Create a Social Media Content Calendar that Works

More than 4.2 billion people worldwide use social media. With that much people hooked to its appeal, you can turn to social media marketing to elevate your brand.

And when talks of social media success come up, here’s a secret. You need to do one simple task: post consistently.

If you’re a busy-body, don’t fret. A social media content calendar will come to your rescue!

In this post, you’ll learn what it is, its benefits, and more. Importantly, you’ll learn how to create one!

Click here to jump to downloadable infographic.

If you’re like 92% of content marketers, social media is where you distribute content. But no matter how awesome your content is, you’re only likely to make waves if your posts are consistent.

Otherwise, you’ll get lost in a sea of other social media posts. Even if those posts aren’t even half as good as yours, you’re worth forgetting if you’re inconsistent.

This is when you need an editorial calendar or a social media content calendar. It’s a tool that can help you plan your posts on social media.

It will also let you figure out what and how many times you should post ahead of time. If you plan on being active for a period of 6 months, for example, a social media content calendar can help you plan for that 6-month period.

A rock-solid benefit of using a social media calendar is consistency. The calendar will help you create a social media strategy that revolves around a consistent posting schedule.

Creating a consistent posting schedule – then sticking to it – is important. It paints a picture of reliability.

It says that you’re always there. And you’re someone that your followers can count on.

To understand this better, try putting yourself in a potential follower’s shoes. Would you consider following a brand whose last post was from 4 years ago?

No, you wouldn’t. By the looks of it, that brand is inactive. And by the looks of it, you shouldn’t bother if you don’t want to waste your time.

Apart from that, here are more benefits of a social calendar:

Effective use of time. It can take just a day for you to enter your future social content into a calendar. Afterward, you can let the posts come running on their own. You could take a vacation!
Always fresh and evergreen content. The tool records everything you’ve published. So if you want to guarantee your posts aren’t duplicates or old ones, it’s what you should use
Ideal content mix. Posting practically the same thing over and over again says you’re boring. And you’re only reaching out to a certain type of audience if you do this. By planning ahead, you can diversify
Remember important dates. No word from you on Thanksgiving or New Year’s Eve? If you’re always busy, it’s possible to miss out on special dates for posting. But an advance post to be published on the exact date is a solution!

Do you have a team who’s helping you run your social media strategy? And do you want to do them a favor?

Using a social media content calendar is the way to go. It’s a surefire way to give every one of your team members a boost in productivity!

After all, having a social calendar is equal to having a strategy. And having a strategy is a key factor in effective marketing.

If you share your social media content calendar on Google Sheets or on any cloud platform, you’re making way for collaboration to happen. By allowing them to view useful information about content getting published, everyone can be in sync. They can work together with the real-time events for your brand.

This way, they can all be on the same page of your brand’s strategy. Otherwise, they could end up working on a similar agenda. Now, it doesn’t seem to help your brand grow, does it?

For example, your writers are not seeing a similar calendar, and are therefore, not in sync with each other’s efforts. What they might do here is write about practically the same topic!

Because it can benefit you and your team greatly, you should use a social media content calendar immediately. But before anything else, you need to take note of some factors.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on what to do:

Doing so is how you can iron out the strengths and weaknesses of your plan. And it’s how you can maximize your efforts.

Determine where your audience is. The people who follow your social media posts are usually active on one specific platform. Is it Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or someplace else? Find out where that is and focus your efforts there
Understand which platform boosted your growth. Look deeper through your analytics to learn which place works best for you
Understand your growth. Find out which content type works best for you. If a specific campaign boosted your growth, look closely into that, too
Learn about the source of your traffic and engagement. Determine if there is an individual source for your incoming audience activity. Then, determine if your team members are doing something differently for that source

2. Determine the content type you plan to distribute

Doing this helps you carry out your social media content strategy consistently. This also allows you to pay attention to content types that work and ignore the ones that don’t.

Here are the four common types of social media content:

Text. Plain text may be too “dull”. But if it’s ripe with information, it’s going to be a hit!
Images. After all, posts that contain images can engage better. These include infographics and galleries of pictures
Videos. 55% of people tune in to videos every day!
Links. These include links to external content

You can even create a separate video marketing calendar if your target content type is video

3. Set a posting frequency

60% of marketers make (at least) a piece of content every day. While you can do this, too, it doesn’t mean it’s the best course of action. For all you know, presenting content too frequently is not what your audience likes.

With the help of the information you gathered from your social media audit, it should mean that you already have an idea of your audience’s behavior. A tip is to understand them through the network in which they spend most of their time in.

Here are some useful demographics on major social networks:

Once you know how your audience behaves, you need to cater to them in a manner that interests them specifically.

