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How to Create a social media Calendar
While the pandemic-infused lockdowns have pushed the world apart, they have brought the online communities much closer. Virtually everyone is now live on social media platforms 24/7. This is why more than ever it’s important to create a social media calendar for the opportunity to virtually connect with audiences and in return, get better results!
In other words, your market is no longer on the streets, or in the corner coffee shops; they are not in malls, stores, parks, or lavish restaurants; they are all online! And as marketers for your online business, it has never been more imperative for your business to infuse the power of social media planning & scheduling to make your timelines engaging for your viewers.
What is a social media calendar?
Social media plays an integral role in an effective inbound marketing strategy. At its most basic level, a social media calendar is a calendar of all your social media posts. By creating and curating a social media content calendar, you’re also creating a central source of truth where you can plan upcoming posts, track what’s been posted, and coordinate your efforts with cross-functional teams.
This type of calendar can be especially helpful if you’re managing multiple social media accounts across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. A Social media Calendar can help you post with a unique voice, manage multiple versions of each post, and decide what to post on each account.
But why do you need a social media calendar?
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Because it can be challenging to create original social content regularly, special events offer a great opportunity to post excellent content and keep social channels active.
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Because these time-sensitive events have a strong sharable effect on social media, and tapping into that can help extend your reach to larger interested audiences.
Tips to create a social media calendar that fits your needs
Social media strategy depends from business to business. But the stepping-stone to having an effective strategy is to have a solid map – which in this case, is your social media calendar. While what to post depends totally on you, here are some must-do things when creating your social media calendar.
1. Identify your Social Media Channels
This is perhaps the first and foremost step that you need to take as the decision-maker of your online business. Start by creating a spreadsheet that lists out all your active social media platforms and then using analytics, determines the demographic of those who interact most with your posts.
Is there a platform that’s less relevant to your audience? Conversely, is there a platform that’s popular with your demographic that you haven’t started to build out yet? Are there forgotten social media accounts for your company that has started gathering dust?
Knowing where your audience is can help you narrow your platforms, which is the first step towards creating platform-specific content strategies—and truly creating content that shines for your audience.
2. Define your Content Plan
Before you begin to fill out your social media calendar, you need to review your current strategy and efforts. Do a thorough review of what platforms and content you use and how effective your content is on each of those platforms.
Knowing what goes up on your platform matters. That’s why you have a calendar! Define your content, based on the platform you are posting on because what works for one, may not necessarily be ideal for another. For example, your Facebook content can be text-heavy, and may not work for Instagram, which is image-heavy. For example, videos, images, links, gifs, etc. that you need and spread it out accordingly across your platforms.
3. Plan your Media Posting
As you’re building out your posts, decide how frequently you’ll post, and how far in advance you want to write your posts. Knowing your cadence will also help you figure out your capacity, and optimize your content creation process.
If you haven’t already, now is also the time to build out your asset library. Do you frequently post images and videos, and if so—where do those images come from? If you have a design team, organizing your posting cadence can help you send requests in advance to avoid overloading them. Alternatively, if you use stock footage, creating an asset library can make it easier to source images and videos.
4. Stay Organized! Prepare an actual Calendar
Unless you have supernatural memory capabilities, you’ll need an actual calendar to keep track of all the dates you gathered. Trust us, the slight effort of entering the dates into a calendar is saving you a lot of time and effort in the long run. Plus, working with an actual calendar has multiple advantages:
- It allows you to make sure that your chosen dates are not too densely centered around the same timeframe. You want your “event” posts to be mixed with your regular social content, not focused all at once.
- It allows you to schedule alerts and reminders and set your mind at ease.
- Seeing the social media calendar in conjunction with your other day-to-day tasks will give you a good idea of how long in advance you need to prepare and work on your posts’ content (we’ll get to that in a minute).
5. Use Scheduling tools to never miss a date
After all this hard work, the last thing you want is to forget a date and miss out on an opportunity to post terrific content. Fortunately, technology is more reliable than our human capacity to remember everything and multitask perfectly. Scheduling tools, like AppuSocial, are the friendly little helpers that publish your posts for you. All you need to do is insert the content in advance and pick the exact time you want your posts to go live.
AppuSocial Social Media Calendar
Here at AppuSocial, we have our own social media calendar which helps you to fully manage all your social accounts at-a-glance. So, if you are already using AppuSocial and have one of our paid plans (Appu, Fanny, and Jumbo), you can now put it to use to manage your social media calendar as well.
You can decide to either create all your updates directly in AppuSocial on the social media calendar or prepare the posts ahead of time separately and add them to the calendar when they are ready.
You’ll then be able to not only have a visual idea of what your coming weeks will look like but will:
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Because it can be challenging to create original social content regularly, special events offer a great opportunity to post excellent content and keep social channels active.
-
Because these time-sensitive events have a strong sharable effect on social media, and tapping into that can help extend your reach to larger interested audiences.
When coming up with updates, I usually find myself adding the posts directly in AppuSocial and planning upcoming weeks using the queue and calendar features. This has been especially helpful when scheduling Holiday posts ahead of time.
Create, Schedule, and Publish Your Social Media Posts Across Platforms
Now that you’ve planned out your content on your calendar, it’s time to research and gather your content, create blog posts, and design images. If you struggle to find the time to execute your social media plan and create the content you need, below are the details, AppuSocial will help.
Manage Content Creation with AppuSocial
Social networks are all similar, yet different when it comes to the photo sizes and the number of characters in the caption section. Each social network displays captions differently and that’s the reason why everyone should be very careful when it comes to curating a new post.
Here’s where the previewing tool come in handy. AppuSocial provides previewing tools for all the changes you make to each post/social account. It’s important to view how your posts will look like once they’re online and if you’re not satisfied, you can simply go back to the creation dashboard and make the desired changes.
Also, it’s important to take a look at the text alignment, especially if you have mixed it with multiple emojis. Is there going to be a new row once your post is shared, or will it be an ugly paragraph one would never even consider reading? We already know how tricky Instagram can be when it comes to writing a proper caption.
Pre-schedule your Posts
Once you have decided which posts you’re going to share on all your social media networks, then what’s left to do is schedule them accordingly and easily manage them to a personalized calendar.
Most social media managers take the time to create wonderful posts and then schedule them. By using a social media post scheduler, you will be able to select the desired mode of scheduling date & time, respectively.
If you want to schedule a lot of different posts at the same time, all you have to do is create a posting schedule by specifying the desired days of the week, time, and the type of post (video, link, GIF, etc.) from a single unified content calendar.
Wrapping Up - Everbody Likes Our Social Media Calendar
Being organized, planning your posts, and tracking what works is the best way to optimize your social media strategy. A social media content calendar can help you curate evergreen content and share high-quality posts on relevant and important dates. Next step: going viral. Sign up for a 14-days free trial today!
