Nowadays, you can’t think even for a day without social media. So, as a business, naturally, you’ll like to cash out of this situation. But when you have too many contents to publish each day, have various social media accounts, and aren’t following a social media content calendar, you’ll face a great hassle. If you don’t want to face this mess and get desired results from your social media posting, please read this blog-” A Definitive Guide on Social Media Content Calendar in Bangladesh.”
What do You Mean by a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar helps you organize the publishing schedule of your social media posts with content names, dates, and times to post on social media. This calendar can also have tags, links, mentions, media, and copies like videos and images. You have the option to use a spreadsheet, digital calendar, or a platform for social media management like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout.
How to Make a Successful Social Media Content Calendar?
If you want to get an answer to your question about how to make a social media content calendar? Just have a look at the following steps:
- Perform an Audit on Social Media.
- Utilize a Template for Social Media Content Calendar.
- Choose Your Content Types for Each Social Media Channel.
- Identify a Posting Schedule for Social Media Calendar.
- Coordinate with Your Team.
- Organize Resources.
- Track, Analyze, and Improve.
Let’s discuss the above steps thoroughly.
1. Perform an Audit on Social Media:
You can’t just dive to create a social media content calendar because before that you need to perform a social media audit of your previous content to assess your present online presence. Take care of the following issues while performing the audit:
- Crucial metrics and KPIs or key performance indicators for every account on every platform to recognize success. The major metrics on which you need to focus are namely: reach, engagement rate, clicks to the site, and reactions (like, share, comments).
- Goals of your brand for every account on every platform.
- The audience you target.
- Best and worst performing campaigns and posts.
- Experimenting and improving opportunities.
- Frequency of publishing.
Gather inherent analytics from sources such as Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics. Find out the analytics that contributes to the best or worst performance of your content. Perform a competitor analysis in your niche during the audit to get a better idea of your content calendar. This analysis will let you find out the gaps.
If you can complete this audit successfully, you’ll able to understand how to organize posts for your social media content calendar, and the content type you’ll develop for the audience. Your objective is to fill every day on your content calendar. If you’re able to figure out what’s going well and the improvement opportunities, you can achieve the goals of your brand.
Recommended reading: A Detailed Guide to Social Media Audit
2. Utilize a Template for Social Media Content Calendar:
Create a template for social media content calendar and keep yourself organized, integrate workflows, track metrics, and improve collaborations. Include the below-mentioned things in your social media content calendar:
- Date and time
- Social media accounts and networks
- Media such as GIFS, videos, images, and the like.
- Social copy consisting of links and hashtags.
- KPIs
- Space for feedback and cooperation notes.
- Key (a color-matched key having labels to keep your content organized.
Take your content calendar to an advanced level with these additions:
- Geo-tag
- UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tracking links
- Links to published posts
- Related campaigns such as the launch of a new product.
- Network-specified formats like feed posts, stories, and short-type videos such as TikTok, reels, and the like.
- Approval status.
- Organic or paid posts (add budget details in case of paid posts).
The above additions give more context, specifically, if you want to further analyze to track performance. For instance, UTM tracking links let you measure traffic from a social platform, the type of traffic (organic or paid, referral), and the particular campaign that drives the traffic.
Use a spreadsheet, or digital calendar for the template or automate the calendar-making with tools like Hootsuite or Spout’s social media calendar.
3. Choose Your Content Types for Each Social Media Channel:
After you’ve performed the audit and developed a template for social media content, it’s time to choose your social media channel and the content type to publish for each channel. Find out that the target audience is most engaged with which social media channel and they can relate to which content type. Study your analytics well while thinking about your ideas for social media posts and find out the categories or themes for the content types to be included in your content calendar.
Measure the pluses and minuses of all social media channels such as audience preference, cost, functionality, and reach while choosing the social media channel. Research the things that performed well for the like business or companies during the past. Consider the analytics to decide which platform to achieve your specified marketing goals. Ensure you choose those social media channels you have already used and are confident enough to utilize or provide the best engagement levels.
Read also: Why Do You Need a Social Media Content Strategy
At this step, take care of the following things:
- Set aside your likings.
- Concentrate on the information or data.
- Match your decision with your available resources. For instance, if you like to run ad campaigns on six social media channels or platforms, but your team has only four people, you won’t be able to manage it.
4. Identify a Posting Schedule for Social Media Calendar:
After you’ve decided what content type you’ll post, you also have to generate a schedule for posting to track the right time for publishing. Select a suitable spot depending on the preference of your audience, as social media moves fast, too little, too late, or too much posting can lead to dropped engagement. Though frequent posting is vital, never prefer quantity to quality. Never share redundant or irrelevant content only to meet the posting quota.