For example, if your audience is on Twitter and they happen to prefer seeing politics-related posts no more than 3x a day. Then, what you do is schedule politics-related Tweets 1-3 times a day!

4. Set your content ratio

This will serve as your content categorization system. It’s a way to monitor the kind of content that your followers enjoy the most.

How you get around to this is up to you. You could categorize your content according to their type. You could also use labels such as “user-generated”, “curated”, and “promotional”.

As mentioned earlier, one of the benefits of a social media content calendar is to let you publish an ideal content mix. And this system will make it possible!

You need to mix up your content types because doing so works wonders. Take it from the successful B2B marketers who get their groove on with an average of 13 marketing tactics

5. Set up your content pool

The idea of simply taking content from someplace whenever you need sounds comforting, doesn’t it? So make it happen by setting up a storage system for your content.

This way, when you’re building your calendar, you can focus on what matters. And that’s on making your social media content calendar as great as possible.

Usually, all you need for this is a spreadsheet. That’s what most social media experts need, too!

As you create your content pool, you need to include the following:

Content type
Title
Expiration date
Media (if any)
Link

Statusbrew's Content Pool is a simplified & collaborative in-app asset repository that helps your team store the high-quality, engaging content in text, image, link or video format to make your campaign management more efficient.

You already have everything you could enter into your calendar. But instead of just filling it up, it’s best to acknowledge the fact that it is unique.

Remember, it’s your social media calendar -- not other people’s. If you simply follow their lead, you could be doomed. After all, what works for others may not work for you.

This doesn’t necessarily mean your social calendar needs to go, though. It just means you have to address its own concerns.

To help you out with this, ask yourself the following questions:

Is your calendar detailed? If so, how detailed should you be?
Are you going to prepare a content pool for each network? Or do you think you can manage to fit them in one system?

Also, think for the long haul and think big. Does every team member get to edit the social media calendar? Or do you prefer to assign specific people editorial roles?

Ironing out who gets to oversee your social media calendar is best. It avoids confusion and it stops someone from overstepping in someone else’s role.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone in this. In fact, 73% of organizations do this!

Now, it’s time to fill up your social media content calendar with posts!

For this, you’ll need to use a tool like Statusbrew. It’s a social media management app that allows you to create a social media calendar.

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

Go to your StatusBrew account and Add Profile. This will let you select a group name and select which social media networks you want your posts to get published.
Compose an entry. An advantage of using Statusbrew is that composing an entry on the tool is like composing an entry on the social network itself.
In this example, I chose Twitter as the network. As you can see, I also need to observe a character limit. That, and I have two other options: Add Media and Add URL/Link.
Choose a schedule by opening the calendar. For this, you can choose to set a date and the specific time when you want your entry to be published.
Click Schedule to complete this process. Your options for this include Send for Approval, Save as Draft, and Send Now.

At this point, it’s inarguable that a social media calendar can up your game. So long as you do your end of the bargain, you can see your social media marketing efforts go above – and possibly, beyond.

And using Statusbrew has your back some more. This is because of the Reports toolbar that comes with promising features relevant to your chosen social network.

Here’s an example. For an account linked to Twitter, these features include the following:

Tag Insights. This is where you can get charts of information related to the tags you’ve used. This includes likes, comments, and clicks
Keyword Reports. Here, you can access charts and other useful information regarding your keyword. You can check out a report about volume and sentiment analysis
Custom Branding. This is where you can receive white labeled reports. You can use this with your brand’s logo and easily share the information with the rest of your team members
Hashtag Insights. This is where you can get charts of information related to the hashtags you have used. This includes average clicks, comments, impressions etc.

It also comes with a List and a Calendar view. These views make it easier for you to manage your social media calendar based on your preferences.

Statusbrew - Social Media Calendar

Found Statusbrew interesting? We'd love to have you try it for your brand or even for your personal use. Just head on to Statusbrew and select the plan of your choice to start a 14-day trial. Reach out to us on Twitter @Statusbrew for an extended trial!

Here's a detailed infographic on how to create a content calendar that works!

Citation Policy: Please feel free to use the infographics in this blog in any commercial or non-commercial capacity. If you use the infographics, we require a reference back to Statusbrew Blog.

Conclusion

Have you wondered why your posts don’t seem to engage your audiences on one network? And yet, they seem to be having a blast on another network even if you posted them at practically the same time? Well, that’s because time can either work for you or against you.

And the solution is to use a social media content calendar. Apart from the above-mentioned benefits, it also helps you make use of the best times to post on social media networks - figure out the best time to post on Instagram , Facebook, Twitter, etc. according to your target audience.