Working around a busy schedule sometimes means forgetting to be consistent with content. Social media content calendars can help you to be consistent and publish content in conjunction with any campaigns or events! A social media calendar will tell you what, where, when and why your content is being published. This helps you and your audience understand the importance and relevance behind your posts. Social media calendars help you plan new content ideas based on future events such as launches, holidays and seasonal events, meaning you have time to make your content perfect stay ahead of the game and never miss an important content day!
How to create your Social Media Calendar:
Step 1: Analysis of current social media platforms.
The first thing you should consider when creating your social media calendar is what platforms work for you? By analysing your current social media platforms, you can gain key understanding to which platforms currently work best for your business and which platforms you want to prioritise.
Top tip: It may be a good idea to put time aside to explore other platforms that you could potentially utilise in the future!
When your looking at performance rates, it’s important to also look at the type of content your followers enjoy the most. This can be seen through your current social media Insights and once you have chosen the social media platforms you want to prioritise, you can start to plan some content ideas!
Step 2: Creating your content.
The most important part of planning content is the content itself! There is no point posting content out that won’t resonate with your followers, after all – that’s who your content is for! Ensuring that you content speaks to your followers is to most important thing. This can be done through a variety of different content pillars and topics to shift the focus around different areas of the business.
Step 3: Creating your calendar.
It’s important to choose the right design when creating your calendar, it needs to be easy to understand and follow. The template you choose can be reused over and over so ensure its got all the elements in that you need.
Here’s some key points to consider when choosing what goes on your calendar:
- Social Media Platform
- Date
- Status (published)
- Topic
- Visual
- Any hashtags or links
Step 4: Activity times
It’s not just to correct platforms you need to consider, it’s the timings as well! There are certain times on social media where people are active. This all depends on age, location and gender, so it’s important you pick times when your audience will be active on these platforms. Many businesses choose the same time to post each week, this way your audience become aware of when to expect your content. However, to get to this point you need to find a time that suits both yourself and your audience. There are many ways to do this but the way that we like to do this at Blue Moon is by looking into our insights to understand when our audience is active on social media. This way we are getting first hand insights into our followers behaviours and can then be proactive with them we choose to share on social media. Here’s some key times recommended to post according to the general engagement rates on these platforms:
Instagram: 9am-10am and 8pm-9pm
Facebook: 9am
Twitter: 10am to 12pm
LinkedIn: 9am to 12pm
As you can see there’s a clear pattern of when audiences use social media the most and this is outside of work hours or within a lunch break for example. These a good times to start with if you you are new to social media and haven’t got any insights yet.
Step 5: Analysis of results.
After you have created your content calendar and started to published some content live, you can then analyse the results!
The analysis of results can be based on how successful the content performed, as well as how well your performing on social media compared to before. Once your in the flow of using of uploading content each month, you’ll be able to adjust the titles chosen to maximise engagement rates, such as finding out peak posting times and what content works best for your business.
Social media is constantly changing and it’s easy to get lost and fall behind! If this sounds like something your business needs help with, then why not speak to the team at Blue Moon? We can guide you through your marketing journey and help with the planning and execution of content for your social media platforms. If this is something you’d like help with for your business, then please contact us today.
