How to Create a Strategic Social Media Content Calendar

A social media content calendar helps you save time by planning your posts in advance, and can be optimized by experimenting with posting frequency and content to find what resonates best with your audience

A well-planned social media content calendar lets you use your time to plan for the future and focus on other aspects of your marketing strategy. Scheduling out a social calendar in advance will save you from searching topics every day.

Creating a posting schedule that works is a process of persistent experimenting and fine-tuning. Play around with different posting times and the number of times per week you post as well as your content. This will give you insight into what works specifically for your audience. Here are some tips to create a social media content calendar.

Strategic Social Media Content Calendar

One strategy that will help you plan and post content more strategically is by creating a social media content calendar. A content calendar can help you stay organized, set reasonable goals, be consistent across channels, and measure the outcomes of your efforts so that you get the most out of your social media presence. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the steps of setting up a successful social media content calendar and provide tips on how to make it work best for your brand.

Pick your social channels

Choose one or two platforms that you like to keep up with. Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to post on all the different channels. Once you’re comfortable with those, add another. There are schedulers that will help you post across multiple platforms so you don’t have to do them individually. Or, better yet, call Advent Trinity to set up social media posts for you.

Determine your goals for posting

Creating a content strategy seems like a lot of work, but it all really boils down to your goals. You’ll want to educate your audience on your industry while informing them of new products or services while keeping them entertained. Use a combination of promotional material, entertaining content, and curated or user-generated content.

The exact mix will vary depending on your brand, niche, and what types of content you see your audience respond to. An initial rule of thumb to follow is to make ⅔ of the content informational and ⅓ or less should be promotional. Constant promotional posts can alienate followers. 

Posting ideas

• Publish content, news, and opinions relevant to your industry
• Post action shots of your products and photos of others showing off your swag
• Tips, shout-outs, and company updates 

See more great post ideas here

Repurpose content

Don’t be afraid to repurpose content and schedule it across different social media platforms to get the most out of it. Tweak the wording to make it appear new. Blogs are great to take bits of information and post.

Determine how often to post and when

Here are the industry standards on how many times to post to a particular platform:

• Facebook pages: 1-2 per day
• Twitter: 3-10 times per day
• Instagram: 1-3 times per day
• Instagram Stories: 2-5 times per day
• Pinterest: 3-20 times per day
• LinkedIn: 1-2 times per week

Though, you can use insights to see when your audience is online and consuming your content.

Plan Your Social Media Content Calendar

Creating a social media content calendar is an excellent way to ensure that you are providing your followers with regular, engaging content. Not only will it keep your followers informed, but it also provides them and your business with structure, which can help you achieve greater success and reach more people.

In order to make your content as effective and successful as possible, think about what topics would be of interest to your followers, and how they can generate engagement. Focus on creating content related to these topics so that it resonates with those you’re trying to reach. With a bit of creativity and thoughtful planning, you can create a content calendar that will engage your followers in ways both large and small, resulting in increased brand loyalty and improved relationships between both businesses and customers.

To sum up: take the time now to create a social media content calendar; it will pay dividends later!

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By Leslie Radford