If you own or work for a business that is heavily active on social media (as most should be), I’m sure there is a lot of content being pushed out on multiple social media channels. If you do not currently have a process in place for scheduling and calendaring your content in advance, we’re going to explain the value of doing so and how you can better manage your accounts through this method.

A social media content calendar allows your organization to outline posts that you intend to publish on each channel. It’s essential for plotting campaigns, planning content, and creating a consistent publishing schedule. With a content calendar, you can decide what to publish days, weeks, or months in advance. That means you won’t have to scramble to write or design posts at the last minute.

Set Goals

Whether long-term or short-term, goals are a must to ensure the content you are publishing is effective and has an underlying purpose to help grow the business. Every piece of content you publish should have a projected KPI or focus for what it should accomplish. An example could be a post that you’re trying to drive traffic to your website or promo with. It wouldn’t make sense for you to be worrying about the amount of comments or likes but more directed towards click rate or share rate. Determine the category of leads, sales, engagement when creating the underlying meaning behind that piece of content.

With setting goals you must determine if they are short-term or long-term and set a projected timeframe that is realistic to accomplishing these goals. At the end of each month you want to track your growth, see what posts did well, and work off of that to retarget your strategy for the next month.

Organize Your Content

Having a calendar in place provides an outline for yourself to stay organized and structure your content in a way that resonates with your audience. Doing this can help you clearly prioritize campaigns, categories of content, and peak days/times you’ll want to post.

Some categories you’ll need to decide between:

• Blog Posts
• Product Promos
• Testimonials
• Quotes
• Employee wins or features
• Events

There are others to choose from depending on your industry but these are some of the most common. Once you’ve chosen the categories that make sense with your business, you can organize your calendar (color coding recommended) to space them out accordingly based on campaigns and goals for the month.

Once you’ve structured your content, you can determine the exact dates, captions, tagging opportunities, hyperlinks, images, CTAs, hashtags, and any other details for your workflow. Any overarching themes (weekly, monthly) you can categorize in a separate column on the left to create awareness around it.

We recommend planning your content at least a month in advance. Your short-term goals are just as important as your long-term ones and doing so gives you time to see what worked and was executed as planned and things you may need to adjust for the following months. Planning too far in advance restricts you from making these pivotal decisions.

Creating Your Social Media Calendar

You’ve created your plan, you categorized your content, campaigns, and themes. It’s time to put it all together. You can use a Google Sheet to structure the calendar into days but ultimately, we recommend subscribing to a scheduling software that allows you to add your content into dates, times, and accounts prior to the month to free up the task of posting each and every day.

To plan it out, you can create a mock calendar in a Google sheet that resembles a monthly calendar. You can add your images, captions, and all the workflow details to this cell to see the flow of your monthly setup.

We recommend doing separate calendars for different social media platforms as well as different accounts (if you run them for more than one company.) For example, my CTAs for LinkedIn will be different from how I would caption it on Instagram. Hyperlinks don’t work as well in a caption of Instagram as they do on LinkedIn so it’s important you differentiate them all. Color code the different social media channels if this visually helps you.

Just remember the simple steps to follow:

Build, Design, Manage, and Schedule your content. There are different applications for all these steps that can assist further if your organization needs guidance or lacks expertise in any of these areas.

Track Your Results

Now that you’ve created your calendar, it’s important to follow through and execute. Whether you’ve decided to invest in an application or will do so manually, make sure your team has an action plan and knows the steps to ensure your content publishes when and where it’s needed.

Once your content has been published, go back to your KPIs and track what worked and what didn’t based off your short-term goals. Understand what you were trying to achieve with each piece of content and determine if you had all the details aligned with the post to allow your audience to respond appropriately. You can then make adjustments and repurpose similar content you have planned for the months ahead.

Conclusion

Creating a social media calendar will help you set and accomplish your social media goals. By coordinating campaigns, aligning your content categories appropriately, and planning ahead you can better tailor your content around your growth plans and build a better strategy.

Remember to follow up with the content that is posted, check in on your audience, engage with them as the content is being published, and check the analytics to progress your goals for the months ahead.