Having a social media content calendar for your business is of huge benefit. It ensures you never miss important dates, saves you time and money, helps you organise your website and social media content and build positive relationships with your audience. Your social media content calendar can be recorded in a way that suits you, with the three main ways being in a spreadsheet, on a printed calendar or using scheduling tools such as Buffer or Hoot Suite.

Read on because we’re going to explain the steps you’ll need to take to create your own social media editorial calendar.

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar for Your Business

There are five main steps to creating a content calendar for your social media accounts. They are:

  1. Identify your audience – as a part of your business plan, you should already have nailed your target audience or customer persona. This is the group of people who you are focusing on to purchase your product or service. Write down your ideas about what they think, like, engage with and want to know more about.
  2. Audit your content – look through the content you have shared on social media in the past. Make a note of what was engaged with and shared, as well as which post types completely flopped. Is there any content that you can reuse or repurpose?
  3. Research content – having worked out which posts resonated with your audience in the past, you’ll now have a good idea of what they like and don’t like. Spend some time looking for content you feel that your target audience wants.
  4. Check your diary – make a note of all the important dates with which your audience will relate. Special events such as Mother’s Day, Christmas and Easter are good for eCommerce businesses to identify well in advance.
  5. Make your plan – using your choice of calendar tool, record down information such as:
    • Social media platform
    • Date & time of post
    • Image for post
    • Text for post
    • Link for post

In your plan, it is important to plan ahead. Some people find focusing on a theme each month helps them to create their content. Others like working around what’s been happening in current events. Or you may want to base your content around important dates or your current marketing focus. While it’s good to have your content calendar created ahead of time, try not to aim for more than a month of advice. This saves you from having to make any large edits due to unforeseen events occurring.

If you’d like some help creating your social media content calendar, we can help! In fact, we’d even say that this is one of our specialities! Send us an email today and together we’ll get your content humming!