reviews in a centralized place.
Track reports
After successfully posting your content using a content calendar, go through the reports of previous posts and get to know-
- How many likes did it acquire in 1 hour?
- How many likes did the posts get?
- How did the audience react to that post?
By doing this, you will get an idea about what worked in your favor and what did not. Then you can plan your strategies accordingly.
Wrapping Up
Social media content calendars can be extremely beneficial for handling your social media content effortlessly and effectively. Apart from using a social media management tool, you can make slight changes to your content, making it more engaging and not allowing your audience to see the same post and get bored.