As a social media manager, you wear a lot of hats – and manage just as many social accounts. Creating and maintaining a social media content calendar is essential to keep you organized and on track with the strategies that get your brand results.
Keep reading to learn more about why you need a content calendar for social media and how to create a simple one that makes your workflows seamless from one month to the next.
What is a social media content calendar?
A social media content calendar is a strategic content planning tool that helps you plot out and visually organize your social media posts in advance. Think of it as your roadmap for social media success, mapping your content strategy to tangible and publishable deliverables.
Creating a content calendar for social media isn’t just about staying organized. It’s about maximizing your impact, ensuring your team stays aligned, and centralizing the messaging that resonates with your target audience. We’ll discuss the many benefits of a social media calendar in the next section, so read on.
Why do you need a content calendar for social media?
A social media content calendar is the vessel for your content strategy. It structures your content planning.
Planning your posts ahead of time and centralizing them into a social media calendar has many benefits. Let’s dive in.
A content calendar saves you time.
The task assignment features in most social media content calendars let managers delegate post creation, approval, and publishing responsibilities within the calendar interface. As a team, you’ll be able to batch tasks, schedule content in advance, and stay organized while posting across channels consistently.
It helps you maintain a consistent posting schedule.
You know the benefits of a consistent posting schedule. (Hello, algorithm boost.) With an effective social media content calendar, you can identify and solve holdups in your publishing process to create a well-oiled content machine.
The right calendar tool allows you to monitor and measure social media campaigns and processes in one place.
Although your social media content calendar functions as a planning tool, it’s also a great way to monitor and track social media analytics. A unified social media management tool can integrate analytics directly into your content calendar, enabling real-time performance tracking and data-driven optimization.
A social media content calendar ensures your content mix is diverse and engaging.
A well-structured calendar helps you ensure you have a diverse yet cohesive content mix. That means promotional posts are balanced with engaging, value-driven content, and you use every format that your target audience enjoys. With a calendar, it’s easier to spot when one content type – say, carousel posts – are dominating your feed when you see it visually.
It makes company-wide collaboration a breeze.
An effective content calendar aligns your team and allows you to socialize your upcoming content across the marketing organization, allowing synergies with broader marketing campaigns to surface.
Want to break down silos at your company? Create an easily shareable version of the calendar so other departments can tap into your social content and use it in broader marketing campaigns and company initiatives. An added bonus? This is likely to draw more internal advocates who could amplify your content efforts.
A content calendar helps you publish social media posts at the right time.
Sharing the right personalized content at the right time is what separates a good customer experience from a great one. Knowing what you’re publishing down the road means you can pivot future content to reflect current events.
A social media calendar filled with major holidays – great engagement opportunities – makes it easier to plan and schedule your posts.
It allows you to plan social media content around company objectives.
Whether you’re launching a new product at the end of the month or preparing for a massive Facebook giveaway, social media content should align with your current and future business objectives.
Marketing campaigns have many moving parts. This can be a coordination nightmare if you don’t have access to a social media content planning tool.
Creating a social media content calendar means you can align your posts with:
- Your email marketing campaigns.
- Upcoming holidays, annual events, or current hot topics.
- Your blog’s promotional strategy.
- Your massive rebranding project.
- Your webinars.
But how do you create an effective social media content calendar? Read on for a step-by-step explainer.
How to create a social media content calendar
Now you know why you need a social media content calendar for your brand. So, let’s talk about how to actually create one. If you take the time to do this right, you’ll be on your way to a streamlined and seamless editorial process.
1. Choose the right social media content calendar tool
There are many different tools you can use to create a great social media content calendar. It’s important to use one in order to minimize the amount of time needed to organize and generate posts across different social media platforms.
When selecting a content calendar tool for social media, prioritize features that enhance team collaboration and streamline workflows.
Look for a unified calendar interface that offers:
- Real-time updates and seamless task assignment.
- Advanced approval processes.
- Multi-platform publishing capabilities, crucial for maintaining consistency across channels.
- AI-powered insights for optimizing post timing and performance.
- Sentiment analysis and analytics.
- Robust collaboration features like shared workspaces and integrated communication.
The ideal tool should not only organize your content but also foster teamwork, turning your social media strategy into a well-oiled machine.
