A social media content calendar is a tool that you can include in your social media marketing tool set to assist schedule and plan your content on social media in advance. Like a standard calendar, you need to determine the type of material and time when you want to publish your posts. The only difference is that a social calendar is specific to social media. Continue reading to learn everything you require on social media content calendars.
Research shows that 92% of digital marketers utilise social media to share out their content. However, the enormous amounts of material make it difficult for marketers to become prominent in the newsfeeds of your target audience. Since organic reach is continuously declining, we are past the era of using disorganised social media marketing strategies – regardless of the quality of your content.
Do not miss significant dates
A social calendar can assist you to plan ahead of all the important dates on social media and other actual holidays like new years and thanksgiving days. You will not miss a chance to boost your brand while engaging with the audience on these special days.
Have a consistent schedule for posting
One of the best and simplest ways of generating followers on social media is posting on a regular basis. People will not follow you when your last post was at the beginning of the year. A consistent schedule for posting illustrates that your brand is worth the time invested by your target audience to visit your page. Also, it trains your existing followers to wait for and engage with your material regularly. This develops long-lasting relationships that result to purchases.
A social media content calendar can assist you to publish posts regularly across all social media platforms by making sure that content is created and scheduled before. You don’t have to release 25 posts on a single day to cover the days that you didn’t add a post.
Discover a perfect mix of content
People don’t like individuals who always speak about themselves. This case applies to brands too when it comes to social media marketing. Yes, the audience needs to know when you have an item for sale. But they need to see other kinds of content like responses to their questions and interactions, content generated by other users, and posts about various topics in your field of business.
Through research, marketers find out what works best for them. You should divide your content proportionally to engage the audience, to outsource content from other relevant sources, and to generate leads. Most of your content should be interesting and helpful information to your audience and the rest promoting your brand. Scheduling your social media content ahead of time ensures that the content you post contains a fair amount of information from each set. Otherwise, you will end up losing clients with boring promotional messages.
Determine what works the process
Keeping records of the content you have posted simplifies the process of measuring the results. Analyse your posting schedule using analytics to see if you can get a pattern. Maybe the posts you publish on weekends are the ones that perform best. Perhaps your followers on Twitter like short videos while followers on Facebook like long blog posts. Use your findings to analyse and improve until you get a publishing schedule that works best for your brand.
If you have a post that works consistently well, it is advisable to boost it using some marketing dollars to increase its reach.
Post fresh content
A social calendar is not only a tool for planning, but it is also a recording tool for the content you have posted. If you post the same material several times, it will let you know. When creating content, look back to ensure that you are not repeating your posts.
Evade errors on multiple platforms
One of the primary sins of social media content management is publishing the same posts on various social media platforms. You may find yourself asking your followers on Facebook to retweet your post. If you plan, this is not likely to happen.
A social calendar allows you to create unique captions for each platform earlier. You avoid seeming disorganised to your audience.
Allocate resources effectively
A quality post always involves copywriters and editorial team. Planning ensures that you don’t strain yourself and your team members too much, as well as the business resources. You are more likely to publish quality content.
Posts created on the last minute tends to have adverse effects on your business.
Save time
You may be wondering whether creating a social media content will not take time. The answer is no. A social calendar saves time. By scheduling your posts in advance, you save a lot of time that can be used to grow your business.
Encourage collaboration
Sharing your social media on cloud platforms like Dropbox or Google Sheets is an excellent means of cooperation. Sharing your social content calendar shows stakeholders the truth about what you will be sharing and when it will be published. They will be able to divide duties among themselves. If someone is absent, they will not be left wondering what to post.
Creating a social media content calendar
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Audit your social media platforms
You need to analyse your current social media strategies before creating a social media calendar. Determine the platforms that you are already using and the one that works best. It will assist you to know whether you need to continue posting in all of them or there are some that need to be disapproved. Also, determine your posting frequency and the goals of each platform. Adding this information to your social calendar is helpful, mainly if you work as a team.
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Audit your content
Analyse your content to determine whether it is out-of-date. If it is, do you need to update it or get rid of it? Also, learn the material that has performed well in the past and the type of content posted by your competitors and their performance. This information will assist you to generate content that is beneficial to your business.
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Familiarise with the demographics of various platforms
Each social media platform has a specific audience, and these people determine the type of content you publish on each of them.
Publishing content that is specific to each platform and tailored to a particular audience is a crucial part of every social media marketing approach. So, ensure you understand the demographics of each platform before you add content in your social media calendar to make sure all your plans are appropriate.
