Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Calendar
Social media posts can be rushed last-minute jobs. “Writer’s block” can be a problem. You might be worried about a lack of engagement, or just need a dose of guidance about what to post and when.
All of these are reasons why you should set up a social media calendar. This can streamline your social media marketing campaign, and give your followers a regular and consistent stream of content, planned in advance, stopping you from scrambling to get content ready to post.
What is a social media calendar?
Quite simply, a social media calendar is a schedule for your social media posts, which may or may not follow seasonal festivals, holidays and other significant dates. It can take many different forms. The example to the left is a very simple design, akin to an instruction list, for a blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Others follow a weekly-themed pattern, something of which you might have seen employed on social media: ‘Monday Motivation’; ‘Tuesday Tip’; ‘Throwback Tuesday’; ‘Follow Friday’, and etc. The posts for each day follow that theme.
When managing multiple accounts or planning into the future, experts often use spreadsheets, to temporarily store their posts. Major social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, now offer their users the ability to schedule posts into the future, ensuring that a regular stream of content reaches their fans.
Key components of a social media calendar
Your social media calendar should be founded on a tried and tested platform, based around two variables (which vary, depending on the application):
- Content that resonates most with your followers, e.g. image, video or certain type of post. Different tools can provide ideas about the most socially shared content on a particular subject (see Feedly, Scoop.it and Buzzsumo).
- Content posted at the most appropriate time of the day, at the most effective time interval (e.g. 2-3 times a week).This article shows the most active times on the major social networks, recommending when you should post.
These variables, you should work out for yourself, testing to see what content and time best works for you, data which can be garnered from social media monitoring tools (e.g. Facebook Insights). For those starting up, who don’t have this information available, it is recommended to experiment with different times, and focus on posting images, links and videos (which have a much higher engagement rate).
Here’s a great FREE to use social media calendar with ready-made example, available to use how you like!
Social media calendar tools
You can use any basic scheduling, spreadsheet or word processor tool for your social media calendar (e.g. Google Calendar, or Google Sheets), but certain free and premium tools offer a more sophisticated or suitable medium, used as a standalone or in combination with other tools. Below, I will list a few of the most popular.
Hootsuite is a free/premium social media management tool, offering the ability to monitor and engage in conversations across multiple social networks, as well as scheduling and tracking social media posts.
Buffer enables you to streamline your social media marketing campaign by posting your content at the optimum times for you, spacing it out at appropriate intervals (automatically, with an optional manual feature). It can be used for multiple social media accounts as well, and offers a free version, as well as premium plans.
Sprout Social is a more business-orientated tool, focused on gaining engagement for your social media posts. It offers a smooth and powerful social media calendar feature. Prices start from $59 per month, with free trials also offered.
Other options include AgoraPulse, SocialBro, Postling and Manageflitter.
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