Planning a Social Media Calendar for Marketing teams

Social media is a productive tool for business owners and freelancers to market their products and connect with a vast audience. 71% of SME businesses use social media for these purposes, out of which 52% post daily.   

But regularly posting quality content every single day on social media isn’t that easy. Unless you hire a marketing team to handle such tasks for you, this type of work falls on your shoulders.   

In the modern-day world where technology is making huge strides every day, there has to be some way through which you can stay active on social media and regularly post, right? This is where the social media calendar comes to save the day! 

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A social media calendar helps you plan and organize all your future social media posts. With the help of this calendar, you can create posts that you plan on posting over the next few days, weeks, or even months.  

You might already know that the impact of social media on marketing and branding is massive. In 2020, 44.8% of global internet users searched for brand information on social media. This makes social media a great platform to target and connect with more people.  

A social media calendar helps you constantly reap the benefits of social media. It assists you to consistently post content on your social media handle without ever missing out or forgetting.  

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A social media calendar is beneficial for a lot of people in different roles. If you are any one of the following, then you might find many uses for this calendar.  

• Small Business Owner - Hiring an entire marketing team for your business may burn a hole in your pocket. A social media calendar can help you plan ahead for your content. 
• Solopreneurs and Freelancers - As you are the only ones running the entire show, this calendar can help you stick to the social media routine.  
• Marketing Team - You and your team members might be professionals in the job, but missing a deadline for a post may be damaging for the company and risky for your job.  

Irrespective of you flying solo or working with an entire team, a social media calendar is a worthy inclusion in your resources and strategies.  

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• Assists in making consistent appearances on social media 
• Keeps you organized on all upcoming posts 
• Lets you plan the date, time, and platform for the post 
• Provides better content quality by giving you ample time to think through each detail of future posts instead of rushing through them 
• Avoids any last-minute content creation 
• Saves time 
• Reduces the number of errors in the post 
• Avoids any delays and eliminates huge gaps between two posts 
• Prevents you from missing out on an event or festive season that calls for a mandatory post 
• Empowers you to try out different variations, permutations, and combinations to find out the ideal strategy for social media marketing 

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Executing a series of steps and loads of planning goes into making the perfect social media and marketing calendar. But before we get into that, let’s take a look at the different types of social media calendars that you can use.  

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1. Monthly view 
2. Weekly or Daily view 

As the names suggest, the monthly view displays all the posts for the entire month so that you have an idea of what lies ahead. The weekly or daily view shows you the posts for all the days in that particular week so that you can focus on them alone. The weekly view also makes your screen look less crowded.  

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You can create your social media calendar all yourself with spreadsheets on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. You can also use Google Calendar as the calendars are ready-made. All you have to do is add your posts and details to it.  

Apart from this, there are many templates online that you can download and use to create a social media calendar. The advantage of a ready-made calendar over spreadsheets is that you can easily schedule your posts when you add them.  

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You must now set categories for the different types of content that you post. These categories may be, 

• Blogs 
• Product updates 
• Major events 
• Announcements 
• Relevant and trending images and videos 
• Tips and tricks 

Like these categories mentioned above, find the ones that are relevant to your business or project.  

Also, note the different social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., and find the channel that your customers use the most. You can also classify your posts based on the different social media platforms.  

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Now that you have categorized each post, you can add information about the post like, 

• Date of posting 
• Time of posting 
• Caption 
• Type of post - regular post, story, ads, etc. 
• Specific target audience 
• Link to the post 
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With your categories and format all set, plan for all your future posts. Add each post and its corresponding detail to the social media calendar so that publishing your post on any given day can be completed in a few seconds! 

Ensure that you plan your posts for holidays and special occasions well in advance so that you don’t forget about it when the time arrives.   

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• Instead of saving your post images and videos in your local folder, save them on cloud content repositories like Google Drive and Dropbox. This way, you can easily share the content with your team members, and they can provide their input as well.  
• Save your posts with the publishing date as the file’s name. This makes it easy to find the post, especially if you have too many posts created well in advance.  
• Try not to overcrowd the post on your calendar with too much information but provide necessary details so that it is easy to find and publish. 
• You can use tools like Google Analytics to track and analyze your posts on different social media platforms. Using data like the traffic and number of views, you can enhance your marketing strategy. You can also import all your data and analytics into one dashboard with Dataflo. 

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Investing your time in a social media calendar can be really beneficial for you and your business. With this calendar, you can post high-quality content at the perfect time on social media platforms. This will increase your customer engagement rates and thereby generate more sales.  

Create your own efficient calendar and improve your social media marketing today!