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Digital Marketing

Social Media

Creating a Social Media Content Calendar

Social media content calendars are an essential part of social media strategy for brands, influencers, and creators who manage multiple social media handles. This comprehensive guide will help you create and use a content calendar.

min read

Apr 1, 2024

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Strategy

Benefits of Using a Content Calendar

A social media calendar serves as a comprehensive schedule of your future social media content, organized by the date and time they will be scheduled for posting on a given social media handle. This tool can be organized as a simple document, a detailed spreadsheet, or an interactive dashboard in any given social media management tool. Software tools with content calendars will enable you to track and refining your content through analysis and testing. Using this as an organized process for content creation will then enable a brand to be more efficient and re-invest time savings in making improvements to content quality. Content calendars are used extensively for creating and planning posts, organizing campaigns, and evaluating the performance of individual content. Using a social media content calendar can help brands and creators improve the quality and impact of their social media activities from this structured approach to scheduling and managing content.

The benefits of using a content calendar are primarily from the structured process this creates for the various tasks that are involved in social media management. Content calendars also function as a quality assurance system, allowing for early detection of errors and re-checking of content through proactive scheduling and approval workflows. For organizations with multiple people working across a brand, using a social media content calendar can enable better collaboration and visibility of each stakeholder's scheduled content. This allows each person working on your social media accounts to provide feedback and implement changes, which helps ensure that all content is aligned with account guidelines like brand voice or visual style.

What's in a Content Calendar

Using a social media content calendar provides you with a bird's eye view of your content plan, and would include each post's creative assets, content type, and the timing. While most larger social accounts will use a 3rd party social media management platform, a content calendar could also be a spreadsheet with post details, although this can become burdensome and may not be worthwhile. Most individual social platforms now provide accounts with scheduling abilities, but would not have the capabilities of software tools that provide scheduling for multiple platforms in a single workspace. Your content calendar should contain these basic elements, but may have other functionality as part of a social media management tool with content calendar features, such as recommendations for post timing based on your account data.

Publishing Date and Time
Social Media Platform
Post Format (Reel, Story, YouTube Short)
Post Copy
Visual (Image, GIF, Video)
Hashtags
Location Tags

Tagging Content Attributes

Understanding the unique characteristics of your published content will enable you to uncover performance insights that go beyond the basic metrics provided by social media platforms. For example, a commercial brand might discover that posts with sales-oriented language or promotional content show consistently less engagement when compared to other content types. This kind of insight into engagement, based on the nature of the content, becomes more accessible with the use of structured attributes, such as tags that categorize post content and facilitate an organized analysis of social media data. Additionally, these insights can guide future content strategies, helping to tailor content that better aligns with audience preferences and increases engagement. Over time, this strategic approach can lead to a more effective content social media presence, driving higher levels of audience interaction and brand loyalty.

Social Media Audits

Building a content calendar starts with auditing your your existing social media strategy to understand content performance and opportunities for improvement. Start by reviewing each individual social handle and what has been configured or added on the account. The account profiles and cover photos should accurately represent your current visual branding style and match the image size requirements of each social network to avoid distortion on your profile artwork. Check that all profile fields are filled in correctly and that the bio or description content is tone aligns with your brand's voice guidelines. You should aim to use consistent usernames across all social platforms; it's acceptable to have multiple accounts on the same network if they serve distinct purposes but for more brands, one account will be more effective. Review the URLs in your profiles to verify that they lead to the correct locations, and for platforms that allow pinned posts, review pinned content to ensure that they are still relevant. Lastly, if your profile has the ability to be verified on a specific social platform, this is can be worthwhile if your account is active and regularly posting content.

As a second step to your social media audit, you will need to measure your social media metrics across all individual accounts with content type, format, and any unique attributes that can be used to organize content. Use this part of the process to also check social listening data and understand who is sharing content, what others are saying about your brand, and what other accounts have shared your content or are using social assets. Evaluating your social media footprint for a formal audit will give you an opportunity to look at a comprehensive snapshot of your social media accounts, and identify what is working, and what is not. What are your best performing posts? What is unique about this content, and how can you incorporate these elements into your future strategy? Your should be looking for specific data trends on audience engagement such as interactions and shares. Use the analytics tools available in your social media platforms or social media management tools. If data is available for more than two years of post history, evaluate how your audience composition has changed or consider any other factors that may impact performance trends over a longer period of time.

Content Mix

After auditing social content, you should be ready to start implementing scheduled posts and creative assets into your content calendar. This starts with selecting the right variety of content you'll post, which platform you'll schedule content for, and what the timing is relative to other posts This process is at the center of social media management, and your efforts in understanding the results of your audit will help inform your choices in social media scheduling. While each account and audience will have unique needs and performance, it may be helpful to use the rule of thirds: one-third of your posts should promote your business or drive conversions, another third should share curated content from thought leaders, and the final third should engage personally with your followers. Another approach is the 80-20 rule, where 80% of your posts inform, educate, or entertain, and 20% promote your business. A mix of different types of content keeps your feed interesting and you should consider broadening your scope of content and experimenting where possible.