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Determine your frequency of posting
After doing your social media audit, you will have information on your rate of posting on social media. Will you continue with your existing frequency or do you need to change things?
Your frequency of posting determines the outline of your social media content calendar.
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Determine the ratio of your content
A social calendar should include a system to categorise your content. This will assist you to track the type of material your audience enjoy most. One suggestion is to mark your content as user-generated, curated, or self-promotional. Otherwise, you can label your content depending on the type like announcements, videos, or blog posts.
Ensure that you label your content helpfully and descriptively. Also, determine the amount of each type of material you wish to post to ensure that your calendar is aligned.
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Create a content repository
As its name sounds, a content repository is a storage space for all the content you may need when creating your social media content calendar. It can be a simple spreadsheet that includes the title, type, links, date of expiry, and images (if required) of your content.
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Determine the needs of your calendar
Start with as many details as possible then start reducing them to what you and your team find the most relevant. The most basic needs of your calendar include the social platform, dates (highlight the vital ones), time, links, images (if needed), and copies.
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Fill up content in your calendar
Input excellent content in your calendar! But don’t go at it randomly. Ensure that you have a strategy in place before starting. Determine the person who will have the responsibility of updating the calendar. You and your team need to answer the following questions before you start adding content in your calendar:
- Who will schedule and publish your posts?
- Do you need to give the copywriter a copy of the content?
- Who will source for images?
- Who approves posts before publishing them?
- How far in advance will you plan your posts?
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Request stakeholders to review it
Depending on the size of your business, sharing your social calendar with other people is valuable. They may include clients, project managers, marketers, designers, and content creators.
However, you should ensure that you set the proper permissions for each person you invite. Not all people have access to edit the calendar, for example.
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Schedule your content for posting
It is now time to schedule the content you have created and planned for publishing. You can post on multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard using tools like Hootsuite.
Few businesses in Singapore are more advanced than magazines when it comes to editorial planning on a long-term basis. While the content you are scheduling may be a bit different from that of a conventional magazine, learning how it is created can be of great significance – especially in inspiring your social calendar ideas.
Most editorial calendars for magazines are available online. Here are some of the best:
- Forbes
Forbes’ editorial calendar arranges the theme for each subject and the main pieces of content that each of them will include. The content calendar adds details of the material scheduled for online publishing. The programs that are anticipated to change are marked with a star.
- Entrepreneur
Entrepreneur’s editorial calendar maps out broad topics for upcoming matters and the specific issues that will be included in each of the editions. It has an excellent approach to writing an editorial calendar.
- Condé Nast Traveler
This lifestyle magazine’s editorial calendar has a high-quality overview of various topics and their publishing dates. It includes images to express each subject and can be used by stakeholders as a reference to add their contributions. They can look at the calendar to create appropriate content.
- National Geographic
Their editorial calendar includes the main articles for various topics per month. The calendar also has a part that maps out the four key subjects that the magazine plans to embark on throughout the year and how they will approach them.
- Harper’s Bazaar
This fashion magazine’s calendar has a simple outline. It outlines the key themes in each month without showing details of how to approach each concept.
Most of these calendars are appealing. You should ensure that your social calendar focuses more on function rather than artfulness.
Get the instructions on how to use free calendar templates below:
How do I use an editorial calendar template?
The template is meant for planning online content. It has sections to key in the title of the material, author, topics covered, deadline, and the expected publishing time and date.
Simply fill in the content appropriately. Each week’s content is highlighted using a different colour for perfect visual distinction.
How do I use a social media content calendar template?
The template is meant for planning all your social media posting endeavours. It is sectioned by weeks with various months split into tabs. Then the weeks are divided by the social media platform.
Ensure you don’t miss out the tag for “evergreen content”. It is a repository for content that consistently performs well on social media.
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Trello
Trello is a great app because of its ease of use and flexibility. It allows you to manage your social media calendar and the production process. You can even add innovation ideas in the app.
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Evernote
It is an app for taking notes that offers customizable Social calendar templates. The templates can be utilised to track your posts on social media in different levels of details.
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Hootsuite Planner
If you use Hootsuite, you can track and manage your scheduled social posts using Planner, a graphic calendar accessible on Hootsuite console. You can also craft fresh content using Hootsuite planner.
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Google Drive
An elementary Google Sheet has everything that you need to create a working social media content calendar. It is simple to use and share.
