How to Plan and Organise Your Social Media Calendar?

What is a Social Media Calendar?

A social media calendar, aka content calendar, is a detailed strategic plan for deciding on content, including dates and times. They are usually made monthly to streamline posts for a month, including images, videos, links, tags, mentions, and captions. Most businesses create a calendar in a spreadsheet or a digital calendar.

Why You Need a Social Media Calendar?

From saving the creative team time to maintaining consistency, social media marketing strategy has been truly helpful to brands and businesses. Here are a few reasons why you need social media post ideas in advance.

• More time to focus on creating high-quality posts rather than scrambling at the last moment to decide what to post.

• Maintain consistency while delivering quality work to the audience.

• Helps to meet the deadline before time and align with the campaign requirements.

• Streamline cross-functional collaboration and workflows while showcasing the campaign planning to stakeholders.

• Easy access and repurposing the content.

• Beneficial to track and estimate the performance, helping you to understand what’s working for the brand.

How to Create a Social Media Calendar?

A social media content calendar is more than just a well-organised spreadsheet. It helps align your content goal with the campaign, keeping everyone in the know of the post timeline. Here’s how you can create one.

1. Set objectives and KPIs

Every social media algorithm works differently, and so do the strategies. Set objectives and KPIs for each platform, and create content based on them. It is an effective way to attract desired outcomes from the campaign.

2. Audit current content and channels

Not all of your social accounts and channels are beneficial to your business growth. Auditing your content and channels is a social media marketing strategy that helps determine which to focus on. You can simply follow the Five W’s rule, which includes who, where, what, when, and why, to get the detailed insights of each account.

3. Choose channels and content type

Since not every platform is meant for the same objective, deciding which one to proceed with is a crucial move. Let’s say Instagram. It is fruitful to engage with users and promote your product and service directly. However, LinkedIn is designed for B2B marketing, so you can directly connect with a business's leadership or owners.

4. Decide posting frequency

‘Consistency is the key’ is the most heard thing. There’s no rule for how often you should post, but knowing the best time to post will help in getting more engagement. To schedule your social posts, check whether you have enough content and how many times you can post based on your availability.

5. Build a content template

Creating a content template is one of the significant parts of the content calendar for social media. Create a content pillar that aligns with your business goal and is relevant to your audience. The standard content pillar types include educational, entertaining, informative, UGC, promotional, seasonal, and trendy topics.

6. Fill the calendar

When you have decided on your content pillar, start filling your brand’s social media content calendar. Design copies, creatives, tags, captions, time, date, visuals, content types, and links for the post. In addition, include the call to action to your social media post ideas. You can draft all of that for now to get feedback from your seniors or the creative head.

7. Schedule, preview and approve

Once you have approval of your social media calendar, it’s time to schedule the posts. Ensure to preview the post before scheduling to check it’s error-free, or, if there are any, rectify them beforehand. Finally, schedule the post. This process saves time and eliminates last-minute rushes, protecting you from potential errors.

Conclusion

Knowing what a social media calendar is and creating one is the approach most businesses are now taking to save themselves from creative block and maintain consistency. As a social media marketing agency, our word of wisdom for your content calendar is to align with your audience, stay updated with trends, and focus on quality over quantity.

FAQs

Q1. What does a good social media calendar look like?

An effective social media plan comes up with detailed information about the post that includes date, time, creative, content type, CTAs, and the relevant tags and links.

Q2. How many planned days should a social media content calendar have?

An ideal time for a business's social media posting schedule is either weekly or monthly. However, the usual approach is monthly, which is what we do for our company as well.

Q3. How often should I update or adjust my social media content calendar?

You just update or adjust at least once a month, or when there’s a new trend. This is the best social media marketing strategy for keeping your content relevant to your audience.

Q4. How to create a social media content calendar in MS Excel?

To create a social media posting schedule, head to the new Google sheet and start by creating columns.

• Channel

• Day

• Status

• Time

• Topic

• Copy

• Visual types

• Links

• Content pillar

Once it’s done, you can start filling in the calendar according to your social media planning.