We all know by now that social media is a crucial marketing tool for your brand. With these ever changing platforms, regular posts and appearances on your audience’s feed are important.
You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it here again; consistency is key! Your engagement with your audience relies on a consistent and reliable wave of content and communication. In this fast paced world, inconsistent posting could harm your brand’s recognition and relevance. Trying to think about work, what’s trendy and what’s for dinner can be all too much. Staying consistent and cohesive keeps your brand from getting lost in the clutter.
Let us show how social media content calendars are beneficial for your business.
What is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A good questions with a simple answer:
Social media content calendars help you plan and see an overview of your upcoming social media content. They allow you to map out your time, deadlines, content ideas and links, and juggle your social media presence across the multiple platforms you’re most likely jumping between.
Managing the postings across different platforms effectively can be rough. It’s easy to lose track of when and where you’ve been posting and interacting with your audience. Even brands with the best content marketing strategies can get lost in the whirlwind of social media content. Take a look at our 5 easy steps to create a bulletproof content marketing strategy to make sure your audience sees you for the fabulous brand that you are!
Social media content calendars are simple to build even for the not-so-tech-savvy individual. With simple spreadsheet skills you can build your own or find a free template online. The magic of these calendars lies in what you include in them.
Common details to place into your content calendars include:
- Content topic
- Post title
- Scheduled date of post
- Scheduled time of post
- Platform it will be posted on
- URL links, if any
- Visuals: photos, videos…
What makes your social media content calendar effective?
Effective social media content calendars are more than just a to-do list with dates. If done well, it’ll become a wonderful time-saving tool that’ll help you maintain an unmissable online presence.
Before creating a social media content calendar, it’s important that you complete all the necessary homework on your audience and audit your existing social media content. This ensures that you’re curating your content effectively for your audience.
1. Analysing your current content
Analysing your current posts is the greatest insight into what you should keep or change when creating a content calendar. Audit your current content for popular engagement times and posts, weaknesses and KPIs. Pulling apart your content plans is the best place to begin planning your social media content calendar. Remember to be critical of your content’s success in achieving your specific marketing goals.
Using this insight will help you target your future content and expose your audience’s habits and preferences.
2. Choose your social media platforms
Reflecting and analysing your market research is crucial for understanding your audience. Simply put, there’s no point in creating a social media content plan and calendar if your content won’t reach your audience and appeal to them.
Revisit your target audience’s demographics and reassess your social media platform choices in order to best reach your audience. Understanding their social media habits and daily browsing times will help you plan an effective social media calendar. For example, if you’re selling retirement homes, TikTok might not be your go-to social media destination.
3. What content should you post?
The content that you post has to engage the audience. Creating your content is a balancing act between forming relationships with your audience, and promoting your brand and services. You can’t have too much of either one.
To help you achieve the perfect balance for the content that you post, there are some simple rules to follow.
The 80-20 rule
This rule dictates that 80% of your content should be based around creating a relationship and engagement with your audience. This content should be created to entertain, inform and engage with them. You should be making them aware of your brand and grabbing their attention in a memorable way.
The remaining 20% should be about directly promoting your brand and services. This works to convert leads and promote your offers to your audience.
The social media rule of thirds
As the title suggests, this rule divides your social media presence into thirds.
- One-third of posts should contain personal interactions with your followers
- One-third of posts should contain curated relevant content from your industry
- One-third of posts should contain should promote your own brand
Social media content calendars are a great way to expertly plan out your social media posts. They make sure you’re posting consistently, on the right platforms, and at the right time. Who can say no to that?! With this neat tool in your back pocket, your social media presence will be the talk of the town.
Need help getting started? Contact our team today.
