A social media calendar is an overview of your upcoming social media posts, organized by date. Social marketers use content calendars to plan posts, manage campaigns, and review ongoing strategies.
Use the editorial calendar template linked above to plan individual content assets. Think blog posts, videos, new research, etc. This is where you plan out the content that your social media efforts will be promoting.
Managing your multimedia content
Social media content creation and posting take time and attention every single day. A social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your work, avoid multitasking, and note down all your content ideas for later.
Social media planning calendar tools even allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time. That means you can share content every day without logging into all your social platforms every hour on the hour.
Content frameworks like these give you one less thing to consider as you create your posts. Scheduling posts in advance allows you to stick to a schedule while ensuring you always have quality content ready to go.
What you look for in the audit should align directly with your content goals. For example, if one of your goals is to improve brand awareness, then look at your follower count on each platform and identify which posts resulted in new followers. Now you have an idea of what types of content help expose your brand to new people who want to follow you.
Individual social media platforms have their own ways to help you maximize reach as well. On platforms like Twitter and Instagram, utilizing hashtags is a great way to distribute your content further. Hashtags help you reach people who not only follow you but are following a specific trend or interest. On LinkedIn and Facebook, join groups related to your industry and share content when it relates to the conversation.
Another good distribution strategy involves networking with bloggers and content creators in your niche. Other brands are more likely to share your content with their audience if you have a relationship and will return the favor. Just remember that anything you share with your audience should still be valuable to them and relate to your brand.
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Certificate, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. Your electronic Certificate will be added to your Accomplishments page - from there, you can print your Certificate or add it to your LinkedIn profile. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free.
After conducting a social media audit, you should comprehensively understand which channels your audience uses and the kind of content they prefer. You should use your findings to determine which social media channels you'll leverage and the content you'll post.
For example, you may notice your audience prefers your behind-the-scenes content on Instagram but goes to Twitter to ask questions and learn more about your product. In that case, you can post fun behind-the-scenes photos and Reels on Instagram, then use Twitter to share information about your product and answer consumer questions.
Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis, but this multifaceted tool is also perfect for social media content calendar organization. Excel can be customized according to the priorities and metrics your team is focused on, so it's a great option for planning.
Marketers with small teams and heavy workloads will love this intuitive template. It acts as a social media content planner, tracker, and archive, making it perfect for sharing your social plan with stakeholders and referring to it when you need to repurpose old content.
Loomly offers tools beyond content scheduling and management. This tool provides inspiration and direction to help you create content. It also allows you to manage your content assets, schedule posts, view them as a list or a calendar, and analyze what posts are working versus which ones need work.
Coming up with social media content ideas can take time and effort. Sprout Social's social listening tool lets marketers like you uncover niche conversations that your audience is interested in. From there, you can join the conversation for brand awareness or start your discussion on the topic to grow your following.
The Evernote mobile app also boasts interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later. This feature is of particular value for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram.
Hootsuite offers a built-in Planner tool to help you create campaigns, identify publishing gaps, and collaborate with your content creation team. Its primary features are in social publishing so that you can release content to your networks in advance, but it also has rich features for collaboration and post approvals.
You can even curate content from other sources without logging into your account. Once your content is created, you can preview it with the Composer tool, which displays it according to each social network's unique format.
Cross-collaboration is a big deal on any marketing team, and Hootsuite has a way of making this even more accessible. The social publishing platform has a built-in content library serving as the single truth point for your entire organization. Does your sales team need a product feature cheat sheet? Customer service looking for details on the latest product feature? All that and more can be found in your team's Hootsuite content library.
Like Hootsuite, Agorapulse offers social publishing tools and a content calendar to manage your social media accounts easily. This includes scheduling (or rescheduling), queuing, and bulk uploading posts, which is incredibly helpful for teams who use quarterly or monthly content plans.
What makes Agorapulse different is its social inbox, which allows you to manage all the interactions from various platforms in a single place. After all, content isn't just a one-and-done activity; it's about building awareness and engagement with your readers.
If you want more from your content calendar than knowing when posts go live, StoryChief is your option. With StoryChief's smart calendar, you can better strategize and plan your content strategy across channels.
So what about content planning and creation? ClearVoice offers content creation tools to fit into your workflow. Their big claim to fame is their Talent Network Search which allows you to find and connect to content creators to work on your projects. Yet, ClearVoice also has features for task management for internal and external collaborators.
Not every social team is working for a big agency or client. For freelance content teams who want to stay organized and on time with their social media publishing, ClearVoice offers some of the same great features at a price customized to your team.
Zerys is another platform that matches you with your ideal content creation freelancers. However, it markets itself as a platform dedicated to content success, offering content planning, production, publishing, promotion, conversion, and analytics features.
If you're modeling your social calendar after this one, remember to include a tab for content details and who on your team will be responsible for creating the content. You might also have a separate tab for each month to keep things organized.
Step 3: In the right panel, click LinkedIn. Create your post in the text box, including emojis, hashtags, mentions, tags, and a content link. When using HubSpot's social media management tools, you can only mention or tag LinkedIn company pages, not LinkedIn users.
Americans spend around 2 hours on social media every day, making it a great way to reach out to your business's current and potential customers. It's not enough to know what you want to post; you must also understand why your business posts content.
Posting content to social media can help your business achieve many goals, including raising brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, introducing new products and services to your customers, and even launching rebranding campaigns, to name a few.
When choosing your business's content goals, consider what your brand most needs to accomplish. Are you looking to reach out to a new demographic and generate leads? Do you want to increase your customers' engagement with your business? Knowing your content goals can help to ensure that your business's content reaches the right audience with the right message.
Once you know your business's goals, decide what types of content your business will post. Each type of social media content has advantages and disadvantages. For example, blog posts and articles can help your business build credibility, but they can be time-consuming to create. Meanwhile, Tweets can help your business gain consumer insight and hone its brand voice, but Twitter's limit of 280 characters per Tweet means your business may have to use long threads of multiple Tweets to get your message across. Carefully choosing the types of contentyour business will post can help ensure that your content provides value to your audience.
Your business's social media presence should be informed by its content, goals, and target audience demographics. For example, while posting on Instagram may help your business reach a young audience and market goods, the photo and video sharing platform may be a poor choice if you want to increase blog traffic among professionals in your industry. Likewise, a LinkedIn post may help drive traffic to your business's blog but may not help you drive traffic to your online store.
Considering each social media platform's strengths and weaknesses can help you accomplish your business's content goals without wasting time and money marketing to users who are outside of your target audience.
When creating your business's content calendar, account for the engagement patterns for each of your social media accounts to demystify the scheduling process, save time, and get your posts in front of your audience when they are most likely to see them. 2ff7e9595c
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