It is a well-known saying that “time is money”. In every business organization, it is essential to plan things well in advance for smooth running of business activities. Planning is an important step for success of companies’ managerial activities. Many times, main reasons for the failure of management are lack of punctuality, companies do not function their activities at the right time and late implementation of certain tasks. To eliminate all the inconveniences, one should make proper timetable to all the tasks they need to implement. Specifically, many digital marketing firms, use social media calendar for pre-planning of their social media functions and posts.
What is a social media calendar?
A social media calendar is an outline of your forthcoming social media posts. It can be arranged in the formation of a spreadsheet, Excel sheet, Google calendar or interactive dashboard (if you’re using a social media management tool).
A social media calendar usually comprises mixture of these components for each post:
The dates and time when it will be posted.
Creative assets such as text on graphic, pictures, videos, graphics, captions etc. which are required.
Hashtags and links to be included.
The social media and accounts where it will be published.
Uses of social media content calendar:
1) Improve accuracies and consistency:
One of the most important rules of social media calendar is to post on a consistent schedule. It doesn’t matter how often do you post but you should post on an accurate dates and time. Sticking to a systematic schedule is important so your followers know what to expect.
Scheduling posts in advance allows you to stick to your posting schedule while also ensuring you have quality content queued up and ready to go.
2) Organized and saves time:
Social media content creation and posting take time and consciousness every single day. A social media calendar lets one plan in advance, curate your work, evade multitasking, and make notes of all your content ideas for later.
Social media planning calendar tools even allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time to post automatically, so you can share content every day without logging into all your social platforms every hour on the hour.
Certain type of posts like Reels are yet not available in Scheduler tools. But they will soon be available, keep following us to know more about such updates and tools.
3) Schedule content for important holidays and events:
Planning your content based on holidays and important days are essential in social media networking. Digital marketing associates try not avoiding single important day to encash the trend.
We have created a list of festivals and special days, so our clients & participants don’t miss an opportunity to not be able to be visible at the right time.
You can know more about the Indian Social Media Calendar 2022 (click here)
4) Premium quality content and cohesive campaigns:
Social media management budget has skyrocketed in recent years. Nowadays, it is not abnormal for a single social media post to have a whole creative team working behind it. The people behind it may include social media managers, content writers, content creators, graphic designers, social media influencers etc.
Dropping everything for an unplanned emergency Instagram Reel is not going to win hearts or minds. And it’s not going to end-up in your excellent possible content or a cohesive account. A social media calendar comforts you to delegate your resources both human and digital effectively, so that your team has the breathing room to do their best work.
A long-term plan will allow you to adapt a consistent brand visibility and new content that achieves your social media marketing goals.
At the same time, it will allow you to take advantage of moment marketing. Imagine if you are working on the content to be posted on the next day v/s having the fixed schedule content already completed. The later allows you to have time and resources to mix with the trends.
5) Follow what works and try to improvise:
Due to proper social media planning one can track their daily activities. They can evaluate which strategies are working more effectively. You can improve your content with the help of past social
media calendar’s records. Eventually, it will help organization or an individual to improve the content and can evaluate which functions are more efficient.
Creation of social media calendar:
1. Audit your social media content and accounts:
Before posting things on social media account, you need to have a clear image about existing social media account. As a part of your audit procedure, you should keep count on how many posts are being posted on the social media accounts. Also keep a close look at your analytics for any clues about how your posting frequency or time of posting affects engagement and transformation.
2. Decide how your social media calendar should be:
It is an important step to decide how your social media calendar will exactly be. To obtain most out of your social media calendar, point out activities and information which is most important to you.
Your social media calendar must include basic things such as:
Date and time
Social media Platform
Festival dates / Special Days
One-liners or text on Graphics
Captions for each post
Visuals such as pictures, graphics, videography, reels.
Relevant links
3. Content creation:
Content creation is important part in building a social media calendar. The whole month’s social media creatives depend on the content. Content writer will write content regarding a particular month’s social media activities. All the social media posts depend on the content written by content writer. Such content writer can give suggestions to graphic designers for creation of the graphics itself.
4. Graphics and visuals:
For the visuals of the social media post, graphic designers create graphic. They make graphics according to the content written by the content writer. They get inspired by the idea behind the post and try to make relevant graphics to the post.
5. Invite team to review and provide suggestions for the improvements:
Asking your team to have discussions on social media calendar and its improvement is an important step. To have different opinions and ideas will add up more value to it. Your calendar is most efficient when it is logical to everyone who has to utilize it in their work. Ask for feedback and ideas from clients and your creative team to make sure it fulfils everyone’s needs.
As you start to work with your calendar, make assessment on how it feels to you, and propose the team to give ongoing suggestions. If it feels inconvenient and critical, maybe you want to back track
some of the information. Or maybe it’s not detailed enough, and you need to add additional content and columns.
At the end of this step, you should have an easily prepared document that even the newest team member can easily interpret.
Using cloud management systems like Google Sheets / Microsoft 365 will really be helpful in collaborative working system. The entire team can simultaneously work on the same file and complete the tasks given to them.
Monkey Ads & Academy has built a very simple to use Social Media Calendar Tool which you can buy at just ₹555 from our website.
Follow us on Social Media for more information on such useful tips and techniques of using Digital Marketing tools for your business.
The blog is compiled and written by Ms. Pearl Tailor who is a content contributor on our website. If you have any questions or feedback, kindly please write back to us.
