Have You Got a Social Media Content Calendar?

Have You Got a Social Media Content Calendar?More than 50% of Australians log in to social media everyday, and businesses are starting to take advantage of this. Having an active presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and even Twitter can generate new customers, and keep current customers loyal.

Why You Need a Social Media Content Calendar

Being a successful social media marketer involves more than just posting a link to your site once or twice a month. You need to post regularly (at least once per day to Facebook, less for G+ and LI), and your posts need to be interesting, valuable, and varied. You’re objective is to attract attention and build relationships by providing value and being helpful. You wouldn’t walk into a party, introduce yourself and say, “Want to buy my product?” So you don’t do that in social media either.

Sound like a lot of work? Well, it is. But it can be worth it if done correctly. Inbound marketing strategies have proven to be more effective than conventional marketing. If you want to learn more about this, read our earlier post about inbound marketing.

One of the ways you can make social media marketing easier is by creating a social media content calendar.

What is a Social Media Content Calendar?

A social media content calendar helps you organise your business strategy on social media. It’s a place to create content, set dates, assign jobs, and measure the effectiveness of different posts.

A content calendar might look something like this:

Have You Got a Social Media Content Calendar?

Your content calendar can be in a spreadsheet, a Word doc, Google Calendar, or whatever program you feel comfortable with. Ideally, share the content calendar with everyone on your marketing team through Dropbox, Google Drive, or a similar cloud sharing service.

What to Include in a Social Media Content Calendar

What's included in a social media content calendar will vary business to business. Here are a few ideas that will suit most businesses' social media strategies.

  • The day/date.
  • The type of post. For example, Monday's post may be an image, and Tuesday's post may be a link to your latest blog post.
  • Who will be creating/posting/scheduling the post.
  • Which social network is the post designed for, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.
  • How did the post perform. Recording the number of likes, shares, retweets, and comments can be valuable when it comes to planning future posts.

3 Benefits of Having a Social Media Content Calendar

1. Plan in Advance

Planning what you’re going to post and when is incredibly beneficial, and here’s why:

  • You won’t miss important dates. Make sure you take advantage of holidays (like Mothers’ Day, Easter, Christmas, Australia Day, etc.) on social media, whether that’s by promoting a special offer, or just wishing everyone a great day.
  • You won’t skip posts. Posting consistently on social media is very important. A social media content calendar will stop you missing days, or even weeks at a time.
  • You can be strategic about promoting a service or product. For example, instead of posting a link to your new product everyday for one week, plan to a link to the product once per week, and link to a blog post promoting the product once per fortnight. Having a birds-eye-view of your social content can help you execute more complex marketing strategies.

2. Measure the Success of Social Media Posts

There’s no point sharing the same type of post again and again if it isn’t effective. Each post should have a goal, such as clicking through to your website, liking, or sharing. Measure and record the success of each post type, so you can formulate a strategy that gets the best results for your business.

3. Takes the Stress off You or Your Content Writers

Coming up with great post ideas everyday can be overwhelming. A content calendar is a place where you can jot down great ideas when you have them, and use old ideas when you don’t.

Once you’ve locked in your strategy and planned your post types and measured effectiveness, it’s a whole lot easier to plan further topics and promotions.

Get Social Media Help

Don’t have time for social media? No worries. We can take care of that for you. We provide social media content creation, distribution and measurement for several different types of businesses.Call us for a chat on 1300 554 495, or send us a quick email to find out more.

Avatar for Annette Welsford

About Annette Welsford

Hi there. My passion is to inspire and help business owners to create the type of marketing and customer service that makes their business irresistible. I'm privileged to have a talented team at Commonsense Marketing who create and execute beautiful websites, engaging social media campaigns, and fantastic email campaigns that deliver results for our clients. And it's wonderful that many of them have said lots of nice things about the work we’ve done (see our case studies). We love to work with the owners and teams of small to medium sized business who are motivated to become the best in their niche and achieve more than they ever thought possible.