A content calendar is the backbone of a well-structured social media strategy. It provides a roadmap for what, when, and where you’ll post content, ensuring that your social media efforts are consistent and aligned with your goals. This guide will walk you through the steps to create and maintain a simple content calendar that drives engagement and growth.
What are your social media goals?
Set Clear Objectives! What would you like to achieve through social media? We recommend focusing on increasing the visibility of your brand, having interactions through likes, comments and shares which massively helps your engagement. And finally you want to drive traffic and sales through your social media channels.
Make your goals SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals are a great way to break down what you want to achieve. This can be your first step in defining your goals for your business’s social media.
Identify Your Audience
Understanding your audience is key to creating content that will be successful. You can understand your audience easily by breaking them down into simple categories. Starting with Demographics. What are your target audiences: Age, Gender and Location. And psychographics, what are their interests, values and behaviours. This will give you a basic understanding of your audience and will make it easier to create content for them.
Choose Your Content Types and Themes
Coming up with ideas can be challenging but you can find inspiration everywhere. Start looking at other accounts doing a similar thing to you and see what videos are most popular. Looking at Pintrest is a great tool as you can find fun content challenges which are a great way to get used to creating regular content. Finally, you can use ChatGPT, just give a prompt of what your business is and what style content you would like to make and ChatGPT will generate a variety of ideas.
Examples of Content Types
- Educational: How-tos, tutorials, tips
- Entertaining: Memes, quizzes, vlogs
- Promotional: Product announcements, sales
- Inspirational: Quotes, success stories
- Seasonal Content: Holidays, events, and industry-specific dates (TIP! Use a website like NationalDayCalendar.com to find national days relevant to your business)
Plan Your Content Schedule
All social media have a variety of frequency goals with Linkedin being from 2-5 times a week and TikTok being the highest with 1-4 times a day! Of course these are just the dream goals and you need to prioritise what works best for you with the time you have. Additionally, prioritise which social media platform your business will perform best on. Eg. Light-hearted and fun video content will be most successful on TikTok.
Variety is always a good thing as it will be more interesting for you as a creator. It is also more interesting for the audience as it gives them a variety of things to watch and you can see which performs better. Some examples of this varied content could be blog posts, ‘spend the day with me’ vlogs and viral challenges.
Utilise Content Calendar Tools
A variety of tools have been developed to help make your life easier when it comes to planning your content calendar. Here are some that we recommend.
Google Calendar: A great tool for planning basic content and it’s free! Using the google calendar is a great way to practise and get familiar with content management. It is also very user-friendly
Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a great tool as it allows you to plan your content and schedule it. They also offer a variety of different paid packages to fit your budget. Using a tool like Hootsuite can be useful as it offers different tools in the packages such as a Hashtag generator, Automatic Link Tracking and a competitive benchmarking tool.
Later: Using later you can schedule all your posts for auto-publishing. Like Hootsuite they offer a variety of different paid packages so you can decide what suits your business best. Some perks of Later are their visual Instagram planner, Instagram story scheduling and Carousel auto-publishing. Don’t forget that you can check analytics using Later and see which posts are performing best and at which times.
Buffer: Buffer has a great free publishing tool that allows you to schedule content to 3 different social media platforms with a maximum of 10 posts per channel.
Conclusion
Building a content calendar for your social media ensures that your strategy is well-organised, consistent, and aligned with your goals. By planning your content in advance, using tools for scheduling, and regularly observing performance, you can enhance your social media presence and achieve better results. Start creating your content calendar today to streamline your social media efforts and boost your engagement.
If you’re ready to take your social media to the next level you can contact us to learn how we can help you build and optimise your content calendar!
