As marketers, we have all evolved from the chaos of unorganized workflow and unplanned posting, which often jeopardized our brand’s image. Today, the key to staying organized and posting effectively is through a social media content calendar.
Having a content calendar is useful, but creating it is another tedious task. In this blog, you will learn how to create a content calendar in 2024. We will not only discuss the “how-tos” but also share a free social media calendar template to start you on the right foot with a consistent and well-planned schedule.
We will also discover the best tools for organizing your weeks and months of content and some common social media calendar mistakes to look out for while planning.
What Is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar is a detailed overview of your posting schedule on all social channels by date and time. Marketers use it as their social planner to manage what they’ll post, where they’ll post, and when it will go live.
A content calendar offers a systematic approach for following deadlines, taking approval, maintaining consistency, and analyzing performance. A simple calendar contains dates, times, content, media, links, specific events, etc, according to the campaign and social network.
You can create a social media calendar based on your scheduling and posting needs with a ready-to-use template or social media calendar tools like SocialPilot, which offers an intuitive calendar that auto-fills.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Content Calendar?
Having a social media planner calendar is more than just ensuring posting at the right time; it is about effective management that leads to spending more time on impactful content creation.
Creating a calendar is like self-care. You no longer have to feel the terror of coming up with the content idea right before it’s time to get down to work and write your next post, as the deadline is looming on the horizon.
Some of the primary benefits of maintaining a social media planning calendar include:
To Stay Organized and on Track
Scribbling your content topics on crumpled pieces of paper, post-it notes, and in random notebooks isn’t a particularly reliable method. Also, it’s likely to drive you away from what’s really important amid so many ideas and things to think about.
A content calendar will give you a better perspective of your overall marketing strategy. You can align your post topics with social media and email marketing content.
Besides, it will help you mend content gaps and prevent you from missing your content’s deadline.
To Help You Stay Consistent
The 3 Cs of content marketing might as well be consistency, consistency, and consistency. The key to always being on your audience’s radar is offering them educational, relevant, and entertaining content day after day.
Irregular posting leads to an out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of scenario, no matter how much your audience likes your efforts.
You can use a social media calendar tool to keep things in check.
To Keep Your Audience Engaged
Sometimes, you can indeed wing it, but that’s not a method that will work in the long run. When you’re hurrying to publish something, you might fail to check if it’s a repetitive topic covered beforehand.
Similarly, randomly picked topics that don’t resonate with your target audience hurt your engagement. However, a plan to organize social media content calendar will allow you to spot such blunders so you only publish fresh and relevant content.
For instance, if you are a new restaurant business owner and make a whole week’s worth of specials list and organize it into a restaurant social media calendar to post, there is no stopping the people from being intrigued!
To Keep Track of Your Performance
Tracking your metrics is the only way to measure the effectiveness and success of your content and overall marketing efforts.
Establishing certain benchmarks is also necessary. By monitoring these numbers, you can tweak and fine-tune your content and give your audience what they need and want.
It’s worth noting that many renowned digital marketing agencies recommend building social media content calendars. If you take a look at their websites, blogs, and social media channels, you can conclude that they have one themselves.
To Ensures Better Team Collaboration
A social media calendar is not just for one person; it’s for the team, too. You can collaborate with your team members, assign them tasks based on priority, and make the workflow systematic.
Everyone can access your content plan and participate in the planning and execution with a centralized view. This is also useful in minimizing back-and-forth communications for approval from clients or stakeholders about content.
An organized and well-planned social media content calendar streamlines all this. It simplifies your entire marketing strategy and keeps you aligned with the result.
Do you want to know how to create a social media calendar and organize your schedule? Follow these six easy steps to create your own.
How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar: 6 Steps
Before you finally have your own personalized content calendar, you must answer some questions to make it impactful.
Yes, making social media calendars can be intimidating, but once you get a hold of it, your marketing strategy will become more powerful and intend-oriented. So, let’s begin breaking down each step:
1. Audit Your Current Social Media Posts
Everything starts with a detailed social media audit. This will determine whether your existing content and identity resonate with the target audience. Look at the metrics, such as reach, likes, shares, comments, saves, etc, of each type of content (e.g., images, blogs, videos, reels, stories).
To analyze your current social media presence, you can follow the below procedure:
- Compile All Your Social Profiles: Gather all the social profiles in one place to conduct the audit and comparison. Make sure they are all active and optimized.
- Rectify Branding Inconsistencies: Make sure your brand’s all social media profiles have similar profile images, bios, links, etc.
- Identify Weaknesses: Keep an eye out for the profile or content that does not fit your identity or has performed badly, and find out why it has not engaged enough.
