As traditional marketing is transitioning into digital marketing, creators have to spruce up their content game, and having a social media calendar is a necessity to accomplish that in 2021. In this article, we look into social media calendars and their vitality for content creators. Read ahead to learn more!
In today’s marketing world, social media management entails more than simply publishing on Facebook and Instagram. Your brand’s social media activity must sync with other time-sensitive marketing activities like television commercials, email campaigns, and website updates.
Implementing your social media marketing strategy will go much more smoothly if you have a common location for multiple teams within your business to handle social media material.
Social Media Calendars: What are they, and why should you use them?
A social media content calendar is a working document that helps you plan out what you’ll post on all of your social media platforms for the month, week, day, and even time of day.
It acts as a communication medium for each post’s content (photos and video), copy, hashtags, and tags. It is critical because it helps you to plan and ensure that you are conveying the appropriate message to the audience at the right time.
A well-maintained social media content schedule helps to keep all of your marketing activities on track. Thanks to that, you will strategically implement a plan of action for your whole marketing strategy. It allows you to examine data from social media sites to get a better sense of what is and isn’t working. It helps keep trends in check as well! Here is an article that will help you on that!
Despite the dynamic nature of social media, professional services businesses that want to get the most out of their social media marketing must plan—using a social media content schedule.
Don’t panic if creating a social media schedule appears to be a tough job. You’ll wonder how you managed without it once you have everything in one place.
Why Should You Use a Social Media Calendar?
- Efficient Organisation: The ability to see your social content strategy over time and keeping organised across all social platforms is one of the advantages of adopting a social media content calendar. It assists you in focusing your social media marketing efforts on key opportunities in your sector or organisation. Rather than posting on the fly, a social media schedule gives you plenty of time to fill space with relevant material beneficial to your audience.
The ability to see your social content strategy over time and keep organised across all social platforms is one of the advantages of adopting a social media content calendar. It assists you in focusing your social media marketing efforts on key opportunities in your sector or organisation. Rather than posting on the fly, a social media schedule gives you plenty of time to fill space with relevant material beneficial to your audience.
It is arguably the most compelling reason to keep a calendar of any sort, but especially a content calendar. It is easier to keep track of the material in your feed and when your procedures are well-organised and visible.
- Brings Consistency to your profile: An editorial schedule keeps you on track to create material for campaigns and events significant to you. It guarantees you don’t miss out on crucial material for upcoming events or product releases.
Using a social media content schedule can help you generate a cohesive voice and a constant flow of material that will help you achieve your long-term marketing objectives. Planning out your social media material ensures that your brand tone is consistent and your content is a trustworthy source of information for your industry’s members.
Which blog articles or other material do you have that needs promotion on social media, for example? What’s new in your line of work? These are questions that are all answerable through a social media calendar.
- Brings a Quality of life change to your work:
A content calendar, also known as an editorial calendar, may assist your company in allocating resources most effectively and efficiently possible. The calendar may function as an assignment board for individual team members to know when they are required to share postings or engage with current ones, in addition to monitoring what you will publish and when.
It also makes your life easier when creating posts by searching for the content beforehand. You will make informed decisions and have better insights about the timing of your social posts. You will inevitably be thrown a few curveballs along the way. But with a solid organisational system in place, you will not go into a full panic mode when hunting season is in full swing, and you need to brainstorm a quality Facebook post to promote your brand for this crucial time.
Using a social media calendar to plan, you save time on research for other subjects and posts. There will be no last-minute scrambling since you will know ahead of time what you need to prepare to stay on track. Here is an article that will help you formulate better strategies for your small business!
Now that we know how vital social media calendars are to marketers everywhere. Let us look into how to create a social media calendar for ourselves!
How to create your Social Media Calendar?
Before creating your social media calendar, we must look at the necessary tools to make one for us. There are several tools available to assist you in creating and managing your social media schedule. Let’s look at a couple of them.
- Microsoft Excel: The most often used tool for creating and managing social media calendars in Excel. It’s adaptable, and you can shape it into whatever shape you choose. To better manage your monthly events, divide your calendars into sheets and colour mark them as needed. If you don’t have a Windows PC, there are numerous alternatives available on the internet.
Google Sheets is a viable option. It may be accessed from anywhere in the globe, allowing you to make adjustments to your schedule without having to take your laptop with you.
- Socinator: Socinator is a great platform that allows you to organise tasks and schedule them for going live whenever you need them!
The posts to go live upload themselves when the clock strikes the set time and makes life so much easier for a content creator! Socinator also provides you with statistical reports that are generated automatically at the end of every working day, so no progress slips under your nose.
- Google Calendar: Another excellent tool is Google Calendar, which already comes in the shape of a calendar.
You may also choose from a variety of colours to emphasise various dates. While it may be a beneficial tool to use, especially if your social media schedule is light, it may not be the most practical tool to use if you have numerous accounts to manage or a large number of items to publish.
