How To Create an Effective Social Media Calendar for 2024
Everything is digitalized in today’s world, and to keep up with the pace you need to level up your social media experience for your customers. You can use a social media calendar to organize and structure your social media posts.
What Is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar helps you keep your social posts and presence intact. It could be made in a simple spreadsheet or by using different tools. You can map out the order of your content such as which type of content will be posted on which day, then at what time it will be posted or when it will go live on the page.
You can also go for a complex social media calendar where you can add the number of hashtags to be included or any specific link or image to be added. It might seem like a lot to figure out but once you are done with the social media calendar you will feel more organized and have a proper vision and structure for your work.
How To Create A Social Media Calendar
Follow these simple steps to create a social media calendar
Conduct a Social Media Audit
Conducting a social media audit for your company to review and understand the current social media performance is the first step in the social media planning calendar process.
To analyze which kind of content has worked well and which didn’t will help you make informed decisions for ongoing content design. Look for the key performance indicators such as customer engagement, follower count, views and impressions, etc.
Identify Your Target Audience
To have a better positioning of your content, you need to have an understanding of your target audience. In the social media planning calendar process having a target audience will influence a better strategy for content as well as branding.
Customizing your content accordingly to suit the needs and preferences of your customers will help them feel connected with your content, making them feel heard and listened to.
Plan What To Include In The Calendar
Understanding and planning what type of content your audience will love to see on your page is important. Include such content on your page.
Suppose your target audience is teenagers and early adults you can go for video and infographic content. You can also keep a mix of blogs and videos to keep your audience engaged.
Choose The Platform And Posting Frequency
Now that you are all set with your audience and form of content for the next part of the social media planning calendar process, you need to choose the platforms and the number of times you want the post to be up on your pages.
If you are in a B2B business, then your ideal choice would be LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. If you are a B2C business then you can go to Instagram, TikTok, and even Facebook. It can depend on the target audience as well for targeting youngsters you can post on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. To target middle adults and old-generation, people use Facebook as it is the platform mostly used by them.
You may need to figure out and adjust the number of times you will be posting in a week as it varies from one platform to another. For Instagram and TikTok you may need to post daily but for platforms like Linkedin, you can post twice or thrice a week.
Create The Calendar
Make a calendar that will be easy to read and understand just not for you but also for the other employees at your social media agency or business.
Use a spreadsheet or any other tool to create your social media calendar, and keep your format simple with some of the major headings such as date, day, time, type of content, and so on.
Schedule and Publish Post
You are all set and ready with your social media posting calendar. You can use some automated posting tools to ease your work. Analyze your social media calendar well and start posting.
Tools Used For Creating A Calendar
Listed below are some of the easy-to-use tools that will help you create your social media posting calendar.
Spreadsheets or Google Sheet
It is the most convenient tool that allows you to create and format your social media calendar. It offers several features such as color formatting, several filters for screening your content, and helps you organize the calendar.
You can also share it easily among your team and colleagues.
Google Calendar
After reading your social media calendar on Google Sheets you can keep a check on your schedule of posting the content by using Google Calendar.
Even if you forget to put up the post the Google Calendar won’t forget. It will send you a notification alert at the scheduled time and date to remind you about the posting.
You can also share it with your peers for better productivity.
Canva for Creating Content
Canva is an easy content-creating tool. It has a wide range of free and paid templates for various content such as infographics, videos, and so on. It also provides you with several quality images and graphics to use while creating your content.
The designs made in Canva can easily be shared among your colleagues and team for review and modification.
Benefits of Social Media Calendar
Organization
It helps you maintain a structure and keep your work organized, to make sure you don’t miss out on any important date or time of posting your content.
Time-saving
Having a pre-planned and organized social media calendar would save a significant amount of time and avoid the hassle of creating content at the last minute.
Efficient workflow
As you can share the calendar with everyone the whole team will be aware of the plan and there won’t be a gap in your communication. This will lead to a well-managed and efficient workflow.
Post consistently with ease
To maintain a strong online presence among your customers so that they do not forget you among the competition, you need to be consistent and a social media calendar would help you do that easily.
Planning strategic campaigns in advance
It will align your content with your marketing goals by planning and executing strategic
campaigns, you can also track your progress.
Using occasion-based marketing
To connect with your audience in a more personalized manner you can create and schedule the posting based on different occasions or National holidays.
Conclusion
Utilizing these steps and creating a well-structured and planned social media calendar for your social media agency or business will help you stay ahead of the competitive market. Understanding your customers’ needs, wants and preferences is the key to creating a useful calendar as doing market research would help you analyze your target audience and help cater to their needs in an improved and personalized way through your content.
Doing all these by yourself can be overwhelming at times, so if you are looking for the best social media content planner to ease your work, visit our page Eco York to learn more about our customized and affordable services that will help you transform your business. Our services would offer you with just the solution you are looking for.
