Social media is always changing. You might have been able to post on your brand’s Facebook or Twitter pages only once or twice per day a few years back. Today, it is essential to have the ability to create a solid social media strategy, implement it, and monitor its results.

This takes effort and time.

How can you ensure that you don’t lose the larger picture while you post, share, and comment?

We offer this advice to overwhelmed marketing staff and business owners: Create a social media calendar.

You can use a social media calendar to help you stay organized, manage your messages across social media channels, track your performance, and plan a better strategy overall.

Let’s now go over the steps to create your social media calendar.

Review Your Social Media Pages

Even if you have an existing social media presence, the first thing you need to do is a thorough audit.

This is what the action plan for the first step could look like

• Update security settings and passwords for your existing account

• Reporting impostor accounts, and archiving older accounts (or posts).

• Identifying successful content and campaigns in the past 

• Identifying campaigns and content that are not generating enough clicks, likes, or shares.

• New benchmarks and KPIs are established for each account

You can identify opportunities to improve your social media strategy by assessing your current content.

Identify which type of posts you want to share

After you’ve restructured/rehabilitated your strategy, you can now decide what kind of content you want to share frequently.

Are you ready to:

• Use conversation starters to engage your followers
• Blog posts are a great way to share your knowledge.
• Repost content that is related to your brand and advocacy
• Send us your tips and quotations.
• Post engaging multimedia content?
• Promos and Events

You should now have a list of content and posts that you wish to share on your social media channels. It is helpful to be able to assign which posts go on which social media channels. Your most graphic-heavy collaterals should go on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also find a summary of blog posts and conversation starters on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Calculate the Frequency of Each Type Of Post

Once you have a list of content you want to post to your social media accounts, you can now decide how often to share it.

You can now create a draft calendar. You can, for example, plot your quotes or tips every Monday and your blog posts every Wednesday through Friday.

Be sure to coordinate your sale posts with other inbound strategies. If you send out marketing emails that promote a sale at your shop, make sure you also post the same offer on all your social media channels.

You can get a better idea of what your week should look like by creating a social media calendar. This will allow you to fill in the gaps and adjust your days by adding too many posts.

A good content strategy goes beyond getting the right content to the right people. Timing is also important. It is important to find out the best times for posting certain posts, and the best hours to post on each social media platform.

Make the Content of Your Post

Don’t worry, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the content you publish. A social media calendar that is well-organized should include the text you intend to publish with each campaign, even the gist.

This is essential to be able to communicate effectively. Knowing your audience is an important part of a successful social media strategy. You can then create copy that makes sense to them.

When you do this, make sure everything is consistent with your brand voice. Your audience will be able to scroll through past posts and content quickly. Your brand’s consistency in voice and tone shows your reliability and identity.

Additional tip: customize your text according to the network you will be posting it. Some channels allow you to use more characters than others. Cross-posting is a good idea. Make sure to test your content with social media post testers. The three dots signifying a cut-off text could confuse some people and cause a lot of your content to be lost.

Identify the Multimedia Collateral or Link That Goes With Each Post

Next, you need to decide on the content (graphic, video, or blog post) that will accompany each post. You will need to search through your blog for relevant content, locate videos, or ask your design team for graphics.

These can be saved in a folder and linked to your social media calendar. This helps you to stay organized and prevents any miscommunications during the day.

Finish Your Calendar

You now know when and what content you will be posting, so it is time to create your social media calendar.

A well-organized calendar should include the following information: the title, the date and hour, the caption, the link to which it will take you, the social media channel where they will be posted, and the character count.

To make your workflow easier, you could set up a monthly overview as well as a weekly/daily view on the same calendar. 

Final Thoughts

A social media calendar will help you execute your strategy more efficiently. You won’t miss any opportunities or have to abandon important tasks.