Your social media marketing plan requires a stellar content strategy. Content is the underlying foundation that will provide a basis to all your digital marketing efforts, and helps engage people with your product or website. As a brand, you will be using multiple channels to increase the coverage of your digital presence. In order to optimise your efforts, it is important to use a social media calendar and keep everything streamlined.
Before we get to the part of how to create a social media calendar, here are some reasons as to why you should have one:
Multiple Channels
In most cases, your digital media presence will not be limited to a few social media channels. Once you are creating content, it is good to repurpose that content and push it through different channels in a planned manner. Repurposing content provides increased visibility and optimises the use of social marketing channels. That way you can use similar content to target your followers on your Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. and maintain track of all trends and changes you have made.
Automation
While you are deploying your social media strategy, you will come across a lot of social media automation software that you can use, such as Hootsuite and Buffer. Automation software helps you time your social media updates well in advance and reduce the real time effort required to post content on different channels. A calendar helps you plan your updates and configure the software as per your marketing needs.
Consistency
When you schedule your social media posts in advance, it helps you create consistency and building trust with your audience. Good social media planners are able to plan their updates upto a year in advance, depending on trend forecasts from previous experience.
Productivity and Time Saving
Having a good plan for your social media posts helps you save time and effort when it is time to post. We want our brand to be visible during trends, and rather than having to wait for “What should I post now?”, having a planned strategy will help you stay productive and save time at the eleventh hour.
Now, how to create an effective social media calendar?
Creating a social media calendar is not very difficult, when you get down to doing it. All you need is to create a simple excel sheet, and draw up a plan with simple questions like “what”, “where”, “when” and “why?”
The “why” helps you understand who you want to target. The “what” is the content that you have created for your target audience. “when” and “where” get specific about which channel to use and at what time.
The simple questions thus are:
- Who is my target audience?
- What is the content that I should posting to address that audience?
- What platforms should I be focussing on in order to reach my audience?
- What is the reason behind sharing this content?
- When should I be sharing it?
Getting down to doing it, here’s how to create your calendar.
- Open a fresh spreadsheet in Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or Numbers.
- Create tabs for each month.
- Add fields for Months, Days, Weeks and Channels.
- Use a consistent colour-coding scheme.
- Repeat copy the completed template into each tab.
- Save the file and start planning.
Grow with Digital. Welcome to the #DigitalTwist.
