Create a general social media content calendar

Social media content calendar is an essential part of digital marketing. In our day-to-day life calendar is required for maintain daily routine. In that case, social media content calendar is also required to the digital marketing for maintain their regular online activities. Creating a social media calendar for our brand is essentials. A social media content calendar will help to plan out multiple weeks’ worth of high- quality content that will be posting for our social media audience in advance.

Meaning and important of a content calendar

A content calendar is a written schedule of when and where we plan to publish upcoming content. It is also known as an “editorial calendar”. A Content calendar typically includes upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships and updates to existing content.

If we are using content marketing to grow our online business, then staying organized is key. Here are three ways that content calendars help our content marketing strategy.

First: A content calendar ensures that all of our content related tasks are actually happening.

Second: A content calendar makes it easier to collaborate with our team and outside partners.

Third: A content calendar gives us a big picture overview of upcoming staff.

Meaning of a social media content calendar

Social media content calendars are spreadsheets or apps use to schedule social posts in advance. Social media content calendar are the best way to plan and organize upcoming content. It is a simple grid with a few links or a bespoke dashboard that can plan out dozens of feeds. A calendar can be as simple or complex as depend upon the brand needs it to be. A social media content calendar provides the opportunity to schedule our experiment towards improvement.

Benefits of a social media content calendar

Social media content calendar are used to plan when and which content will be shared, manage campaigns, and track deadlines. Find out why you should have one and how to get started. It sounds like a big commitment at first, but you can rest assured it’ll pay that time back in the future. Now, we are discussed about the benefits of a social media content calendar as follows:

· Save time by being organized

Social media marketing goals have a key point in common with many of the other goals in your day planner: they take effort and attention every single day. Maintaining a social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your work, avoid multitasking, and note down all your creative brainwaves for later.

· Post consistently

Consistently showing up in your audience’s feed is the key to engaging them on social. Impressive engagement increases your organic reach via the platform’s algorithm, so your posts get shown to new eyes, and new people start following your brand. Populating your social media content calendar with posts ahead of time allows you to post consistently whether it’s a slow news week, or your biggest promotion of the year.

· Make fewer typos, and also reduce the risk of big mistakes

Planning your posts ahead of time means that you can build failsafe into your workflow. A social media calendar especially one with team member approvals built in is the best way to prevent a low-key embarrassment.

· Get more ambitious with your social strategies

The world’s biggest social media brands are often running multiple campaigns at once — long, medium and short-term, paid and organic. Once you have your schedule nailed down, your glorious brain is freed up to tackle even bigger questions.

· Don’t miss out on relevant moments

A social media calendar allows you to strategically observe worldwide global moments that are relevant to your brand’s audience. Also, with your day-to-day schedule covered, if something topical comes up

· Make higher-quality content

Today, it’s not that unusual for a single social media post to have a whole team of creative behind it: A social media calendar helps us to allocate our assets both human and digital effectively, so that our team has the breathing room to do their best work.

· Track what works, and improve it

Social media analytics have a lot of insights for us. A social media content calendar provides the opportunity to schedule your experiments towards improvement. It finds the right recipe for the type of content, format, post frequency, and best time of day to post for each social platform.

How to create a social media content calendar

There are 8 steps to creating an effective social media calendar:

1. Audit your social networks and content

2. Choose your social channels

3. Decide what your calendar needs to track

4. Make a content library for your assets

5. Establish a workflow

6. Start crafting your posts

7. Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve

8. Start publishing/scheduling

If this is our first time making a calendar for social, we might want to crack open our guide to creating a social media marketing strategy first. Our calendar will be all the better for having clear goals to underpin it.

Audit your social networks and content

An audit is key to fine-tuning your strategy and maximizing your ROI. This will result in precise, up-to-date data on:

· Impostor accounts and outdated profiles

· Account security and passwords

· Goals and KPIs for each branded account, by platform

· Your audience, their demographics and personas

· Who’s accountable for what work on your team

· Your most successful posts, campaigns and tactics

· Gaps, underwhelming results, and opportunities for improvement

Budget some dedicated time to go through all of our social assets. Then rest assured that it will be tackling our refreshed social strategy with the best information.

