If you share social media content for your business, you know all too well how difficult it is to consistently post creative and unique content. To successfully manage social media, it’s essential to use a social media content calendar. In this post, I’m going to walk you through how to create and use a social media content calendar and finally master social media for your business. Social Media Content Calendar Please note this post may contain affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you click them and make a purchase. This is, of course, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more information. How a Social Media Content Calendar Will HelpI created my first social media content calendar four years ago when I managed the social media channels for the company I worked for. Every Friday, I would log in to HootSuite (my social media management and scheduling software) and schedule all my posts for the following week. Some weeks, I could get all my posts done in 15 minutes. Other weeks, I would struggle for hours, at a complete loss of what to post. This weekly struggle left me feeling uninspired and defeated. Then, one day I had an idea. What if I create a calendar with prompts or ideas of what to post each day? I tested my idea and I’m proud to say the calendar completely transformed my social media process! The calendar got my creative juices flowing and significantly sped up my content scheduling process. The calendar helped me consistently post unique content every single day of the year, which is why I continue to create a social media content calendar every year. Cheat Sheet: 50 Social Media Post Ideas
In a rush? Grab the FREE downloadable cheat sheet at the end of this post!
If you can relate to my story and you’re experiencing similar frustration and stress with your social media channels, then you need to use a content calendar. To help you get started, I’m going to walk you through how to create your own content calendar and then I’ll show you how to use it to schedule your social media posts each week. How to Create a Social Media Content CalendarThe first step is to identify what calendar tool you plan to use. You can use free tools such as Asana, Google Calendar, Google Sheets or an excel spreadsheet. I prefer to use Google Calendar and create a new calendar specifically for social media posts. Once you have your calendar tool selected, it’s time to conduct research. Open up your dear friend Google and search for a list of the major national holidays in your country. Identify the holidays you want to recognize on social media and add them to your calendar. Next, research national days/weeks/months such as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month or National Friendship Day. If you live in the United States, NationalDayCalendar.com (image below) is an outstanding resource to find national days related to your niche. No matter what type of business you own, there is a day you can celebrate. Once you’ve exhausted your national holiday research, turn your focus closer to your local community. Are there important days, festivals, or sporting events that occur in your local community that you want to recognize? For example, I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the Cornhuskers. (Go big red!) A business owner in Lincoln would absolutely want to include every Husker football game on their social media content calendar. Ignoring these “state holidays” would be suicide. Next, turn your focus toward yourself and your business. What major milestones do you hope to hit in the coming year that you can celebrate on social media? For example, McDonald’s proudly promotes the number of customers served. Additionally, think about anniversaries you can celebrate such as the day you officially opened for business. You could create a fun infographic like the one below created by Picnic People. Then, take a look at your strategic growth plan for the year. Do you have any major product or service launches planned? Do you plan to run any specials or sales throughout the year? Do you plan to attend any industry trade shows or events? If so, be sure to add these to your social media content calendar. Once you have all the possible holidays, events, celebrations, and promotions added to your calendar, it’s time to fill in the rest of your calendar with basic day-to-day posts. For help building out your day-to-day posts, read: What to Post on Social Media. The article outlines 50 different ideas of what to post on social media in 2018. It’s is a comprehensive list and will get your creative juices flowing on what to include in your content calendar. I also have a free cheat sheet you can download with all 50 post ideas. Another great resource to build out your content calendar is: 65 Social Media Questions to Increase Engagement. Questions are an outstanding way to increase engagement on your social media channels and allow you to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Use those two resources to fill out the remainder of your calendar. Keep in mind that you want to vary the type of posts you share. Don’t ask questions five days in a row or post inspirational quotes for weeks on end. A wide variety of content types will keep your audience engaged. You’ll also need to remain flexible to change things up throughout the year. Your strategic plan may change throughout the year, requiring you to fit in a special promotion, or you may want to share an update about a major trending news story. Your social media content calendar is intended to be a guide, not a rigid plan to be followed to the letter. Major Time Saving ResourceCreating a content calendar for an entire year can take a lot of time and the process I described above could take you hours to complete. If you do not have that time kind of time to invest and want all 365 days done for you, then grab a copy of my 2018 Social Media Content Calendar. I’ve done all the research and invested hours of time in creating this calendar. It includes 47 United States holidays and national days, 52 questions, and the 50 social media post ideas placed throughout the year. The post suggestions are strategically planned to ensure variety and freshness to your social media posts. If you want to save yourself hours of time in creating your own content calendar, click the button below and submit your name and email to download my 50 Social Media Post Ideas Cheat Sheet. You’ll receive access to get my content calendar at the lowest rate available. Cheat Sheet: 50 Social Media Post Ideas
In a rush? Grab the FREE downloadable cheat sheet at the end of this post!