After creating your social media calendar, use the apps and tools to schedule all your posts on social media, engage with your audience, and monitor the performance of your strategies.
A social media audit is the road map your brand follows for success in social media marketing. An audit places every social media metric in one place and allows you to track any change easily over time.
Constantly updating your social media update will keep you aware of what is working and what is not. It will also show you areas where you need to improve. Since social media is one of the most powerful ways small businesses can boost their online profile, we have listed some of the tools digital marketers can use for social media audits.
Sociality.io
Topping the list of social media audit tools for digital marketers is Sociality.io. The software has every feature that a social media management team needs. You will find five core modules inside this platform, including scheduling, engagement, listening, reporting, and competitor analyzing.
The scheduling module involves a space where users can easily create a social media post and send it to approve. The system automates the entire process of social media publishing.
The platform collects every comment, mention, and direct message from your social media account through the engagement module. Teams get access to reply to any conversation and take any action, including liking or hiding comments. The listening module involves the tracking of the keywords by the system around social media and blogs.
You can create a detailed social media report in the reporting module, while the competitor analysis module allows users to compare their social media accounts with their rival’s public data. Sociality.io enables the user to measure and compare their brand performance, schedule reports, and measure content performance at a go.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a comprehensive software allowing users to thoroughly analyze the behavior and users of the social platform Twitter. The software helps you get the most out of your Twitter activity.
Using the tool, you can identify, analyze and optimize relevant data from your account to maximize your brand influence on social media and increase social growth. Followerwonk will help you:
- Gain twitter insights
- Determine trends in the platform
- Expand your reach to broaden your audience
- Increase your follower base
- Forward your business goals
The tool is extremely easy to use and effective. It is designed to assist you in developing a social graph through Twitter. You can also use this tool to analyze the popular hashtags that your competitors use. Moreover, you can analyze which accounts your competitors follow to check their type of following and whether they also follow the active fans or not.
Unmetric
Unmetric is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that most companies use to examine their performance in online marketing. The tool is useful in examining a user’s social media audience and their marketing campaigns to help them grow their businesses.
Unmetric also helps users understand how their peers, partners, and competitors use social media. It allows them to assess the effectiveness of various creative content strategies.
Moreover, Unmetric offers campaign intelligence to help their consumers get complete visibility over their recent organized marketing campaigns. This enables the user to see the number of times their videos have been watched and monitor their hashtags.
This invaluable social media tool will help you understand the entire marketplace. It will give the user a big understanding of their competitive landscape to better inform their strategy. A company can also leverage the tool for new business pitches and any development to help customers stay at the top of their competition and identify any gap that must be addressed.
Critical Mention
Critical Mention is a fast and reliable all-in-one media platform where users can easily analyze search results and turn them into actionable data. The tool consists of search, sharing, and analysis elements. Moreover, it has the ability to monitor outline sources and cover offline media too. This platform allows you to identify mentions from Television, radio, and internet media like websites.
The tool provides real-time monitoring results undergoing analysis, turning into actionable data, and sharing using the platform. With this tool, you can establish several baseline numbers such as the engagement score, click on social accounts, how many followers you have gained, etc. All these come in handy when performing a social media audit.
Critical Mention software gives you access to comprehensive coverage on social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, it gives users a visual coverage on density maps and word clouds, helping them spot the emotional extremes. This tool is extremely invaluable with social media audits.
Curalate
Curalate is a tool that allows you to use social content and audiences to make more sales online. The software connects visual content to your products and services.
It works on every media type and ingests and monetizes images, videos, and 360 content from different platforms. After tagging the contents, Curalate then distributes it. As a result, clients will see images and videos of the business products, raising brand awareness and product discovery.
Using Curalate can help you to fully maximize your business’ potential through brand imaging, videos, and other visual content to help your customers connect the images. The platform facilitates your clients’ journey from the time they discover until they make a purchase.
Many clients these days discover new products on the internet, but they become frustrated after realizing they can’t find the seller. With Curalate, you can fully optimize digital commerce for discovery. The consumers get to discover their next buy and then make payments easily.
The tool is useful in improving a business’s incoming website traffic since customers can connect pictures and videos to the retailer and subsequently buy.
The benefits of Curalate include
- Turning engaging visual content into a more personalized shopping experience
- Driving traffic and revenue to a business
- Allowing customers to see content shown in editorial content
- Discovering social influencers and authentic content
- Turning images and videos into a storefront
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a tool for managing and optimizing social media. Brands need to make social media management a priority, and this platform makes it easier to manage different networks in one place. It can also be a great solution for most brand social managers.