- Establish Your Social Media Goals: Define your future goals. Having a clear social media goal based on your desired campaign’s expectations is necessary to streamline the process.
- Identify Your KPIs: With a clear goal, you can pinpoint the parameters and KPIs, such as engagement metrics, CTR, conversions, brand awareness, etc.
- Identify Your Top-Performing Social Content: Based on the set matrices and KPIs, you can now identify the content that has helped you reach your social media goals.
- Determine Your Social Media ROI: After analyzing the content, multiple social media accounts, and goals, the final tone is set by the ROI. Calculate your current ROI and set the future expectations.
You can follow the above process or use our free social media audit template, which is equipped with essential metrics to streamline the analysis of your current social media channels.
2. Choose Social Media Channels and Set Content Theme
Every social media platform has a different tone and vibe. For instance, Instagram and Snapchat are great for visuals, and LinkedIn suits professional content. Not every platform is a perfect fit for your type of content.
You need to decide which vibe suits your brand; choose the one where you are most likely to find the target audience. Consider your audit and pick the platform most effective for your brand.
After finalizing the social channels to focus on, set a clear theme for your content. Decide according to the brand goal and audience interests to generate results. For example, if you are a fitness brand, your theme can be fitness routines, nutrition tips, customer spotlights, etc.
Once your platform and theme are finalized, you can find engaging social media post ideas and fill your social media content calendar. However, you also need to ensure a content mix, which is distributing different content types (informative, promotional, UGC, etc) on your calendar.
For this, you can follow different strategies:
The 80-20 Rule
80% of your content should be informative, educational, and entertaining.
20% of your content should be to promote your product and brand.
Like SocialPilot’s Instagram account, which has a perfect mix of informative social media updates, entertaining memes, and promotional content.
The social media rule of thirds
⅓ of content from followers
⅓ of content to promote your product
⅓ of content should be interaction with followers
Even when you don’t directly promote your product, ensure to stick to your niche and resonate with your brand identity.
3. Choose the Right Tools and Templates
Now that you have all the items, you can start mapping them on your social media editorial calendar. But, before that, you need to decide whether you want to create social media calendar from scratch, use a tool for an auto-filled calendar feature, or use a ready-to-use template.
The resource selection for your social media calendar should be based on your needs. If you just want a basic calendar with a few details marked down, you can build it from scratch. If you want advanced features like scheduling, multi-platform posting, and analytics, you should choose social media calendar tools like SocialPilot. And, if you want to visualize your entire content plan in one place, you can go for free customizable calendar templates.
For any of the above, you need certain elements to prepare your content.
- Date and time
- Post content copy
- Post captions
- Post Format
- Visual assets
- Platform to share it on
- Tracking links (if any)
Decide on these factors and use them to make a content calendar. Below is a social media calendar with examples of elements for a week of content for Twitter.
4. Plan, Create, and Schedule Posts
With your theme, platform, content type, and tool in place, start planning your content. Evenly distribute different types of content (text, images, and videos) on your schedule and leave space for events, holidays, happenings, current affairs, news updates, etc.
Plan your social media content calendar around your campaign with various content to keep your target audience interested. Develop posts that match the platform, your theme, and your goals. Below is a peek into how you can segment your content format and type.
The whole purpose of a content calendar is to keep your social media strategy organized, so prepare batches of content in advance and schedule it for the best time to post to get the highest engagement.
5. Collaborate with Teammates and Clients
If you are creating a social media schedule and working on it alone, you are doing it wrong. Social media is not a one-person job; it requires teamwork. For the actual content, captions, and post copy, you can collaborate with your teammates and assign tasks to generate fresh ideas, schedule social media posts, etc.
When you have a calendar for your social media plan, your content is pre-made and can be sent to the clients and stakeholders for approval. There is a good scope for improvement in the social media strategy when you are pre-planned with content. This way, you can ensure that every piece of content is of the highest quality, free from errors, approved, and perfectly aligned with your brand’s tone.
6. Track and Analyze Your Social Media Content Calendar
When you start publishing posts per your social media content calendar, it does not mean the work is over. The next step is to keep track of your content performance and analyze the results. At this stage, using a social media tool to schedule posts and manage calendars can help.
These tools come with Analytics and Reporting features to help you effectively track your performance based on the goals you set. With this tracking, you can analyze which of your posts are doing well and which are not getting engagement. With regular review, you can refine your future content and strategy.
By using these steps, you can create a social media content calendar that will never disappoint you and also save a lot of time. This way, after every step, you are connected with the next one to keep a cohesive strategy aligned with your marketing goals.
Free Social Media Calendar Templates
We have created a free customizable template to help you create a useful social media content calendar. This well-crafted template will keep you organized and consistent in reaching your goals.
