Nowadays, social media is part of a marketing team’s everyday routine. With nearly five billion people across the world (and counting) using at least one digital social platform, any modern business that wants to be known and continue to grow can’t neglect to post on its profiles.
Yet whether you’ve had your Facebook page for years or are just starting a TikTok account, bad social media management habits can start to creep in and make your hard work less effective. In fact, it’s not uncommon, with 63% of businesses not using a documented strategy.
Creating a social media calendar that works is the centre of any effective online business presence. But just because it’s a basic requirement doesn’t mean it’s easy. Read on for some helpful tips and tricks.
Social media is a fast-paced world. So you might wonder at the point of investing time and effort in creating a set calendar when trends can turn any planning on its head overnight. Yet there are lots of reasons why putting together a social media plan can benefit your business, including:
Of course, if you spot an emerging trend or topic, then adding to this calendar with reactive content will also benefit your business. A good social media calendar just sets out the base activity for your team to elaborate on.
Before they open a new spreadsheet or planning tool, your team needs to think about the direction your social media and content should go in. This means establishing a strategy.
It’s likely that your business has a presence on at least one platform. Even if you’ve not posted for a while, pulling off any performance data you have will give you some insight into the type of content that has and hasn’t chimed with your audience in the past. This will give you a jumping-off point for content generation, even if it’s for a different platform.
Rather than ignoring a competitor who’s smashing social media, copy them! Ok, not entirely. But your competitors’ profiles can prove a rich source of content generation and inspiration. Particularly if you want to understand the topics, trends and formats that your target audience is enjoying. Let your competitors do the hard work, then reinvent it in your own style.
Whether you decide to set short-term KPIs for each platform, a long-term strategic objective, or both. It’s important that you establish an aim for your content. Otherwise, your activity will start to lose focus and you risk confusing your online communications and audience. Even if you change your aims after a month or so, setting this direction will put you on the path to success.
Once you’ve set out your strategy and objectives, it’s time to start generating ideas and slotting them into a schedule. While you’re brainstorming some new content, make sure you keep the following points in mind.
You might think that posting the same content across your Facebook, TikTok and Instagram accounts will save you time. And you’d be right. But it won’t be as effective as if you’d posted with the specific platform in mind. It might also mean you run into quality problems such as incorrect image formats or caption character limits.
Plus, each platform has particular features that could give an extra boost to your content creativity. For example, Instagram has reels and stories. Reels are great for longer-form videos or delivering more in-depth content, while stories are short snippets are updates. Adjusting your content so it fits the specific platform will help you engage with your audience more effectively.
As well as developing content ideas based on the messages you want to share with your audience, take a look at the social media topics and trends that are emerging in your industry. This won’t just help you generate relevant ideas but get involved in topical conversations with your audience straight away.
Don’t just follow the leader with your content though. If you can take a topic or trend and add your own expertise, opinion or perspective on it, then this will make you stand out from the crowd.
Whether you have brand guidelines for your business or not, you need to think about the tone of your social media content. Specifically, you need to think about how you will translate your personality onto each social media platform.
For example, it’s likely that you’ll write a totally different caption on LinkedIn than you will on TikTok. Yet your brand’s traits need to come through clearly on both.
Setting out guidelines and examples on how to do this will help you keep your social media messaging consistent across all platforms. This will avoid confusion amongst your customers, even if different team members are writing your posts.
When you come to scheduling your posts, don’t forget to add and adjust the extras to fit the platform you’re using. This includes checking:
Though you might be tempted to schedule posts on the same time and day every week, this could get you stuck in a performance rut. By changing up your post times and frequency, your activity will look more natural to the platform algorithms and make it more likely for your content to appear on people’s feeds.
It also means that, once you’ve posted regularly for a few weeks, you’ll be able to see the times and days when your audience is more interactive and engaged.
If you find yourself getting lost in a brainstorming pot of ideas, formats and platforms, then always return to your audience and their needs. At the end of the day, they’re the focus of all this activity and planning, so the content you’re producing needs to be inspiring, helpful and interesting to them.
Depending on how structured you like to be, you might plan your social media calendar between one and three months in advance. There are a few management, scheduling and planning tools that can make this process easier for your team:
Whether you use these tools or not, it’s important that once you’ve started posting regularly, you review your content’s performance at intervals. This means pulling data from either the social media platforms themselves or your management tool to analyse what content worked and what didn’t.
Depending on your specific KPIs, you’ll be able to review your social media’s performance by platform or format. Plus, adding internal tags to your posts in management tools means you can also analyse performance by content topic.
This will give you invaluable insight into what is and isn’t working for your audience. You can then use this information to feed into any future brainstorms to make your content as effective as possible.
Plus, if you’re looking for further advice on how to create social media content that really chimes with your audience, feel free to get in touch and we can talk through your needs.
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