Social media is valuable for all businesses, big and small, so it’s no surprise that most businesses are on social media these days.
And for better reach, businesses need to be present on the most popular social media platforms, if not all.
Being active on multiple platforms is a lot of work and requires coordinated efforts from various teams like editorial, design and campaign management. You cannot do this without a plan in place. A social media content calendar is the best way to plan and schedule all your social media content, across various networking sites.
So, what’s a social media content calendar?
What is a Social Media Content Calendar
As the name suggests, it’s a tool that helps you plan content, manage posting schedules and track social media campaigns.
It tells you: What you are going to post, When and Where. You can make it even more comprehensive by including Why you’re posting and How successful your posting is.
Importantly, it makes all this information available at one place for everyone on your marketing team to follow and execute.
This is one tool that everyone should have in their social media toolkit. Still not convinced? Let us give you three most important reasons why you must have a social media calendar.
It Focuses Your Efforts
Sharing quality content is the key to getting noticed on social media. If you do not plan your content in advance, you may end up with last minute, shoddy content that could do more harm than good.
The content calendar gives you a clear idea of what posts are going up on which sites and when. This means no more ad-hoc posting. Also, you can see to it that posts are updated consistently on all your active networking sites, instead of focusing too much on a few at the cost of others.
Further, each networking site requires its own strategy, research and creativity. Planning out your calendar forces you to plan your posts with a purpose instead of posting for the sake of it. Also, scheduling posts in a particular fashion gives your messaging a personality of its own. In the long run this approach will establish your credibility, help you stand out from the crowd and get you more followers.
It Helps Manage Your Work Efficiently
Content calendar allows deliverables to be broken into projects and sub-projects, so that every task can be tracked and maintained efficiently. The structured approach allows everyone involved in the project such as writers, editors, graphic designers, project managers, etc., to work in a more collaborative way instead of in silos. That too without losing sight of timelines or the targets.
In addition to keeping track of what you have to post and when, individual team members can use the deadlines to work backwards and plan out their tasks more efficiently so that the teams are not burdened unnecessarily. A content calendar allows you to plan and set a publish date well in advance, so that everyone gets adequate time to work on their tasks and don’t miss any posting dates.
The calendar also helps you allocate resources in the best and most efficient manner. And if you work with freelancers or have staff working remotely, which is how most people work these days, it is even more handy. You can keep everyone focused on the objectives and timelines.
It’s Easy to Create and Maintain
The best part is – creating a content calendar is pretty simple. You can make it using an Excel sheet or a Google spreadsheet for easy sharing among team members. Just pick and choose from the many free calendar templates available on the internet.
You can have weekly, monthly and quarterly calendars to plan out your content well in advance. Or have a very specific calendar that goes into the details of the day-to-day management of the media campaigns. In our experience a weekly calendar works best, especially if you are posting daily and on multiple platforms.
Once your content calendar is set up, you only need to update it as you go along which shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes a day.
Now that you know the benefits of having a social media content calendar, get your team together and start planning yours, now!