How to Create a Social Media Calendar for Your Business: Four Easy Steps

You’ve created a strategy to grow your business online. One of the activities you’ve planned is for social media marketing. This may leave you wondering how to plan your postings on social media. You’ve probably read a ton of articles on the type of social media posts that you can use for your business. So, with a strategy in place, you can publish creatively designed posts on social media, but this too has a certain order that you need to follow properly.

Indeed, posting on social media needs planning too. This means you have to create a posting schedule by using a calendar. But, how do you create a social media calendar? In this blog post, we’ll take you through 4 simple steps of creating a social media calendar.

How does a social media calendar look?

A social media calendar provides an overview of upcoming posts you’ve planned to post on a fixed date and time. Ask your social media executive and copywriting team, they’ll have a lot to say about how to create a social media calendar. Don’t have an in-house social media marketing team? We’ll back you up with the best social media marketing group of experts.

The social media calendar is created manually on a spreadsheet, an interactive dashboard, or a digital calendar. If you want to picture a social media calendar, picture an Excel sheet with the days, dates, and timings mentioned in a weekly order in a row.

So, seven days in a row with the time and date, under which the type of social post will be mentioned.

For instance, here’s a sneak peek into a social media calendar we made for a client’s brand.

Other details your social media calendar will have to include:

• The social media accounts you will use to publish specific types of posts. Sometimes, a post you put up on Facebook or Instagram may not be relevant to LinkedIn. Likewise, you will have to create posts unique to LinkedIn that would not play well on more casual social media platforms.
• Elements you will use in your social media posts, from hashtags to links and graphics. Doing this in your social media calendar can help you pre-define which elements get featured when, on which post, and specific social media platform.

Creating a Social Media Calendar for Your Brand

You don’t just randomly start adding a schedule and post type to your calendar. There is a science to this too. Here are four easy steps to create a social media calendar for your brand:

➮ Identify your audience by doing a social media audit

Why are you putting a quote post on Monday and not on Thursday? Why should you post on Sundays on Instagram but not on LinkedIn?

Buffer states that the best days to post on LinkedIn are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Whereas the best days for Instagram are every single day with variations in the post timings. For instance, the e-commerce brand Shopify suggests that you may put a post on Instagram at 5 a.m., 11 a.m., or 1 p.m. on a Monday. You can put a post on the same platform at 9 a.m. on a Saturday.

While these timings are suggestive of what you can do generally, it’s also important to check when your audience is present online. Furthermore, a social media audit can do the following for you:

• • Assess your social media presence, accounts, and interactions.
  • Analyze your social media performance, that is, your metrics including engagement, clicks, and conversions.
  • Help you understand your audience’s habits and interests.
  • Get key insights on how your audience engages with your content.
  • Analyze what your competitors are doing on social media and check their performance.

➮ Decide the social media platforms for your brand

It’s important to target your audience based on their demographics while planning content for your social media pages. Do some market research to identify the social media platforms your audience is actively present. Then match the top content types that best fit your needs, while also considering your budget.

Motivational speakers can use Instagram reels to speak about all things inspiring. The reel content should be relevant to what the audience struggles with daily. On the other hand, the same motivational speaker can publish videos about the TED talks they’ve done, post newsletters, and so on.

➮ Determine what goes on your calendar

While deciding how to create social media calendars, you must also plan what goes into it. So, your social media calendar should include:

• Graphics, links, videos, copies, and captions
• Day, Date, and time of posting
• Social media platforms selected for posting
• Campaign hashtags
• Platform image sizes (Example: Twitter’s differs from Instagram’s platform)
• Color-code the post types
• Geo-targeting
• Post types from product launches, contests, polls, etc.

➮ Get feedback even if it hurts

You may think that the social media calendar you’ve created after days of planning is the perfect calendar ever made. However, it’s important to see it from the perspective of your team and stakeholders. They may also have a good insight into eliminating unnecessary post formats or suggest some additions.

Moreover, you can discuss the relevance of your calendar and why you planned it a certain way. When you have these discussions out loud, it also helps you gain more clarity while fine-tuning the calendar.

Here are a few questions you can ask your team and stakeholders. This can help them give you a productive feedback response. Remember to be open to feedback as the goal is to fuel business growth.

• Does the social media calendar align with the social media strategy?
• Do the post types match the interests of the target audience?
• Are the hashtags relevant, too many or too less?
• Does the phase-wise approach of the quarterly or six-monthly posting schedule match the brand’s marketing goals?

These are just a few questions that can help you gain the right feedback. You can always add more questions to make your discussion specific and relevant.

In conclusion, these 4 easy steps when executed properly can help you confidently create a great social media calendar for your brand.

FAQs

➮ Why should I create a social media calendar?

A plan and strategy that backs your social media presence should also be executed well. Without the proper execution, you stand the chance of losing out on your efforts. Therefore, creating an efficient social media calendar will help you execute your strategy, and in-turn grow your brand’s presence.

➮ Does my business need a social media calendar?

Yes, if your brand is on social media then creating a well-planned social media calendar will benefit you.

➮ Which tools can I use to create a social media calendar?

There are various tools you can use to create a social media calendar. These include:

• HubSpot’s template for Excel (Free)
• Google Drive (Free)
• Loomly (Paid Tool)
• Later (Paid Tool)
• Trello (Free for Individual use, paid plans for adding members)
• Evernote (Free Basic Plan, paid plans for higher packages)
• SproutSocial (Paid Tool)
• Hootsuite (Paid Tool)

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