Focus on the patterns, you find through audit and competitor analysis. Take care of the publishing times and dates for all platforms and note down any particular theme. It will let you plan and organize your posts for the highest visibility.
You’ll get various competing data about publishing tempos. Some experts suggest regular posting to remain at the top of your audiences’ minds. While others recommend just posting when you get precious and quality information to drive conversion.
5. Coordinate with Your Team:
If you are not connected to any agency or company, doing your social media marketing, you can manage your social media pages on your own to some extent. The role becomes complex when you have your business or part of an agency or company managing various social marketing campaigns for different social media channels. In such a case, you’ll require a team to handle all these different social media campaigns and know the rules and requirements of the social media calendar. You need to have good coordination with your team and everyone needs to have visibility regarding the below-mentioned things:
- What is being published?
- Who is publishing it?
- Which content needs approval?
The process becomes quite complex when someone is publishing the content remotely or managing multiple projects at a time. Unite all your required team members on the same page, and keep sound coordination between them regarding publishing deadlines, client requirements, and all other rules of each content.
It won’t be intelligent to introduce too many rules all at once. It will be better if you introduce a few rules and enhance your process’s complexity gradually.
6. Organize Resources:
Analyze all the assets and resources you have to ensure their availability at the time of need. Organize all of them in a resource library so that you can easily get them when you need them.
Begin the resource organization by gathering the following elements:
- A cheat sheet of sizes of social media pictures.
- Basic photo assets in different forms such as graphics, vectors, and templates.
- The palette of your brand color.
- Logos in different resolutions and color schemes.
- Brand guidelines
- Storage of primarily published social media graphics and posts.
- Typeface components such as fonts of your brand and fonts that are publicly available to be used as replacements.
- Library of social media reports along with key findings and frequency of posting.
I have only mentioned the starting point here. If you consult any expert social media marketing agency, they will suggest some more elements to include.
7. Track, Analyze, and Improve:
A social media content calendar is not only a planner but also will let you track your content performance on various social media platforms. You can analyze the content performance and later on take effective measures to improve the performance. Consider having an archive of successful posts, so that you can take insights from there for your future posts to make them even better. Again, you can reshare those successful posts when needed in the future.
You might have other teams in your company other than the social media marketing team. Share your content calendar with the other teams and get feedback from them to make your content calendar more effective. You can also ask for suggestions from your stakeholders. The main purpose here is to come up with a complete and effective social media content calendar that matches your company goals.
Involving other teams than only the marketing team will help you come up with unique and fresh ideas to improve your content calendar for social media.
From the above steps, you must have understood how to create social media content calendars.
Benefits of Social Media Content Calendar
A social media content calendar will offer you several benefits. The following are some mentionable ones of them:
1. Saves You time
A social media content calendar gives a complete schedule of content, so you don’t have to spend more time thinking about what to publish, and when to publish. Thus, you can save time especially, when you are dealing with multiple projects on multiple social media platforms.
2. Expands Team Bandwidth
As you have everything pre-scheduled, your team doesn’t need to look for new ideas every day to publish. Thus, you can save bandwidth.
3. Keep a Compatible Posting Schedule
You can keep a compatible posting schedule. There’s no fixed rule that you need to post every day but if you have a schedule, you can post on special events and post frequently to remain in your audience’s mind.
4. Supreme Quality Content
You don’t need to spend more time thinking about what and when to post on various social media channels, you and your content team can spend more time developing supreme-quality content. A social media content calendar lets you focus on quality rather than on quantity.
5. Easier Scalability
You can easily increase your content production level by using a content calendar without disturbing your marketing team. When you know the deadline and what to prepare, you’ll get more time to research and prepare quality content at a faster pace.
6. Better Cross-functional Cooperation
As I have mentioned above, you can share your content calendar with other teams of your company to ask for their opinions to make your content better. This practice will strengthen cross-functional cooperation and build a cooperative environment in your company.
7. Brand Recognition
Maintaining a content calendar lets you focus on quality rather than quantity. As you prepare quality content, your audience and clients will appreciate your brand and they will remember the name of your brand. They can also refer your brand to their known ones. Thus, you’ll get enhanced visitors to your site and it will increase your brand recognition.
Final Words:
You must have become confident to use a social media content calendar to flourish your business after reading my blog-” A Definitive Guide on Social Media Content Calendar in Bangladesh.” If you have further queries check out the FAQ section and need any assistance with social media marketing or more please contact digiSocial.