These tools will either make creating a social media content calendar way easier for you than how it is usually or give you a barebones calendar to work on and design as your own. Regardless of if you already have a calendar or not, giving these tools a try will not hurt you but only help you smoothen your tasks throughout the day.
- Categorise Your Content: If you haven’t already done so while setting your sharing schedule, it’s a good idea to make a list of post kinds that you’d want to publish regularly, especially if you share a lot of various sorts of material.
A social media calendar solidifies posting material relevant to your audience and promotes your brand. Plan material around campaigns and goals before building your calendar.
Your categories can be broad and particular if you need them to be, depending on your business. A book club, for example, may provide free trials, challenges, reading exercises, courses, and even invitations to book club events in the future!
Your categories may include:
- Quotes
- Product promotions
- Events
- Announcements
- Q/A videos
- AMAs
- Assign dates to your categories: Create a second spreadsheet to use as a
working library once you’ve decided on your categories so you can plan and gather the unique material, goods, events, and promotions you want to share.
It’s now up to you to select when (and on what days/times) you’d like to share them. It’s a good idea to colour-code each content category so you can tell them apart on the calendar.
Now that you’ve created your categories, it’s time to select when (and on what days/times) you’d want to share them. AMAs, for example, maybe published Monday through Wednesday, and events every Friday.
- Update your calendar regularly: Make a list of all the stuff you’ll be sharing over the next several weeks/months. We consider putting out updates for all of your categories as far ahead as possible.
- Create your own Social Media Calendar: Coming up with your calendar is not a big deal, especially when you are on good terms with Microsoft Excel or Google sheets. To create your Calendar on Google Sheets, follow the steps below. The same can be applied to Microsoft Excel as they allow the same functionality to their users.
- Go to Google Sheets. Search it on Google or click on www.docs.google.com/spreadsheets.
- Click on the Blank template with a plus (+) sign on it.
- Now that we are ready with a blank Google sheet for our social media calendar. Let us label the first seven columns (A-G) according to the days of the week. Accordingly, column A should be Monday; column B should be Tuesday, and so on.
You may delete columns H-Z as we will not require them anymore for our calendar. Keeping them in doesn’t hurt either but deleting them looks a lot neater!
- Insert another row and merge all the cells in the new row and name it “Month” to signify the month for which we are assigning posts.
- Under each day of the week, mention a platform and leave some space beside and under that cell. Fill in the details later when you update your calendar.
And lo and behold! You have for yourself a brand new social media content calendar to smoothen your life as a content creator! Wasn’t it easy?
Making a social media calendar is easy as it does not require the knowledge and professional skills to create one. Creating a calendar for your social media takes less than 5 minutes to set up and will serve its purpose for time immemorial! You can always make your social media content calendar template for your fellow creators to use! Sharing IS caring, after all! Share your social media calendar ideas with your peers!
Don’t just create, automate everything with Socinator!
How many times have you caught yourself thinking about how easy it would be if your phone posted all your updates on its own? We are sure content creators feel like that every day as they wake up from their sleep and look at the insights they missed out on in their slumber.
We have a solution for that problem, and it’s very convenient! Socinator automates most tasks for your favourite social media platforms and puts you above your competitors. Gone are the days you had to stay up till 3 AM to appeal to the audience on the other side of the world. Automate your tasks and get a full, good night’s sleep, thanks to Socinator!
Socinator automates your Instagram company and gives you much more information than you currently have. You develop when you engage with others who interact with you, according to the algorithms of social media sites.
Several tools are incorporated into social media sites to assist you in getting the most out of your postings. In addition, they want to reach as many people as possible, just like you!
Auto-publishing of posts is one of SociNator‘s functions. It lets you automatically respond to the comments on your page by using a template set by you in the initial process! It aids you in following accounts who have followed you by returning the favour automatically.
Not only that, to help your Instagram account climb the ranks of the deeply feared Instagram algorithm, it will engage with the accounts engaging with you by automatically liking a few of their recent posts.
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Setting up new accounts is not a hassle anymore, thanks to Socinator automatically verifying new accounts registered into its database. Not only that, if you are a power user with several accounts online simultaneously, Socinator lets you operate all of them through its single and intuitive dashboard. And there is so much more in store waiting for you!
Brands have effectively increased their engagement with the aid of SociNator. With Socinator by your side, you’ll be able to produce high-quality content in no time. Content prepared specially for your consumers that they would interact with happily! Reassure your fans with compassionately generic replies and only communicate with them when they require human help! Don’t give the impression that you aren’t paying attention to your audience!
With the aid of Socinator, you can make your audience feel important by responding to their questions quickly and without breaking a sweat! It has resulted in a significant increase in income for the sector! Check out SociNator right now and see how it may help you reach new heights.