Sprout Social also provides features for social listening and influencer identification. The pricing is sensible, and the user interface is intuitive. The platform also has impressive analytics capabilities, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
You can carry out social media audits by utilizing the platform’s analytics tools to make better and more strategic decisions for your social media platforms.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another popular social media audit tool that offers excellent social media management tools and amazing performance analytics reports. It helps in keeping track and managing different social media network channels. Moreover, it can enable the user to monitor what the audience is saying about his brand and help respond automatically.
The platform also allows the viewing of streams from multiple networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Hootsuite makes it easy for users to get to their platforms without inputting pesky passwords or visiting a website individually.
You can also schedule messages across all the social media networks in advance with Hootsuite. This allows you to create a robust social media strategy encompassing crucial times when most people read posts so you can get more followers to notice your content.
Hootsuite contains a Hootlet plug-in that allows users to easily share their content across the internet to reach more followers. Hootsuite has something for everyone, including free packages for freelance, marketers, and tools for large organizations.
Klear
Klear social media analytics tool deals with social media monitoring, influencer marketing, and competitive analysis. The tool has three essential tools to choose from: Facebook Page Analytics, YouTube Analytics, and Bloggers Analytics.
You can use the platform to check your social networks and determine how you are doing on social influence and engagement, how many fans you have, and how the top content is doing. You can also search your competitors to see how their content is doing.
The campaign reports for Klear are data-driven to help users analyze their capabilities and enhance the strategy by discovering areas that require further growth.
If you want to create an influencer marketing campaign, using Klear might just be the best option for you. The platform has influencer tools for identifying and analyzing influencers that you can use in determining the best influencer for your campaign.
Using Klear also gives you an opportunity to identify and target global influencers and bloggers, which will impact your campaign significantly.
Trendspottr
Trendspottr is a real-time trend intelligence tool that global brands, digital and PR firms, and marketers use. The tool predicts emerging trends, viral content, and main influencers for every topic in real-time. Moreover, it is useful in establishing thought leadership and acquiring customers.
Identifying trends and the directly involved influencers enable a business to identify and engage with relevant influencers. The use of predictive analysis helps it to mine through current events, news, a crisis, among others, so that the user can discover what’s trending, avert crisis and stay in front of the curve.
This tool will be of great help to social media audits as it will help you not to miss out on all that valued field insights.
The key features of this platform include:
- Viewing of the trending content and hashtags from popular topics.
- Viewing what other people post and engaging with Twitter users by sharing content.
- Sharing trending content on the business social network sites in Hootsuite.
Similarweb
Similarweb tool estimates your total amount of traffic compared to what other websites get. Using the site, you can see the traffic sources of your competitors, which are categorized into three groups, namely, referring sites, social traffic, and top search keywords.
Similarweb allows users to analyze different category levels and how traffic gets to them using real user searches and real clicks. With the tool, you can see organic and paid traffic, search traffic by channel, and search traffic by source.
Additionally, you can do competitive research using different filters to filter your results and get a better focus on your query. The available filters include all search channels, branded and non-branded, newly discovered, trending terms, and question queries.
Similarweb is also able to detect the trending keywords that most SEO tools cant catch. Creating a strong SEO strategy requires you to continuously adjust your target keywords according to the recent events and updates to the core algorithm for Google.
Similarweb contains a traffic and engagement page on its website analysis tool to give users a view into other websites’ traffic that they may be interested in. The page includes information on the number of visits, ranking, and engagement.
This competitive research platform is crucial in:
- Gaining an overview of your digital market share.
- Determining how your brand compares to the competitors.
- Understanding how well your brand is performing based on your visitor reach and engagement.
- Discovering emerging trends.
- Gaining insight into the behavior of your audience over a particular period of time.
The main benefit of using this tool is that it will help you analyze and benchmark based on how our competitors are doing, thus, uncovering quality for your brand’s traffic and competitors. It also discloses changes in reach and engagement over time.
Conclusion
Performing a social media audit can help you stay ahead of your online presence while optimizing our social media to be more successful. An audit is a first and critical step to working on your social media strategy.
These tools make it easier for you to get information and statistics to help you make better business decisions. Utilizing these tools to the fullest will lead to high rewards in your business. You should also revise your social media strategy to get the best out of it.
Top brands make huge profits by employing such tools for digging through data and placing hard numbers in their social audits. They understand what works well for them and know how to quantify it meaningfully, and so should you.
