As a social media manager, creating a content calendar is crucial to your role because you want to create content tailored to your client’s brand, industry, and niche. This has proven to be a lifesaver, as it not only builds a structure around your content and planning but also provides clarity for whatever content you create.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a well-thought-out, strategic, and detailed plan for upcoming posts on your various social media platforms. It also includes designated publishing times and dates for the posts, and you can include links to inspirational content, videos, pictures, tags, captions, and copies.
Why Do You Need a Content Calendar?
A content calendar helps you as a social media manager put a plan in place for your posts and relieves you of constant drawbacks on ideas.
Here are a few more detailed reasons why you need a content calendar:
- Saves Time and Helps Track Performing Content
Creating a calendar ahead helps you save time and relieves the stress of unplanned posting, especially when you are running multiple social media accounts. This gives you clarity on the content that needs to be created and the ones that need to go up on designated days. It also helps you track your best and least-performing content, allowing you to return to the drawing board and create strategies that help elevate your content.
- Makes Implementation Easy
While creating content off the bat can seem fun, having a content calendar is even more fun. This helps you stay committed and makes implementation easy.
- Audience Interaction and Engagement
Creating a content calendar helps you understand what kind of content you want to create to keep your audience engaged.
In turn, this helps your audience know what kind of content to expect from you. This way, they have something to look out for, and you have something to deliver to them. It also facilitates healthy interactions and community building.
- Consistent Posting Schedule
Managing a social media account demands constant attention. When you manage multiple accounts, you tend to lose track of time and could become inconsistent with posting. When you create a detailed and well-structured content calendar, you become consistent with your posting schedule.
- Brand Voice and Messaging:
A calendar ensures that your content consistently aligns with your brand voice and messaging, avoiding any contradictions or mixed messages.
Things to Consider When Creating a Social Media Content Calendar
When creating a social media content calendar, it’s important to consider several factors to ensure that your content is effective, engaging, and aligned with your overall marketing goals. Here are key things to consider;
- Understand Your Audience:
Know who your audience is, what they care about, and when they are most active on social media. Use analytics tools to gather insights on demographics, interests, and behavior patterns. This would also help you understand their content preference.
- Identify Your Choice Platform or Channel:
This is very important as you will be working with different niches and industries. Knowing the right platform for your social media content helps you understand the kind of content you will be creating and the strategy to put in place to get the right audience.
- Conduct a Social Media Audit:
By conducting these audits on your social media platforms, you can know the type of content your audience wants to see, your most and least-performing content, your best posting time and schedule, and, most importantly, your audience demographic across social media platforms.
- Create a Goal:
Creating an achievable goal in your calendar brings you clarity on what you want to create and how you want to execute it. These goals can include generating new leads, directing users to your website, gaining visibility, or growing your social media followers. The calendar will be your guide.
- Create a Template for Your Calendar:
By doing this, you ease the stress of categorizing your content. This also helps to determine the specific kind of feature your calendar should have, ranging from the social media platform where the content will be published, the topic, the type of content, the date and time of posting, the person in charge of posting, and lastly, a follow-through: has the content been posted according to the designated schedule?
Now that you have all these in check, you may ask, “What tools can I use to create my content calendar?” There are many social media planners and scheduling apps that can help you with that. Here are just a few:
- Asana: As an agency, we swear by Asana for content calendar planning and general project management. It helps with collaborative content planning and management amongst the other things Asana is great for.
- Notion: This is a productivity and note-taking web planner application. It has a database that helps plan your schedule, with organizational tools and templates to ease the planning stress. You can pick the right template for your content calendar and customize it to structure your plan.
- Airtable: This is another organizational app that helps you organize all your work in a template of your choice. You can create and structure all your content using the Airtable app and categorize them as you wish.
- Google Calendar and Sheets: Google Calendar is one of the oldest applications for creating a calendar. With different features, you can tabulate your ideas and categorize them, making it easy to know what type of content to publish.
Creating a content calendar never goes out of style. Matter of fact, it relieves you of all the stress there is, plus it is flexible enough to adapt to trends that align with your niche and industry.
A well-detailed calendar gives you clarity and helps you focus on your other marketing strategies and structures.
To get more practical steps on how to create a social media calendar, grab The Foundation Of Social Media Management. You would also get a bonus done-for-you content calendar template if you purchase the course.
P.S. Need expert advice? Book a One-on-One session with Uche.
We hope you find this helpful.
