Calendars. Most of us use them in one way or another to keep track of our activities and plans. Have you considered using a social media content calendar? There are three primary and very important reasons we suggest using a content calendar:
- Organization -Putting together a social media content calendar will help make sure your posts are varied and scheduled in a well thought-out manner. You do not want to have three sales related posts in a row and then not have any for two weeks. It is significantly more impactful for you to have a sales post, then an informative article or link and then another sales post.
- Optimization -With experience, you can learn how to determine the time of day and day of the week that your social media followers are the most active. By scheduling posts to run at those times, more of your followers are likely to see and interact with your posts. Posting when no one is online is like shouting your message to a conference room at 5:00 am on a Sunday. It may be the best message ever presented but no one will hear it.
- Collaboration -Having a content calendar will allow you to work as a team and not be posting conflicting messages or “stomping” on messages. If your partner posts a photo from an event advertising on-site discounts, you do not want to post an hour later and offer “the boss is away sale” in store. These messages can confuse followers as they do not know where to go for the best offer. Additionally, you do not want to post multiple messages that compete for the attention of your followers. A content calendar will ensure that everyone on your social media content team will know what is being posted and when.
There are many content calendar templates you can download if you want but we have found that often a simple Google doc, Word or Excel document are the easiest to move between different team members. We tell our clients that the best tool to use is the one that works for them.
We suggest your content calendar includes the date and time of the planned post, the text of the post, the image to go with the post and a verified link if applicable. Posts can always be edited, added to or removed completely but by having a calendar with posts planned in advance, you know that you do not have to create or find a post daily when you would rather be spending time on other parts of your business.
We would love to sit down and talk to you about how we prepare and use content calendars to design social media campaigns for our clients and how even a simple calendar can maximize the success of your efforts.