Choose your social channels

It seems like every social media manager we know got the same Slack message last year. In the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, it takes concerted effort to find the time to stay on top of new developments. Naturally, we here at Hootsuite have compiled the most complete guides possible:

· Instagram marketing strategy

· Facebook marketing strategy

· YouTube marketing strategy

· Twitter marketing strategy

· LinkedIn marketing strategy

· Pinterest marketing strategy

Just take some professional development reading breaks during that post-lunch lull, and you’ll be sparkling with new insights and ideas in no time.

Decide what data your social media content calendar needs to track

As you figure out what this beautiful beast is going to look like, you want to map out the information and functionality this tool is going to provide to you. Maybe you’re starting fresh for, say, your side-hustle doing social for local indie rappers. In which case a simple spreadsheet might do.

So we advise you to start with basic details:

· Platform

· Date

· Time (and time zone)

· Copy

· Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)

· Link to assets

· Link to published post

Also, add more advanced details that you might potentially find helpful. Details like:

· Platform-specific format

· The vertical or campaign its affiliated with (eg. product launch, event, contests, annual giving, general brand awareness, customer service, etc.)

· Geo-targeting

· Value (i.e., is it a short-lived topical post or a big-budget evergreen showpiece?

· Paid or organic? (If paid, then additional budget details might be helpful)

· Has it been approved?

· Has it been posted?

· Analytics and results

Make a content library for your assets

Regardless of what you call it, your supply of visual content should not be living on your iPhone, or in a bunch of desktop folders marked “misc social.” A social media content library has a few key features:

· It’s spacious enough for large files;

· It’s accessible from your phone as well as your computer (trust me on this one);

· It’s easily shareable with team members, but you can trust its privacy features;

· It provides links to individual files so that you can plunk them into your calendar (or perhaps it interfaces with your calendar natively).

The way you set up your content library is almost as important as your social media content calendar. The less searching around for assets that you have to do, the better.

Establish a workflow

Now that you’ve gathered all possible information, it’s time to start sketching in the bones of your daily, weekly and monthly social media cadence.

You’ll want to think about:

· How often you want to post to each channel;

· The best time to post to each channel (based on your analytics);

· What your content ratio will look like (an easy starting point is the rule of thirds, which,

· Who needs to approve posts (e.g., your copy-editor, your legal team, your CEO) and how communication will work there;

· What the process is for brainstorming new content, not to mention assigning and creating it.

Once you have a social media workflow outlined, consider documenting it in an easy-to-access place (say, a separate tab in your social media calendar spreadsheet). The more complex your team, the more helpful it is to break down definitions and processes so that you’re not answering texts from colleagues when you’re supposed to be chomping beignets in the French Quarter, or getting a root canal.

Start crafting your posts

Take some time to go through that old “misc. social” folder and start pulling together some discrete posts. As you work, evaluate how your calendar feels. If it’s onerous and finicky, maybe you want to dial back some of the detail. Or maybe it’s not detailed enough and you need to add a few columns. (Or maybe it’s just… kinda ugly, in which case check out our beautiful free templates, in the next section.)

Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve

It’s time to reveal your work to the world, or at least to your colleagues. Ask them to put it through its paces, and schedule a meeting for everyone to connect on findings. You’ll probably find some gaps.

· Does everyone have the passwords they need?

· Do people understand UTM parameters?

· Do you have an unrepentant hashtag abuser on your team?

· Does everyone know how to find, download and upload the high-res infographic the designer made for the Jan 18th thought leadership piece for LinkedIn? If not, can they figure it out easily?

At the end of this step, you should have an airtight document that even the newest team member can understand.

Start publishing (or scheduling)

As Rafiki says to Simba: it is time. Your social media calendar is up and ready to run. As you start publishing consistently, you may realize that it’s still taking time to sit down and manually publish your posts. This is especially true if you’re working with some high-volume feeds.

Conclusion

In above, we discussed all the things of social media content calendar like as its meaning, importance, usages and create a general social media content calendar. Finally I have concluded that we are using a calendar that also has a scheduling function is our best bet. They are typically built using one of three different formats- printed paper, spreadsheets, or software services. So we should be followed these formats and steps to a create a general social media content calendar.