Most marketers now recognize that a social media strategy is an integral part of most marketing campaigns. With so many social network platforms, it’s crucial to plan for when and what you will share on these platforms. And don’t forget to check out social media management tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite (depending on your usage and budget) so you can upload many posts at once to reduce the administrative burden. But back to social media calendars and why they’re essential.
What is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar is list of your upcoming posts, usually organized by date and time. A social media calendar can be a spreadsheet, digital calendar, or a special template (plenty of these are available free on the internet).
Your social media calendar should usually include the following:
- The date and time a post will go live
- The social media account or network will go live on
- Assets that will be included, such as copy, hashtags, links, and images/photos/graphics
Creating a Social Media Calendar
As with many things, a little planning in advance of actually creating the calendar is very useful. This can include:
- Assess your social media presence, accounts, and engagement to establish what’s working and what’s not by looking at your engagement.
- Using what you learnt in point 1, select your social media channels and the type of content you want to post. You may find your audience prefers short specific questions about your product on Twitter and ‘how to’ posts or longer form articles on other channels.
- Tailor the content of your social media calendar to help meet your business and goals, and obtain your desired results. Your calendar should include the content mentioned earlier but as you gain more experience you could also start to include platform-specific materials including Reels, Stories, TikTok LIVE, polls, shoppable posts, etc
Get Feedback
Share your calendar with your team and stakeholders to get their feedback. As you start to use your calendar, you may find other changes you can make to improve or expand the areas/products/campaigns it covers. Even if something seems to be working, social media changes so fast you need to be abreast of changes, and constantly aware of how your social media is performing to ensure you are getting the most from it.
What We Use
It might be useful to know what Kehorne do…. We use Buffer for posting out to the channels that we find best for our business. We are regularly posting to LinkedIn (the company page), Facebook and Twitter. Using images is also very important and we either use free images from stock (unsplash.com) or buying images from shutterstock.com
A social media calendar is essential to make sure your time spent posting is as efficient as it can be, and should be included as part of your digital strategy. If you are looking for help in creating your digital strategy please get in contact.
