Create a Successful Social Media Content Calendar: Tips and Template

Social media marketing helps you build awareness, engage prospects and customers, and delight them with the products and services you have to offer.

A common indicator of successful social media marketing is maintaining a documented strategy.

Did you know that 49% of organizations document their social media strategy?

To generate social media ROI, it is critical to plan, organize, and analyze your content before you post it on social media.

In this blog post, we’ll look at how a social media content calendar helps you achieve social media success, as well as how you can build one.

So, let’s get started!

Here’s how a social media content calendar helps you:

Organizing content

Documenting your activities on social media helps you save time and manage campaigns across platforms.

It helps you visualize your social media strategy going forward.

It also enables you to track and test the effectiveness of social media strategies so that you deliver highly-engaging content to your prospects and customers.

Charting out your social media plan helps you fill gaps, if any, in the scope of your campaign, and address overlaps.

Mapping campaign with goals

It is important to be able to deliver content that nurtures your audience at each stage of their buyer’s journey.

With a social media calendar, you can organize content according to the buyer stage, as well as past performance.

This helps you deliver the right content, to the right person, and at the right time, enabling you to map your campaign with overall social media goals.

Establishing a brand voice

A brand voice appearing consistently in your audience feed helps you boost customer engagement and achieve social media KPIs.

With a social media content calendar, you can build and maintain a consistent brand voice across platforms.

This also enables you to establish a consistent flow of content that fits in with your overall marketing goals.

In addition to this, it helps make your presence on social media one that your audience can trust.

Maintaining a workflow

Establishing a weekly and/or monthly workflow is an important aspect of running a successful social media campaign.

A content calendar helps you do this, as well as decide how often to post to each channel. This includes the most appropriate time to post social media content.

It enables you to track and analyze the performance of your posts by channel and content, making the process of content creation easier.

Reporting on performance

It is also important to report and follow up on the performance of social media campaigns so that each one you launch is an improvement over the previous one.

With a social media content calendar, you develop the capability to answer questions such as:

• Was I able to achieve the goals I set out with?
• What made my campaign work?
• What aspects of my social media strategy do I need to address?

Answering these questions and applying your learnings will help you build a social media strategy that gets you the ROI you’re aiming for.

Now that you know why you need a social media calendar, here’s how you can create one:

Auditing social networks and content

Before you start creating your calendar, you need to conduct a social media audit.

Let’s look at what an audit covers:

• The persona of your target audience
• Your goals and KPIs for each platform
• Best performing content, campaigns, and strategies
• Imposter accounts and outdated profiles
• Social media team roles and responsibilities
• Opportunities for improvement
• Metrics to be tracked to measure performance by platform

Analyzing social media platforms

Find out which social media platforms are experiencing growth.

This will help you create a content strategy relevant to the platform.

When organizing content by performance, consider doing so by platform, engagement level, and traffic generated.

This will enable you to post social media content that is most likely to engage and delight your audience.

Planning deliverables

Add information for each social media post, such as:

• Date
• Time (and time zone)
• Link to published post
• Content-type
• Engagement
• Traffic/impressions on each platform

And there you have it!

Tips to help you create your very own social media content calendar.

Achieve Social Media Success With A Social Media Calendar!

In this blog post, we looked at how a social media content calendar helps you achieve social media success, as well as how you can build one.

A social media calendar helps you organize content, map campaigns with goals, establish a consistent brand voice, maintain an effective workflow, and set up performance reporting.