Posting regularly on your business’ social media accounts offers a lot of benefits, including increased brand awareness, stronger customer loyalty, and more leads.
But planning out the content you post is key to social media success.
Unfortunately, far too often, content planning ends up on the back burner. We get it, running a business can be a LOT…but just like with anything else in your business, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail, as the old saying goes. It’s worth dedicating a few hours to planning out your social media content.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through the basic steps of creating a social media content calendar, including deciding when and where to post, what types of content to post, and what info you should include in your calendar.
Let’s dig in, shall we?
A social media content calendar is just what it sounds like: a calendar detailing the content you’ll post on social media.
It can be simple—including only the dates and times you’ll post—or highly detailed, laying out which platforms you’ll post on, the content type, post title and topic, post copy, links, tags/mentions, and visuals, in addition to the date and time. Most fall somewhere in the middle.
Without a calendar, you end up posting willy nilly, with no direction or consistency. But with a social media calendar, you’re able to ensure your posts fit into the bigger picture of your brand identity and goals. Plus, when you plan ahead, it gives you time to create the assets you need so you’re not just throwing something together at the last minute.
In addition, a social media content calendar will help you:
Phew…that’s a LOT of benefits from one little calendar! And even better, you don’t need any fancy software to create a social media calendar. All you need is a simple spreadsheet or digital calendar, a little time, and some great ideas.
Now that we’re clear on what a social media calendar is and how it can benefit your business, let’s dig into some specifics about how to create your own. From setting goals and figuring out when and where to post to what info should be included in your calendar and how to measure success, let’s go through it all step by step.
Posting on social media consistently can help you achieve any and all of the above benefits. But just posting by the seat of your pants won’t get you there.
Before you do anything else, sit down and set some goals for your content. What do you want to achieve (brand awareness, lead generation, customer engagement, etc)? And how will you measure your progress toward that goal (likes, clicks, followers, etc)?
Before you start the car, you need to know where you’re going. Setting goals gives you a destination—once you know that, you can determine a path to get there.
You can set any goals you like, but make sure they align with your overall business objectives and are SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, “customer engagement” itself isn’t a SMART goal. But “getting 30% more followers in the next 6 months” is. Once you know what you’re working toward, it will be much easier to come up with the content that will get you there.
Note that every platform is different and draws a different demographic (more on that in a bit), so you may need to adjust your goals for each platform accordingly.
Learn all about setting a unique strategy for each social media platform in this blog.
As I mentioned earlier, every social media platform draws different demographics. Nearly every demographic is on social media somewhere—you just need to figure out where your ideal customers are spending their time online.
To figure this out, first determine who your target audience is, then do some research. Tools like this chart showing what percentage of each demographic uses different social media platforms are a great place to start.
This begs the question, "Shouldn’t I be on every social media platform?" And sure, if you have the resources to consistently post quality content on each platform, then go for it. But most businesses have limited resources to spend on their social media marketing. And luckily, you don’t have to be everywhere to be effective.
To begin with, focus your efforts on the top one-to-three platforms your ideal audience is using. The platforms you choose don’t necessarily have to be the biggest platforms out there—they just need to be the ones your target audience is most likely to use (i.e., if your audience is more into Pinterest than Facebook, then that’s where you need to be).
Learn more about choosing the right social media platforms for your business in this blog.
Next, determine how often and on which days/times you’ll post.
How often you should post will vary depending on your industry, the platforms you’re using, and your target audience, as well as your team’s bandwidth. In other words, if you have a huge marketing team you might have the resources to post multiple times each day…but if you have a small team, that won’t be realistic.
Because there are no hard and fast rules for how often you should post, your best bet is to plan out a posting schedule you can consistently maintain. Remember to factor in the time it takes to create your content: You’re better off posting high quality content less often than posting poor quality content every day.
When it comes to deciding which days and times to post, it’s helpful to consult resources like this one from Buffer. It includes the ideal times to post for most of the major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, X, and Threads).
Once you’ve posted for several weeks, you can consult your analytics on each platform to see when your audience engagement is highest and adjust your posting schedule accordingly.
Now that you’ve set goals and determined where and how often to post, the next step is to plan out the kinds of content you’ll post and the topics that content will address.
The rule of thumb here is to create diverse content. Posting the same thing all the time will only bore your audience, and they’ll stop paying attention.
In other words, your social media content shouldn’t be sales pitch after sales pitch. It should include some promotional posts, for sure, but they should be few and far between, making up only 20% of your content. The remaining 80% of your content should be focused on engaging your audience with posts that are educational or entertaining.
To keep things well balanced, break your content down into categories, such as educational, promotional, holiday, just for fun, etc. Then post content for each category every month, making sure to space them out (i.e., don’t share three “meet-the-team” posts in a row…spread them out throughout the month).
Another thing to keep in mind is that you should ideally post different content on each platform, tailored to the audience you’re trying to reach there. In addition, every platform has different parameters for image size, number of characters allowed in the caption, how to include links, and so on. Make sure your content calendar reflects these differences.
Ok, at this point, you’ve gathered all the info you need to put together your content calendar! 🥳From here, all you have to do is pull up an Excel spreadsheet or Google calendar (or other similar tool) and start laying out your content.
As you put everything into your content calendar, make sure to include the following:
You don’t have to actually write the copy or create the visuals yet. For now, you’re just getting down an outline of your content and making a plan for when and where you’ll post it.
Ideally, you want to plan out your content at least a month at a time. Creating your content in batches like this will be easier and more efficient for your team.
Not sure how to get started? Try using a template, like this free one from HubSpot.
Once you have everything outlined in your content calendar, you can go through it and assign tasks to your team members. For example, you may assign tasks like:
When you’ve laid out your content schedule for the next month or quarter like this, everyone can see what they need to work on and who is responsible for accomplishing each task.
Once your posts are scheduled, that’s it, you’re done creating your social media content calendar….right? Not exactly.
Your calendar isn’t only a planning tool—it can also be used to track and measure metrics across the platforms you use.
Remember in step one when you set goals and chose how you’d track your progress (likes, clicks, followers, impressions, etc)? Well, now is when you start tracking those metrics. And as you gather that information from the different social media platforms, you can use your calendar to keep track of it.
From there, you can use your insights into that data to refine what you post and when and how often you post it. This optimization is key to reaching your goals and ensuring your social media marketing efforts are fruitful. After all, nothing stays static—your audience, the platforms you use, and your business will all evolve over time. Keeping track of these details helps ensure you stay relevant.
Not sure which metrics to track? Our team created an ebook that will walk you through it. Download our FREE ebook, Key Metrics To Track for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy below!
I hope this blog helps you get started with creating a social media content calendar! But if you’d rather hand that job off to someone else, the team at Wild Fig is here to help. Simply schedule an exploratory call with our fearless leader, Kari Switala, to discuss your needs and learn how we can help!