Keeping up with social media requires its own set of tools and methods, each with its own distinct flavour, much like the profiles themselves.
Whatever works for you should be OK, but we do have a few suggestions to help things stay on track.
Get a free 2022 calendar template and learn the six essential components your social media calendar needs to run smoothly.
Monthly Objectives and Content Strategy for Social Media
Before you start writing (or typing), you should determine the purpose of your social media activity.
The analytics and the content are the focus here.
Do you intend to increase brand recognition?
How are you luring people to your website?
Want to spread the word about your latest and greatest product?
Put whatever it is in your calendar so you don’t forget about it.
Put your monthly objectives and content themes in a designated area on the calendar.
Putting your goals and aspirations into your calendar will serve as a visual reminder of what you’re working towards.
This will be helpful even if you’re facing a period of writer’s block, as it will force you to maintain some semblance of order in your creative process.
If you look at this part of your calendar, you’ll be brought around to the articles and metrics you should be considering.
Having these ideas documented can also help when it’s time to submit a monthly report on your progress.
When you compare your calendar with your data, you can see if you met your deadlines and if your content strategy was successful.
Types of Content
Create a list of content categories to use during the month and highlight them next to your monthly goals and focus, much as you could do with a micro-level content focus.
With the aid of your monthly content emphasis, you can weave a narrative across your posts that readers can follow, and with the help of your content categories, you can mix things up to keep things fresh.
The point is to not overdo it with any one type of information and to keep things well-balanced overall.
For instance, you’re more likely to keep your audience interested if you mix in curated content every once in a while rather than pushing product-centric posts with “Buy Now”-type CTAs for weeks on end.
Calls to action (CTAs) are a fantastic resource for brainstorming potential content types.
Consider the call-to-actions in the posts you most like sharing.
The “Buy Now” posts you make will likely be separated from the “Read More” and “Download Now” ones you make.
Examine your past calls to action to see how many distinct groups you can establish.
Your categories need not, however, originate solely from the material you already have.
Think of the kinds of things you’d like to write but haven’t yet.
By assigning a category to each of these topics, you can keep them in mind as you work on other posts during the month.
The next step is to give the various groups you’ve created meaningful names.
Put them in the forefront of your agenda for social events.
Give each group its own colour if you like.
One Tab for All Channels
Some sites are better than others.
This may necessitate many iterations of the same content for distribution on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
Don’t make yourself crazy trying to remember which tab contains which platform’s postings; just keep them all in the same tab.
The convenience of having everything you need in one place will allow you to
Get a bird’s-eye view of all your social activity for the month in one place.
Adjust and republish content from one platform to another (i.e. format your LinkedIn posts for Instagram, your Instagram posts for Facebook, and so on)
When you have important announcements to make, it’s a good idea to coordinate your posting times.
Having everything you’ve written appear on a single page can lengthen the paper significantly.
Nonetheless, the benefits here far outweigh the drawbacks.
We guarantee that after a week of constantly bouncing between your many platform papers, you’ll want to consolidate everything into a single monthly source of truth.
National and Other Holidays for an Entire Year
Everyone has experienced the shock of finding out that today is National [Insert Thing Relevant To Your Business Here] Day when no one warned them.
Prepare for some rushed, half-hearted social media postings to reassure your coworker that you haven’t completely lost your social media marketing mojo.
If you take the time to manually enter these holidays into your calendar, though, you’ll never have to worry about being the last person to learn about them, no matter how obscure they may be.
Make sure to leave room under each date for special occasions.
Structured Social Position
A lack of a reliable method for marking the progress of your posts can lead to chaos.
You may easily miss scheduling a week’s worth of content or accidentally schedule the same thing again.
As a precaution, it’s helpful to keep track of which social media posts have been approved, reviewed, planned, and/or published.
There are several routes you can choose to implement your system, however we suggest the following three:
Check the boxes that apply, then label the columns as appropriate (“Reviewed,” “Scheduled,” etc.).
Our schedule just has one column, “Approved,” to indicate when content has been checked and given the green light for release.
You can use your calendar as a useful tool.
Use It!
It’s not enough to just keep all of your social media stuff for the year in one place.
Take advantage of it as a resource to inspire and guide your own thought.
In an ideal world, your calendar would be geared around helping you produce, hone, and enhance your content strategy.