Why You Need a Social Media Calendar

Do you follow a plan for your social media accounts? Any business that runs multiple social media accounts faces the same dilemma: Consistently posting quality content that engages with their audience.

Poorly structured posts, missed dates, and bad quality isn’t going to cut it anymore. These days, businesses need to be organised, allocate resources wisely and ensure a robust strategy to maximise their growth across each channel.

This is where a social media calendar comes in handy.

What Can a Social Media Calendar do for Your Business?

Having a social media calendar can do wonders for your business. Essentially, it is a detailed schedule that includes all your social media posts (across all platforms) and is organised by date and time. It’s basically a roadmap for your social media success.

A social media calendar breaks down each post and helps you consistently curate high-quality content. Implementing a calendar can help you stay organised, plan your content appropriately and save a significant amount of time better spent on other tasks. Here are five reasons why you should consider developing your calendar right away.

Five Reasons Why You Need a Social Media Calendar

1. Provides you with a bird’s eye view of performance. Social media calendars help you monitor the ROI and success rate of each post on every channel, so you can continue to deliver fresh and engaging content. Find out what works and adjust your strategy according to these insights.
2. Balances the flow of content. It prevents your social media accounts from gathering dust or from bombarding your followers with too many posts.
3. Ensures quality and editorial standards. A calendar gives your team time to react, research and produce the best content for each platform, while catching any embarrassing mistakes.
4. Builds trust and credibility for your brand. By continuously delivering interesting and beneficial content, you’ll be rewarded by followers that trust your expertise.
5. Saves time and money. Your team will know exactly when and where to post new content. This can save you plenty of time. They’ll understand how much time to allocate for any given task, thereby saving resources that would’ve been lost had they needed to check and examine every channel before writing new content.

What Makes a Good Social Media Calendar?

A good social media calendar organises your content in one place so you can easily create, track and assign your posts.

Use visual identifiers for each social media channel your business uses, so you can quickly see which account needs to be updated on any given day.

A good social media calendar should be readable and include any necessary information that’s related to your content marketing strategy. For instance, on Wednesday you might be posting a product announcement on Twitter, a blog post on LinkedIn, and engaging your followers on Pinterest by sharing and commenting on content related to your business.

Unless you’re the sole operator of your social media marketing strategy, your calendar will also provide directions to specific writers. Therefore, anyone can pick up your calendar and easily see what type of content needs to be created that day, when it should be published, and how to promote it across each channel effectively.

Finally, a good calendar will help you plan ahead. It should lay out the upcoming weeks, and breakdown the content you want to publish. The further ahead you plan, the easier it will be to generate high-quality posts.

Remember that adjustments can always be made if something doesn’t work. A post on Facebook may suddenly go viral or get more attention than you anticipated, in which case you should analyse what made it work so well and try to replicate it again in the future. The same goes for posts that don’t fare too well. Take the time to understand why and look to avoid this again in the future.

How You Can Get Started

Making a social media calendar is integral to maintaining a healthy and productive social media strategy. By simply planning ahead, you’ll be able to make informed decisions, deliver strategic content and see improved results. Get the most out of your social media accounts by creating your calendar today.