A social media calendar can help you keep track of your content marketing efforts, plus it can make it easy for your team to produce and publish content consistently.
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What Is a Social Media Calendar?
Having a social media calendar can help you organize and keep track of your marketing efforts, plus it can make it easy for your team to produce content consistently. This written schedule also helps with brainstorming, deadlines, and transparency and collaboration among your group.
In the beginning, you might find yourself constantly adjusting your content calendar based on your resources, i.e., time, marketing budget, and talent. While this could make you feel frustrated, take note that each company requires a unique marketing “process.” For this reason, a customized schedule tab is far more superior to a general template.
If you’re afraid to make a mistake, bear this in mind: It is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all.
5 Benefits of Having a Social Media Calendar
It becomes easy to create engaging content
A calendar can serve as a guideline for your marketing team and content creators who need to churn out new ideas regularly and in line with current events and pop culture.
By creating interesting and timely content, you can engage with your audience, boost your brand, and ultimately, grow your business.
You can plan out your resources
Whether your business belongs to the Fortune 500 or you’re just a solo entrepreneur with a limited marketing budget, a content and social media calendar can play a critical role in how you manage your resources.
When you have a solid content calendar, it also becomes easy to delegate tasks to each team member.
It promotes transparency for all team members and departments
When there is a written schedule that is visible to all stakeholders, everyone can plan accordingly and assess the progress or lack thereof. It also promotes excellent communication and collaboration while at the same time deter workers from slacking off.
Your engagement with your audience is continuous
With a written schedule, it is easy to track your progress in social media, content marketing, and other channels. And because it also allows you to keep an eye on the platforms where your target consumers hang out, it also makes it easier for you to nurture your relationships with them, which is done through posting and sharing relevant and engaging content.
It allows you to measure and track your marketing efforts
Key performance indicators or KPIs are metrics that will help you measure your success or lack thereof. And because these are outcome-oriented and time-sensitive metrics, they are closely tied to content calendar creation.
Popular Content and Social Media Calendar Tools
With literally hundreds of calendar tools available online, finding the right one for your business might be tricky. For this reason, we whittle down the list just for you.
Google Drive
This is one of the most popular tools to create content calendars because it’s free, functional, and above all, comes with adjunct apps like Google Docs and Google Sheets that further promote collaboration and transparency.
How to create a social media calendar with this tool:
Step 1: Create a folder on Google Drive and share it with your team. This will serve as your main folder.
Step 2: Create a new folder within the main folder; name it by month and year. (e.g., August 2021)
Step 3: Create a new Google Sheet within the month folder. At the top of the sheet, enter the month and year, which will serve as the header. Then, create seven rows to represent each day of the week; fill each row with daily tasks.
Hubspot Content Calendar Template
While you can use Excel to organize your tasks and promote teamwork, why not try Hubspot free content calendar template to make things easier for you? After all, it includes features like Content Repository tab and Social Network Update tab that will help you keep track of new and older content and publish them based on holidays and current events (or your digital marketing strategies).
Evernote
This popular app is not just for note-taking. It also carries templates and features that make it ideal for task management, archiving, and organizing a wide range of content such as texts, images, screenshot web content, and audios.
Evernote also carries customizable templates for social media and content calendars.
Hootsuite
This social media platform is popular for its user-friendly interface that promotes seamless integrations for social sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. However, not everyone is fully aware of its amazing built-in Planner tool that makes it easy to create marketing campaigns, track publishing content, and maintain transparency and collaboration among content creators.
With Hootsuite’s Planner, you can also publish content directly to your networks.
Learn how to create your content marketing strategy with this complete guide.
Word of Advice About What Is a Social Media Calendar and Why Do You Need One?
Treating your content and social media calendar as an operating guideline instead of a fixed instruction can help you stay relevant and connected with your audience. For example, you may want to change your social media post or content marketing based on a current event or a piece of breaking news.
Also, don’t forget to make real human connections with your followers. Responding to their online inquiries, positive reviews on customer review sites, and even not-so-stellar feedback on social media can go a long way towards creating a loyal customer base.
To learn more about creating a solid social media presence through the use of content calendar templates and other task management tools and metrics, visit LOJO Marketing or call us at (916) 303-4080.
