Create a Social Media Calendar and Keep Your Posts in Order
Social media marketing can feel unpredictable and overwhelming, but, like most marketing, it just requires data, strategy and forethought to be effective. Creating a social media calendar is a great first step that will motivate you to plan posts and your boosted content strategy each month, so you’re not left frantically scrambling for daily content at the last minute.
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What Is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar, or a social media content calendar, is a tool you can use to plan out future social posts and reference what’s upcoming. You can identify trends, make notes of new ideas and keep everything in one easy-to-reference place.
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Why You Should Use a Social Media Calendar for Your Business
Using a social media calendar helps you work proactively while simultaneously making your life easier. It requires a lot of forward effort to plan posts a couple of weeks (or even a full month) in advance, but the effort quickly pays off. Once you get used to creating one regularly, you’ll wonder how you ever managed your social media accounts before!
These days, there is pressure to be on every social media network, publish posts each day, and make them all unique to the platform. Still, it’s important to say that everyone’s social media marketing journey is different.
Audit your social media channels with our free social media audit checklist.
Scale-back your ambitions. Start by deciding what social media networks you actually need to be on. This sets you up for success by making sure you’re only focusing on the platforms that are the most important for your business.
Your social media calendar isn’t just busywork, either. Having everything in one place makes it easier to notice trends, make sure you’re accomplishing goals, and are consistently posting.
How to Create a Social Media Calendar and Organize Your Social Media Marketing
A social media calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
Our Oneupweb social media calendar focuses mainly on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, as these are the most important ones for our business. (We left YouTube and Pinterest off our calendar not because we don’t use them, but because they are our secondary networks and require more specialized planning and scheduling.)
All you really need on your calendar is copy and a link that helps drive traffic to your website, but we allocated room to attach a campaign to what you’re sharing, as well as a spot to record plans to utilize stories or boosted content.
Building out your social media calendar is only half the job – you still have to create and post all the great content you thought up in your calendar. Choose the right social media management tool to get started.
Here are some of our favorites:
Get Our Free Social Media Calendar Template
Download our free social media calendar template below:
When the Template isn’t Enough
This social media calendar will quickly make your life easier.
According to Buffer, 73 percent of marketers say that social media marketing is an effective tool for their business. If your social media marketing needs more than a template can give, call us at (231) 922-9977 or contact us to see how our social media marketing expertise can usher your business forward.
