Think about the most engaging brands on social media by creating social Media content calendar. These are the companies you may follow on social media, even if you don’t always buy their products. When it comes to social media, some businesses just seem to get it. They can be counted on for engaging posts, witty engagement, and always seem to have a hot take.
So, how do they do it? There’s more to this than simply employing a team of clever writers. A lot of planning and strategy goes into creating that kind of engaging social media presence. One tool that you need to create that kind of engagement for your company is a Content calendar. This tool will help automate some of your content management and leave more room for business innovation. Keep Reading for some great insights on how that calendar can help you.
Start by Making Some Assessments
A content calendar is a tool, and tools are made to fix things. To get the best results, you have to know what needs to be fixed and how you want your end result to look. Before you dive into your content calendar, take a look at your current situation. Identify any issues that you have that are blocking engagement. Your list might look like this:
- Lack of growth and engagement.
- Incomplete social media profiles.
- Failure to respond to the engagement that is happening.
- No clear ownership of responsibilities.
- Lack of clearly defined goals or KPIs.
- Regularly failing to meet goals that have been established.
Now you can use the issues you have identified to get the most out of your calendar. Don’t forget to consider other engagement goals as well, such as:
- Add Reddit and Snapchat to social media accounts.
- Increase social media click-through rates by 20%
- Boost organic engagement by 25%.
- Post 33% more original content.
- Increase followers on Instagram by 15%.
Give Ownership
Lack of ownership can be a real problem when it comes to social media content. It’s easy to see why. Social media participation is something that often grows slowly over time. A company may start with a simple Facebook page, then over the next couple of years, add several more social media platforms and gain loads of followers. Along with that, the demand for regular, engaging content increases. Unfortunately, as this growth eventually happens, the approach to it remains haphazard. Nobody is given true ownership to any of the processes involved in creating social media engagement.
One of the benefits of a content calendar is the ability to assign tasks. In some cases, you can put one person or a team in charge of entire workflows. This helps you ensure that every action item has someone responsible for it. In turn, you will find it much easier to follow up with things.
Joni Williams is a marketing director and a writing expert at a top-ranked writing, editing, and proofreading service review provider. She manages content production on a global scale and says, “At first, you may find this a bit challenging. How do you determine what you need in terms of human resources to write great content, create engagement on social media, and respond to that engagement.” Remember that you will need to manage the following for each platform:
- Creating accounts and keeping them up to date.
- Managing accounts to ensure they are secure.
- Dealing with spam and other problematic content.
- Publishing and promoting content on a regular basis.
Depending on the size of your company and the level of social media activity you encounter, your situation may vary quite a bit. Some businesses simply have one person to manage all social media accounts. Others may have multiple people working on a single platform.
Create a Posting Schedule
This is likely the most common reason for starting a content calendar. One of the most important objectives you will have is to keep up with each social media platform you use. This means posting on a regular schedule so that your followers can count on you for a stream of relevant content.
One of the challenges with this is that each platform is a bit different. For example, your posting schedule might look something like this:
- Posting 2 or 3 times daily to Instagram
- Sharing two stories to Instagram each day
- Posting 2 times each day to Facebook and curating 3 other relevant posts.
- Publishing one blog post every 2 weeks.
- Tweeting 5 times daily.
- Posting one promoted post to Reddit every month.
Of course, your specific posting schedule will vary. However, with a calendar, you can receive reminders to publish content as needed on each platform. You can also include reminders to promote content on your social media.
Pair Your Calendar With Your Analytics Tools
Your content calendar should never be static. Instead, you should continually modify it to meet your ever-changing goals and objectives. In fact, you should partner your calendar with your analytics tools in order to plan your social media posting for the future.
Analytics tools give you plenty of great information about traffic, engagement, conversions, and other activity. Use this data to determine if you are getting the most out of each social media space. If not, it’s time to make changes. Fortunately, with your social content calendar up and running, you’ll find that it is easy to make those adjustments.
Find a Calendar That Works For You
Clearly, there are many ways to use a content calendar to improve your engagement metrics. Now, you have to find a calendar that works for your team. Here are some points to consider:
- Integration with existing tools and databases.
- Ease of use.
- Ability of your team to adopt the solution.
- Usefulness across multiple social media platforms.
- Contains the desired features and functions.
As you shop around for the ideal content calendar, here are some of your primary choices.
A Dedicated Content Calendar
These are apps and tools that are created specifically for the purpose of planning and managing your content output. Some are created by well-known content marketing platforms like Sprout Social or Hubspot. Others are offered as add-ons or modules connected to larger marketing software offerings. Wrike is an example of this.
The pro here is that these tools are specifically created to meet the needs of a content marketing team. On the other hand, these are uni-taskers. Investing in a solution like this could mean adding yet another piece of software for your IT team to manage and your marketing team to learn.
Your Current Calendar App
You may find that a multi-purpose calendar app works quite well for your team. For example, a tool like Google Calendar offers lots of great functionality, such as to-do lists and reminders.
With this option, you will be able to integrate your content tasks with other important tasks. This can help with workflow coordination overall. On the other hand, you might miss out on some of the features of a dedicated content marketing calendar.
A Spreadsheet
You may be surprised at how well a spreadsheet can work in many situations. Even better, you may be able to create or download a template for Excel or Sheets that will perfectly meet your needs.
This is a great solution if you want something simple to implement and don’t want to invest a significant amount of money or overcome a major learning curve. The downside will be a lack of bells and whistles.
Final Thoughts
Quality social media engagement depends on the following:
- Creating and curating great content.
- Sharing that content in a way that works for each platform.
- Managing engagement in a fruitful way.
- Tracking the performance of your content across each platform.
- Making any needed adjustments accordingly.
- Assuring that each platform and each task is given clear ownership.
When you make use of a content calendar, you are able to manage all of this in one place. No content marketing team should be without this important tool. This is more important than ever, considering that more products are sold via social media than television.
Dorian Martin is a writer, editor, and proofreader for Get Good Grade, one of the best academic writing services online. He also serves as the technology consultant for this company, as well as other small-to-mid-sized educational organizations, and remains passionate about helping students conduct credible research and sustain Internet
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