Making a Content Calendar for Social Media

To say that the world of social media moves quickly is probably understating the situation just a bit.

Especially in the fast-paced world we’re now living in, filled with never-ending news cycles that change more frequently than the weather, it can be difficult to keep up with ONE social network – let alone the many that your customers are likely engaged with. One minute, a breaking news item captured everyone’s attention. The next, something that seemed like the biggest story in the world just a few moments ago has already been forgotten.

All of this can make the content creation process difficult to manage, let alone successfully execute. Therefore, if you truly want to make things as easy as possible for both you AND your team members, making a content calendar for social media isn’t just a recommendation.

It’s essentially a requirement.

Creating Your Perfect Content Calendar: Breaking Things Down

But before you get to the actual content calendar itself, you’ll first need to begin by looking inward with a good, old-fashioned social media audit.

In other words, you need to properly assess your current social media efforts to see where you currently are and, more importantly, to help identify where you’d ideally like to be.

To perform an effective social media audit, you’ll need to consider things like:

• Which platforms are you currently using? Which ones are performing the best?
• If you have platforms that are underperforming, why is that? Is it just because you’re not publishing the right content? If so, you could always use a service like Respona to perform more adequate research before posting. If it’s legitimately because your audience doesn’t really use that network, you may want to focus your efforts elsewhere.
• What are your goals with each of the networks that your brand is engaged with?
• Which member of your team is responsible for creating and distributing content for each of those channels?

Once you have all of this information at-the-ready, you’ll have everything you need to make more informed decisions moving forward.

It’s All About Looking Ahead

At that point, you’ll need to determine a few key things about your larger content strategy for social media. First, you’ll need to think about your posting frequency. In other words, how often are you currently posting to each social network? Make a note of all of this, separated into categories based on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and more.

As an aside, here is also where you decide if your current posting frequency is the RIGHT posting frequency. If you decide that you need to ramp up or pull back the volume on any one site, make a note of it so you can address it on the calendar.

You’ll also need to come up with your ideal content ratio – the heart of your content categorization system. In other words, if you post 10 pieces a week on Twitter, how many of those are blog posts versus videos versus announcement posts versus visual content you’ve made using a tool like a tree diagram maker? Do this for ALL of your active social media channels.

Once you know all of this information, you’ll have everything you need to visualize it using the content calendar itself. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t LITERALLY have to make a calendar if you don’t want to. You could always use a timeline creator like Visme(which I founded) to visualize this schedule in some other way.

The important thing is that you know and catalog the following bits of information about EVERY piece of content you post:

• Which particular social network content is destined for?
• The date that content will be posted. If one date is particularly important (like a product announcement video that needs to go live before the product is actually available), highlight it or make sure it stands out in some other way.
• The precise time of day that this content will go live.
• The “copy”, means the content itself. If it’s a blog post, here is where you link to a Word document. If it’s a video, here’s where you link to the. AVI, etc.

Typically, that last part will be blank at the beginning of each month – but that’s okay. You and your team now know exactly what needs to be created (and where it’s going) by precisely which date – allowing you to establish processes to guarantee that you’re getting the right content in front of the right people at exactly the right time, no matter what.

About the Author

Payman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specializing in website design, user experience and web app development.

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