2. Identify your social media goals
Whether you want to revamp your entire social media presence or game the Instagram algorithm, it’s important to identify and define your goals before define into the task of creating a content calendar for social media. So, take the time to set SMART goals you can use to track your progress.
Before moving forward, also ensure your social media content strategy aligns with your long-term business goals. It may sound obvious, but it’s an easy thing to overlook in the excitement of content planning. Involving other departments like sales in the process can help ensure alignment.
3. Evaluate existing social media profiles and content
To prepare yourself to create a social media content calendar, analyze your current state of affairs to identify strategies and platforms you can improve or rework entirely. Start by creating a spreadsheet to track growth (or decline) for each profile over time.
Make sure to monitor appropriate KPIs that align with the goals you set in step two.
You may want to track things like:
- Number of followers/subscribers.
- Engagement (likes/comments/hearts/retweets).
- Click-through rates by platform.
Regardless of what you decide to monitor, double-check that each KPI ties in with your goals. There’s no need to spend time pulling these statistics if they don’t actually relate to what you’re trying to accomplish.
Additionally, this is a great time to review your team and their roles within your social media strategy. Make sure everyone knows what they’re in charge of moving forward.
4. Identify social media channels to use going forward
It’s no surprise that using each social media platform takes time and effort. So, use this time to evaluate your performance on each platform and make a decision on whether it’s worth using in the future. How? Look to social media benchmarks to compare your stats against.
Some platforms are great for community engagement but may not increase your traffic. Others might produce a lot of direct sales but don’t help to create a warm community.
Think back to your goals. Decide which channels are worth investing in. If any of them are brand new, take time to learn how to use them and make sure everyone on the team understands them as well.
5. Create a library of digital assets to pull from
Your digital asset library is the home for all your branding guidelines, as well as icons, images, and the other social media visuals you have at your fingertips. Having a social media content library makes sharing and storing assets a breeze, which is why it is a prerequisite for any effective social media content calendar.
This is also an excellent time to add new visual content to your library. On social media, visuals go a long way. So, you may want to consider creating:
- Informative, entertaining, and educational infographics.
- Candid, real-life product photos or other user-generated content (UGC) from loyal fans of your brand.
- Short, catchy, and professional animated videos.
- Stock photography that’s in line with your brand’s visual guidelines.
- Photos of any subject matter experts that might be used in thought leadership posts.
6. Define and organize a social media posting schedule
Sit down with your team and decide the best times to post and how often you’re going to post on each of the channels you chose in step four. In other words, decide your content cadence. It may help to map out when you will post on each channel using a weekly view so you can visually see how much content you need to plan. Check out templates for doing so here.
If you’re worried about running out of content, using an AI composer that’s custom-fit for the social media use case can help fill the gaps with hyper-relevant posts you can share with your audience.
7. Develop a process from brainstorming to publishing content
Now that you know exactly how much content you need to plan, it’s time to establish a workflow with your team that you’ll use for all social media content in your calendar.
You’ll want to identify a process for:
- Brainstorming new content on a regular basis.
- Developing themes and overall topic ideas.
- Writing content and adding appropriate visuals.
- Curating or repurposing relevant content, with or without an AI composer, to fill the gaps.
- Reviewing before posts go live (i.e., a content approval software).
- Analyzing relevant data from step three.
- Making changes based on learnings from the data you track. (Hint: look at your top-performing social posts and see if they have anything in common. Same with the ones that are underperforming.)
8. Load everything into your social media content calendar
After you have workflows in place, you and your team should start filling your social media content calendar following the processes you outlined in step seven. It may take several iterations for everything to run smoothly.
So, be patient and open to ideas as you work through your processes for the first time. And keep in mind that your social media content plan is fluid for a reason. It’s not set in stone, but rather a guideline to keep things flowing in an organized manner.
Final thoughts on building an effective social media content calendar
A well-crafted social media content calendar is the cornerstone of a successful digital marketing strategy. By implementing a centralized, collaborative tool, you can streamline workflows, ensure consistency, and drive engagement across platforms.
Remember, an effective calendar isn’t just about scheduling posts; it’s about creating a cohesive narrative that resonates with your audience. Regularly analyze performance metrics to refine your strategy, and don’t hesitate to adjust your calendar as needed. With the right approach and tools, your social media content calendar can transform from a simple organizational system into a powerful engine for brand growth and engagement. Happy calendar-ing.
