Step 1. Review Your Current Social Media Strategy
Before you create a social media marketing calendar, you’ll want to make sure you’re content with your current social media strategy. Take a look at your analytics and see if you can gain some insight into how your current posting schedule is working for you. Most social media platforms allow users who create business accounts to access analytics that can give them very valuable insight into what days and times they get the most engagement on their posts. Take this research a step further and hone in on which types of posts are gaining the most traction during your most popular times and days, that way, you can better plan how to format your social media marketing calendar.
Step 2. Decide When and How Much You Want to Post
After reviewing your analytics, you need to decide the following things:
- What channels do I want to continue to post on?
- What days and times do I want to post on each channel?
- What type of content do I want to share in each chosen time slot?
Keep the answers to these questions in mind when planning out your social media marketing calendar. Be consistent here for a while so that way you can see if your strategy is having an impact. You can always change your mind later on. You may realize that after six months of consistent posting on one channel that it’s no longer worth your effort. You could learn that you don’t get much engagement on the weekends and that you want to post the bulk of your content on the weekdays. It will take time to nail down a strategy that works best for you and once you do, you can model your social media calendar around what you know gets the job done.
Step 3. Create Your Social Media Marketing Calendar
You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating your social media marketing calendar. You can do this in a spreadsheet, on a calendar app, or via a social media scheduling app (we'll talk about those more in a minute). Once you choose a format that works for you, you’ll start to plug in your content. You can use placeholders if you aren’t ready to create all of your content just yet.
To start, what matters is knowing when you need to post on each channel. You can plan out a month’s worth of content or a week’s worth—it’s up to you to decide how far ahead you want to plan. Eventually you can add in your caption and the image you plan to post. That way, if you need multiple people to review your planned posts, they can find everything they need in one place.
Step 4. Schedule Your Content
There’s no need to create every social media post live—which can make it really hard to keep on top of a busy posting schedule. Luckily, there are tons of great free apps (or ones you can buy for a reasonable price) that make it possible to schedule out social media content in advance.
All you have to do when using one of these apps is upload your content into the app (a photo or video, caption, and link to where you want to drive traffic) and then choose what platform you need the content to appear on and what time and day you want the post to go live. If you plan to reuse content across multiple channels, you can usually choose to schedule a post to a few different channels at the same time.
This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or an opinion on any issue. It should not be regarded as comprehensive or a substitute for professional advice.