Want your small business to succeed on social media in 2019? A social media content calendar is your best friend.
Read on to find out:
A social media calendar maps out in advance:
You can create a social media calendar in an Excel spreadsheet.
Using apps such as Hootsuite, Buffer and PostPlanner make the process easier. This is because you can schedule the content and they’ll post automatically on your behalf.
You might think planning your social media content for three, six or 12 months down the line is overkill. But there are several good reasons why it makes total sense.
Putting a social media content calendar together is hard work. But once you’ve planned your content and scheduled it, the job’s done. You won’t have to worry about what you’re going to post on social media (at least for the next several months).
More to the point, you can work on your social media marketing in easy-to-manage batches. This is more efficient and effective than trying to come up with something (or several somethings) on the spot every day.
It’s easy to forget about social media when you’re busy. But if you don’t post consistently, you won’t get much return on investment.
Social media is about building relationships with potential customers. And you can’t build strong relationships if you post 12 times one day then disappear for six months.
With a social media content calendar, you plan and schedule everything in advance so your audience will still hear from you – even when you’re scrambling to fill orders and don’t have time to hang out on Twitter.
Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and other lesser-known holidays (National Potato Chip Day, anyone?) are great opportunities to engage with your followers while showing your more human side.
But how do you keep track of them all?
Simple. Mark them on your social media calendar and you’ll get a reminder when they’re up.
Planning aside, a social media content calendar is also a record of what you’ve already done. This is helpful because:
Before you even think about planning your social media content, it’s worth taking stock of what you’ve been doing. This will help you understand:
Here’s how to go about this:
Social media marketers have been debating posting frequency for years. And they still don’t have cut-and-dried answers. Ultimately then, how often you should post largely depends on the network.
Here are posting frequencies for the four biggest social media networks as suggested by HubSpot:
A tweet has an average lifespan of 18 minutes. Which means you have to post several times a day to get noticed.
Start with five tweets spread out across the business day and work your way up
LinkedIn is slower than Twitter. Which means you can get away with posting as little as two to three times a week.
And don’t post more than once a day. According to HubSpot, this will backfire
Like LinkedIn, Facebook is relatively slow-paced. So, posting three to five times a week should be enough.
Here again, publishing more than five times a week can hurt engagement
Neil Patel argues that, unlike other social networks, consistency is more important than frequency on Instagram. In other words, it doesn’t matter how often you post. But if you start posting twice a day, you have to keep it up long term.
For this reason: “…the best posting frequency for Instagram is the posting frequency that you can consistently maintain for the rest of your natural life. Or at least until you sell your business or retire to a beach somewhere.”
Hootsuite suggests using the rule of three as a guideline:
Over time, you’ll get a feel for what your audience is enjoying and what isn’t doing so well. Tweak your mix so your audience gets more of what they want.
Spread your content mix evenly across the week and start scheduling. For your own content, this is straightforward. But finding good content from other sources will require some elbow grease.
Here are some tips to simplify the process:
Set aside some time each month to go over the data. Most social media networks have analytics tools you can refer to. And scheduling apps like Hootsuite and Buffer also have their own analytics dashboards.
Which content is doing best? And, more importantly, is it meeting your goals? Optimize your content mix and posting schedule accordingly.
Oh, and don’t forget to make time to interact with your followers in real time.
You can’t expect to succeed on social media unless you’re, well… sociable.
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