How to plan a social media content calendar?

Natalie Christen, Digital Strategist, Hosting Clues, shares some points to keep in mind when attempting to plan an 'audience-focused' social media content calendar.

Social media management and marketing is a time-consuming task, which is the reason why big businesses outsource it. For start-ups and small businesses, however, outsourcing or hiring a social media agency is not always a feasible option due to budget constraints. In such a case, one of the simplest ways to save time and be productive is by organizing or planning a social media content calendar.

From helping you post consistently to ensuring that your content is relevant, interesting, and engaging, a content calendar can help you attain your marketing objectives. Thus, below are a few tips on how to plan a social media content calendar.

Research and select relevant social channels

Based on your target
audience, the first step for creating a social
content calendar includes research
about social media user
demographics, which will help you choose relevant social channels.

• Is your target audience from the group of professionals?
• Or are they teenagers and young adults?
• Or are they from a particular location/country?

It is important to find
answers for these. Or else you’ll be wasting time, money and
effort posting on social channels that are
not relevant. Thus, with a vast list of social networks - Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc - narrowing down your choices will help you to create an audience-focussed
content calendar that drives conversion.

Set social media goals

As a business or a brand, your social media goals can range from
increasing followers to generating leads to increasing subscribers or sales
etc. You can set monthly goals. However, it is important to set realistic goals
that can be achieved over time. You can make use of Google Excel Sheets to map
this out. This excel sheet can also help you to measure and track the
performance of your social campaign at the end of each month.

Make use of different content types

When planning a content calendar, you need to ensure that the content
you are posting includes a variety of content types, as static can be boring.
From quotes to blog posts to videos,
infographic and gifs, there is a lot of interesting content ideas that you can work
on. You can also run a contest or have
live streaming.

For example; here is a Facebook Live event that was hosted by Amul.

Amul has also recently re-purposed old ads on social media, which has proven a great tactic to boosts customer engagement. Apart from regular social posting, you can also leverage Facebook stories and Insta stories, as these appear right at the top and is a good option to announce events and to promote seasonal sales, discounts, etc.

Engaging images and videos are a must

On social media, one of the best ways to boost customer engagement is by
using professional images. There is a lot of free image sites like Pixabay and Unsplash that offers high-quality
images and videos for commercial use. You can use these for social posting.
Also, ensure that the content is short and simple and use URL shorteners if you want to lead customers
to a specific web page. Not to forget, make use of relevant hashtags to improve
reach.

Set posting frequency and select time

Do you want to post once daily? or Thrice a week on
alternate days? Based on your marketing
objectives, you need to set your posting frequency. Here, one of the important
things to remember is ‘quality matters more than quantity’. As such, consistent
posting is much more important than posting frequency.

Likewise, based
on research, the best time to post on different social networks differ. The
timings would also change based on the location of your audience. Thus, it is
important to get this right for higher conversions.

To sum up, these are some of the tips that can help you to plan your social media content calendar. Once you are done with the planning part, you can make use of social media management and publishing tools like Hootsuite that allows you to publish and track social posts across multiple social channels. You can also make use of free Google Chrome extensions for social media that can help you with your social media content and management.

This article piece is authored by Natalie Christen, Digital Strategist, Hosting Clues