How to Use a Social Media Content CalendarOnce you have your social media content calendar, how do you use it? A content calendar is most beneficial when you use it to schedule your posts either on a weekly or monthly basis. I prefer to schedule posts on a weekly basis because it allows me to be more flexible in switching out posts depending on what is going on that week. However, most people prefer to schedule posts monthly because it’s easier to block a chunk of time once a month, get into the zone, and pound out a month’s worth of posts at once. Select a Social Media Scheduling ToolNo matter the cadence you choose, you need to sign up for a social media scheduling tool such as HootSuite, Buffer, SmarterQueue or MeetEdgar. Expect to pay $10 – $50 per month, depending on the tool you select. If you don’t already use a scheduling tool, and you don’t have a budget for one yet, read: How to Schedule Social Media Posts Without Spending a Dime. The article walks you through a detailed process on how to schedule all your social media content using completely free tools. If you have budget dollars to invest in a more robust tool, I highly recommend investing in SmarterQueue and Tailwind. Throughout my professional marketing career, I’ve used a lot of different scheduling tools. SmarterQueue is my favorite tool to schedule social media posts for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can get started with SmarterQueue for only $20 per month and you can customize your plan according to your unique needs. To schedule Instagram posts, I highly recommend Tailwind. Tailwind allows you to organize your Instagram posts and ensure you grid looks great before you share your images. You can schedule your posts and Tailwind will send a push notification to your phone at the designated post time. Those features are pretty standard with any Instagram scheduling tool, but the one feature that sets Tailwind far above the rest is their smart Hashtag recommendations. You simply type in a couple hashtags and Tailwind will automatically recommend the best performing hashtags for your niche. This feature is a game changer as hashtags are what allow you to be discovered and grow your audience on Instagram. I used to spend hours researching the best hashtags and would get an average of 10 new followers with each post. With Tailwind, I found the best performing hashtags in about five minutes, and I now get an average of 20 new followers with each post. Tailwind has allowed me to double my reach and my followers, which has skyrocketed the growth of my Instagram account. Take a look at the screenshot below of four different posts I loaded into the Tailwind scheduler. I added a few different hashtags to the caption of each post and Tailwind automatically suggested related hashtags. Notice how the hashtag recommendations are color-coded to show the best performing hashtags, the most competitive, and the most niche hashtags? This makes it really easy to select the best hashtags. To add hashtag recommendations to your caption, you simply click on the hashtag you want to include and Tailwind will populate more suggestions. Another great feature is the ability to save hashtag lists. If your posts are all related to a specific topic or niche, you can research the hashtags once, save them to a list, and use the list each time. See the screenshots below from my Tailwind account. In the first screenshot, I clicked on the “#” button to pull up my saved lists. Next, I clicked on the “business posts” list. The second screenshot shows all 30 hashtags from that list automatically added to my caption. It doesn’t get much easier than that! PRO TIP: If you decide to take advantage of Tailwind’s free trial of their Instagram scheduling tool, here’s a pro tip for you. Add space between your caption and your hashtags. You can do this with periods. See the screenshot below to see an example. Design Social Media ImagesOnce you have your social media scheduling tool(s) identified, you need to find or design images and/or videos for your posts. Whatever you do, make sure you only share images you have the rights to share. Ripping images off of Google is illegal and can get you in serious legal trouble. To learn more about the type of images you can share and how to find free images read: 6 Best Websites to Quickly Find Free Images. You can also use your smartphone to take your own photos and videos or design custom images and graphics. If you want to design your own images, you can use a free online design tool such as Canva.com. Canva.com has a lot of great templates you can use to quickly and easily create professional quality images. Reserve a Block of TimeOnce you have all your tools identified and your images and videos created, block off time to schedule your posts. To give you a crystal clear example of how to use a social media content calendar, I’ll outline the process I follow. First, I gather all the necessary resources and tools I need to create and schedule my content. This includes:
Once I have all the necessary resources handy, I get to work. I begin with the next day on my calendar that needs scheduling and work my way through each day I plan to schedule in the block of time I have available. Here’s a one-week screenshot of my 2018 Social Media Content Calendar. In this instance, I would begin with the 21st and design an image in Canva that represents a hug. I would then add it to my scheduling tools, add a caption about how much I appreciate my audience and schedule it to be posted on the 21st. Then, I would move on to the 22nd, which prompts me to share my personal mantra. My personal mantra is perseverance, not perfection, is the key to success. For this post, I could design another image in Canva, take a selfie photo, or find an image on Pexels that represents perseverance. Finally, I would load the image of my choice into my scheduler, add a caption about my mantra, and schedule it to be posted on the 22nd. I continue that process until I’ve scheduled all my social media posts for the week. See how simple that is? There are numerous benefits to scheduling your social media posts in reserved blocks of time. One of the most notable is that your creativity expands and your posts become easier and faster to create as you move along. When you have a content calendar complete with prompts at your finger-tips it transforms the process of posting on social media from frustrating to fun! ACTION STEPS In case you’re overwhelmed by all the information you just consumed (or you skipped straight to the bottom) I want to give you some simple to follow action steps.
You’re going to love how a social media content calendar keeps you organized, allows you to stay on top of important events and holidays, expands your creativity, and saves you time and stress each week. Now, what are you waiting for? Go take action! The post How to Create and Use a Social Media Content Calendar appeared first on Angie Gensler. Source: https://www.angiegensler.com/master-social-media-content-calendar/ from https://angiegenslercom.tumblr.com/post/169554889871
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Melissa from Chicago. I am working as social media expert and now a days learning skills about promoting blog content. Archives
September 2018
Categories |