It's never to late.
With so many different social networks to manage, don’t you wish there was an easier way to plan which content to share on each of your social channels … and when?
If you’re not taking the time to plan your social media content calendar in advance, you could end up scrambling to find content to share, which could be a big problem because sharing quality content across your social networks is one of the most important things you can do to engage your audience and attract new leads.
Reasons to use a Social Media Content Calendar
The most critical thing you can do in your business is take the time to plan out your own social media content calendar. Your calendar allows you to plan and schedule out months of quality social posts ahead of time, and save a ton of time sharing it on social channels. The calendar builds the framework for what you’re going to share, then you can fill in the gaps by manually sharing posts, responding to incoming messages and engaging with your audience. These benefits can be broken down into:
Organisation
Managing multiple social media accounts can turn messy fast. It can also diminish the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts. Knowing what you’ll say and when you’ll say it saves time so you can get other important things done.
Accountability
Calendars are great for setting deadlines. It’s easy to procrastinate when deadlines are flexible (or nonexistent).
Laying out a clear plan eliminates excuses for not knowing what content to publish on your social channels.
Efficiency
Effectiveness
Content first, audience first approach
How to create your calendar
Figure out what content resonates with your audience
Decide on how often to post
Facebook is unique in the marketing world because of its size, as well as how difficult it is to engage. That’s why it’s smart to know what you’re going to post before hand.
- Use videos
- Know what worked in the past
- Keep posts short and sweet
Twitter is still one of the fastest ways your business can communicate with customers. In fact, 34.5% of customers prefer social media as the point of contact (the highest rated method).
- Follow all your Industry Leaders
- Be ready to engage
- Clicks are critical
Known as the “Professional’s Social Network“ there are more than 3 million companies with LinkedIn company pages on the network. Overall there are roughly 238 million users and that number is only expected to grow.
- Know your target seniority level
- Share industry and company events
- Encourage your employees to share posts
Summary
There’s a great chance your post frequency will depend on the amount, experience and authority of your social media partner, so don’t feel like you have to send out less than quality content to meet these guidelines.
Once you have an idea of what kind of content your audience enjoys and how often you need to post, it’s time to create content, email newsletters and links to share.
Whether you use a spreadsheet to plan your content out in advance you’ll still need to supplement these updates with content on the fly with.
- Breaking news
- Quick updates
- Someone in your network shares something interesting
- Got a fascinating comment on one of your updates
Practice makes perfect
It can take even the most socially-savvy companies time to set up an effective content calendar for creating and posting social media content. The idea is to plan far enough ahead and give yourself time to work everything out with your teams so that each post is thought-out and strategically aligned by the time it reaches your audience.
Your elusive creative genius
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius.
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