What’s the next thing that you are planning to post on Twitter?
Chances are that you have still not decided on what to post because you don’t really have a calendar that you have planned for your social media posting strategy.
Worry not! Because you are not alone. Until about an year back, I was in the exact same situation as that of you. My social media strategy involved logging into my social media account whenever I felt bored of writing for my blog, posting a few content strips that I could find here and there and then forget about it until the next time I felt bored again.
And, just like you and me, there are thousands others who follow this exact same method.
The Result – Wasted hours on social media without nothing really in terms of a gain. Neither in traffic nor, in the engagement.
With all of the noise around social media, it is important that you have a concrete social media strategy for your marketing efforts. And creating a social media calendar is an integral part of this strategy.
In fact, creating a social media calendar should be the first step in implementing a social media marketing plan. You could choose to use one of the many ready made social media calendar templates or, even use one of the inbuilt calendar functionalities that are available at some of the social media management services like buffer.
But what is recommended is that you create a customized calendar for your needs because none other than you can better understand your social media plans.
So why would you really need a social media calendar?
What difference does it make?
Why Creating a Social Media Calendar is Important
Social media is not about posting some random stuff onto your social media profiles and pages. It is about providing value to your social media circles and getting them to engage with what you are posting which can then be translated into traffic to your websites and blogs.
Aside to the fact that a social media calendar can help you stay organized, there are many other benefits of creating one. Let us look at some of these benefits –
It will help you maintain a schedule
Consistency is posting is an important facet of social media marketing. You cannot be posting content anytime and expect engagement on your posts. It is important that you maintain a regular schedule and a calendar will help you do that.
This will also ensure that you are not missing out on posting content and will also ensure that you are posting during critical and high engagement periods.
Focusing Equally on all Channels
Social media marketing is about carefully planning for each of the social media channels. The strategy for each of these channels have to be different because the audience behavior in each of these channels are different.
At the same time it is also important to keep in mind that focusing on a single channel might just not be the right idea because of this very diversity in behavior between each of these channels. Creating a social media calendar helps achieve this. Because your calendar will focus on all of the channels that you are planning to market on, no single channel will be ignored because you just forgot posting to it.
Posting Content of Value
Social media is all about engaging your audience. And engagement can only come from a piece of content that is worth engaging. Hence what you post and how you post is an extremely important aspect of social media posting.
A social media calendar will help you plan in advance. It will help you plan on what to post on specific days. And because you already have a plan, you will have a thought-about detailing of the piece of content that you are to post on a specific day.
This makes your posts all the more powerful, thus improving post engagement which in turn means a much better ROI on all your efforts.
The 4 Simple Steps to Creating a Social Media Calendar
Is creating a social media calendar difficult? Do you really have to sweat to create one for you?
The thought of creating one such calendar is enough to derail you from all of your social media posting plans. Because it really looks complicated. And for somebody like me, as I was about an year back, I had no clue of what should go into the calendar, how to create one and what were the tools to build a social media calendar.
While it could look like a herculean task, the fact is that if you understand the underlying strategy behind creating a social media calendar, it wouldn’t take a few minutes before you can master this activity.
Neil Patel in this post on creating a social media calendar in his blog at QuickSprout explains this with a nice and simple infographic. It explains the 4 characteristics of a good social media calendar. A couple of reads of these characteristics should guide you to creating your first calendar.
Courtesy of: Quick Sprout
Don’t forget to let me know your thoughts by commenting below. Do share the post with your social media circles using one of these sharing buttons below.