Do you get anxious or frustrated when it comes to scheduling content for social media? Is your current strategy not working? Or are you simply looking to lessen the load on you and your business? That’s exactly what a social media content calendar will do for you.

Social media content calendars can help businesses streamline their social media strategy by creating a plan for the week, month, quarter, or year that is specific to their business and what they want to accomplish. Planning in advance will allow your business to better manage their personalities, creativity, and production on social media.

Being organized and having a timetable of what content should be posted allows organizations to focus their time on the future instead of being reactive.

We’re going to dig into what exactly a social media content calendar is, how they work, and what they’ll do for your business (and time!).

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar is a list of the content that will be published on your website, blog, social media channels, or podcasts. Typically it includes the date, topic, and type of content that will be published.

The type of content can be separated between different calendars or all inputted into the same one. It doesn’t matter, as long as it works for your workflow.

Some of the benefits of using a content calendar are:

• You’ll be able to clearly see what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by;
• You’ll have an overview of the content that has been created, published and shared;
• You’ll have an overview of the progress that is being made towards your goals.

Why are content calendars important for your business?

Content calendars are a great way of ensuring that your content is posted on time and in the right place. They allow for better planning and more efficient use of social media marketing.

They are especially helpful if you’re working in a multi-person team. Planning, scheduling, and assigning social media posts to other team members alleviates your workload as well as others’.

A content calendar can be used to plan, organize, and execute a company’s social media marketing strategy. It can also be used to increase efficiency by allowing you to post content in the right place at the right time. A well-planned social media marketing strategy will help you to build your brand and drive traffic back to your website or close more sales.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating, distributing, and promoting content. Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media (such as videos, blogs, infographics, or presentations) with the objective of driving brand awareness and engagement.

Content marketers need to have an understanding of their audience in order to create a strategy that will resonate with them. They also need to know how their content will be distributed so they can promote it effectively. The distribution channels used should align with the objectives set out in the content strategy.

Content Marketing Strategy on Social Media

A content marketing strategy on social media is a campaign that is specifically designed to target social media platforms. The goal of this marketing technique is to create content that will be shared among the followers and increase the number of followers.

There are many different ways in which you can use repurposed content for your content marketing plan for social media. You can take a blog post and turn it into a YouTube video or you could pull an article from your blog and turn it into a tweet series. You can also take a podcast episode and turn it into a blog post, or vice-versa, or all of the above.

How to Create a Successful Content Calendar For Maximum Results

Creating a successful content calendar for maximum results is not an easy task. There are many factors that need to be taken into account, but it’s worth it in the end.

Fortunately, there are software programs that can help with this task. They can help you create a content calendar, schedule content to publish on social media, and manage your social media marketing campaigns. Below are a few of the best programs and tools to use:

• Buffer: This is an easy-to-use social media scheduling tool that allows you to connect your social media pages and profiles to bring them into one dashboard. They become much more manageable and not so daunting. Buffer is free, but the free version only allows scheduling for 10 posts at a time.
• Hootsuite: Similar to Buffer, Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to connect multiple social media accounts and bring them to one dashboard. Hootsuite starts at $49/mo.
• CoSchedule: CoSchedule is known for their marketing calendar capabilities. Their platform will allow you to create highly robust content calendars, as well as tasks/todo lists. They have a free plan, but it’s limited to two social media accounts.
• Evernote: While not a social media scheduling service, Evernote is really good for saving content ideas and organizing your thoughts. Primarily, though, Evernote’s web clipper plugin is exceptional for quickly saving content. For example, if you read an article on a digital magazine that you’d like to share with your audience, you can use Evernote’s web clipper to save it for you to schedule later on.

5 Essential Elements of a Successful Content Calendars

A content calendar is a flexible tool and can be anything you want, but it should contain a few things in order to maintain its effectiveness and efficiency. There are five essential elements of a successful content calendar:

1. Timelines: These are the deadlines for each piece of content.
2. Audiences: This is who your content is targeting.
3. Content types: This includes videos, blog posts, press releases, etc.
4. Media channels: These include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
5. Metrics: These are the goals or results that you want to achieve with the campaign (e.g., increase email list size by 10%).

Conclusion

If you’ve been flying by the seat of your pants in terms of social media content curation, then it might be time to buckle down and implement a content calendar. It’ll free up so much more of your time and anxiety around content creation.

Once your content is scheduled for the week, month, or quarter, you can essentially “forget” about it because it’s already done. Sit back, interact with comments and messages that are pouring in, and get ready for the next month.

Did we leave anything out? Leave it in the comments.