This is a monthly view of the social media editorial calendar. As you change the month, the view also shifts according to the dates and days. It also contains a distribution of post types; you can create your own schedule using this template.
The template includes the following elements for each social channel:
- Day
- Date
- Time
- Post Content Type
- Post Format Post
- Description
- Post Creative
- URL
- Campaign Name
- UTM
- Goal
This is designed to last long and do the heavy lifting for your social media schedule. You just have to download the template from the below link, change the month and year as prefered, and start planning and scheduling.
Here’s a free social media calendar template for you to get started:
Choose the Best Social Media Calendar Tool in 2024
For efficient content management, it is essential to select the right social media calendar tool. There are a variety of options available, but it’s important to know how each tool compares in terms of key features necessary for planning and execution.
Here’s a comparative representation of the five tools against critical functionalities to help you identify the best tool to meet your specific needs.
5 Top Social Media Calendar Mistakes to Avoid
For a successful marketing strategy, having a social media content calendar is crucial. But, there are several things that can go wrong and hinder your success. If you do not tailor your content, then these mistakes will have a significant impact on your social media performance.
Here are some common pitfalls and solutions to avoid them:
1. Not Considering the Difference Between Various Social Channels
Every social media platform has a different type of audience and content type. For example, LinkedIn is known for its professional content, and TikTok is all about short entertaining videos.
Now imagine what will happen if you share professional achievements on TikTok and a short entertaining video on LinkedIn. Your engagement will fall flat for sharing irrelevant content because the audience on these platforms is not looking for this type of content.
Not following the versatility of every social channel can result in low visibility and reach. Sharing the same content type on each platform will not help you reach the goals, even if you are consistent. That’s why planning your calendar considering the different voices and vibes is necessary. Trusting a platform like SocialPilot, which will let you know the different specifications of every platform in terms of intent and educate you about what’s trending, is necessary.
2. Not Repurposing Evergreen Content
Evergreen content stays relevant and valuable for years, and repurposing such content can attract engagement.
First, you must identify the evergreen content that has generated outstanding engagement and reach for you in the past. These types of content aren’t necessarily promotional; you can even repurpose educational or entertaining content like memes.
After identification, you have to decide if it needs repurposing or if it can be shared as it is at a later date. Repurposing popular content into a new format can extend its lifecycle and prevent it from gathering dust over time.
3. Not Segregating Monthly and Weekly Calendars
Whether you make a social media content calendar from scratch, use a template, or utilize a calendar tool, you need to figure out a way to segregate your monthly and weekly content plan. Blending both schedules can create confusion and overlap.
The monthly content calendar is primarily for planning the goals and content overview; however, the weekly content plan is a breakdown of the activities with a date and time for posting. Combining these two together can prevent you from distinguishing between the monthly theme and weekly detailed scheduling.
Separating these two formats can enhance the organization and avoid clashes, ensuring the smooth flow of content and work in the team. Using tools that let you visualize monthly and weekly content separately is necessary. SociaPilot has an intuitive content calendar that provides a single UI view of both types of calendar schedules for better understanding.
4. Not Having a Consistent Posting Frequency
While a social planner calendar has several benefits, posting consistency is the most important one. Often, Marketers make the mistake of not being consistent in their posting. If they have a regular frequency of one platform, it lacks on the other.
Not having consistent content distribution throughout the calendar might slow you down in reaching your goals. Sharing good quality content regularly is crucial, as your audience relies on it for brand updates, or else they might lose interest.
While you create your content calendar, keep the content moving so that something is grinding somewhere all the time. Establishing and maintaining a consistent posting frequency is how you can make the best use of your content calendar.
5. Not Re-evaluating and Optimizing
Having a social media calendar and sharing content consistently is not enough. You must regularly revisit your content’s performance and evaluate how it’s changing. Evolving your social media strategy with the digital landscape is critical to see growth.
To effectively monitor your performance and changes, having a calendar template won’t do; you need a social media management tool that offers analytics that shares insights on the regular changes in your reach and engagement.
This is where SocialPilot comes in. With its Analytics and Reporting feature, you can regularly re-evaluate and optimize your strategy and adapt based on real-time data. This is how you can refine your business growth according to your audience feedback and market trends to ensure your strategy remains relevant.
By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll save time and enhance your brand presence on social media. To never face low reach, this is how you can make your social media efforts a powerful component of your marketing strategy.
Reflecting Back
Having a content calendar isn’t just about organizing your content in one place; it’s about creating a lasting impact for your brand. Working with guesswork every time is old news; creating a social media content calendar and scheduling content in advance is the precision.
So, stop just filling slots and start telling your brand story with SocialPilot. Our feature-packed social media management tool streamlines your process, enhances engagement, and boosts performance.
Turn your planning into a success!
