How to Create a Social Media Calendar

Social media calendars can be a really nifty way of providing much-needed organisation, direction and consistency to a brand’s social media presence. Posting content willy-nilly is absolutely not the way forward if you want to go the distance. 

 

A calendar will have your socials seeing consistent attention, growth and engagement by acting as a day-by-day plan that maps out a schedule of content to publish in the coming months, often with exact times included. 

Before you fling yourself headfirst into creating a calendar, it’s important to stop and consider a few things. Firstly, how often should you be posting? This’ll depend largely on how much content your audience can tolerate, how well your posts have historically performed, and the platforms you’ll be posting on. 

 

Secondly, what time of day specifically should you be posting? You might be able to make some assumptions on this based on the demographic and lifestyle of your audience, but for the sake of certainty you can utilise analytical tools to discover when they’re most active. 

 

Finally, consider the burden of the calendar’s schedule. You can only create so much content before the weight of the task becomes too great and the quality begins to dip. Create your calendar with your own capabilities in mind or outsource your company's social media management to sobananapenguin to save time and stress. 

The heart of your social media calendar is, of course, the content you’re pencilling in. It can be quite tricky to plan huge batches of content in advance, so it’s always handy to develop a small group of post categories that you might assign to different days of the week – think blog posts, conversation starters, quotes, tips, tutorials, promotions, announcements, informative videos… that sort of thing. These will vary depending on your goal, be it raising brand awareness, encouraging sales, increasing follower count or another objective. 

 

Don’t forget to also plan content around key dates like national holidays, major sporting events, festivals, or even wackier goings-on like Star Wars Day (May the Fourth, naturally). Producing content relevant to any of these events can be a great way to have your moment in the sun when they come around. 

The easiest way to put together a social media calendar is to use a trusty spreadsheet. Sounds boring, we know, but you can easily lay out various columns so that you can clearly see what needs to be posted, on which day, at what time. 

 

Then you can stick in the description, any URLs or images, even colour code the whole thing if you’re so inclined. All of a sudden, you’re looking at an impressively detailed masterplan of all the content you’ll be publishing in the future, and you can get to work creating and scheduling it far in advance. 

 

Don’t rely too much on a set-and-forget strategy though – you still need to interact with followers regularly to build relationships, and there’ll always be spontaneous events and trends to jump on that couldn’t possibly be planned for. 

Long-term social media management isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Luckily, it is ours (with milk and two sugars). If you’re looking for a helping hand, get in touch and let’s talk socials.