6 Steps To Creating Your Social Media Content Calendar

A content calendar is a great tool for any business that is using social media in their marketing strategy. Content calendars keep your marketing efforts organized, save you time, and allow you to visually see your content for the time frame.

Social media growth happens organically when you post consistent content that your audience wants to engage with. Having a content calendar in place will help you know what to post, when to post, and you won’t have to worry about creating content on the fly.

6 steps to creating your social media content calendar:

CREATE MONTHLY GOALS

Before you can start posting on social media, you need to determine your goals for social media. Are you goals to increase brand awareness? Lead generation? Sales? Website clicks? When goal setting, start small, be specific, and set a realistic time frame to achieve each goal!

DETERMINE WHAT YOU WILL SHARE

Now that you’ve set your goals, plan content categories and types around the campaigns and goals you want to achieve! If you are looking to increase brand awareness, share content related to building your brand: what you sell, your story/background, you as the owner, your team members. 

If you are looking to increase lead generation, share valuable content that educates your followers about your product/service and industry. If you are looking to increase sales, share content about the transformation your product or service provides and testimonials. Social proof is gold! Always remember the 80/20 rule though where you are sharing educational and entertaining content 80% of the time and the other 20% of the time is selling.

CREATE THE CALENDAR

Building a content calendar is super simple. We recommend setting it up in either Google Docs or Sheets (if you prefer the cells!) Using Google allows you to easily access it online, and share it with your team to contribute.

Set the calendar up by the number of platforms your business is on and the number of times you are sharing to each platform a day. Finally, create spots for the content category, picture/graphic, caption, and hashtags if necessary.

ADD CONTENT CATEGORIES TO THE CALENDAR

Now it’s time to add your content categories to the calendar. This helps you make sure that you are spreading content out over the month, and you are following the 80/20 rule we mentioned above. A few great content categories are:

• Educational

• Inspirational

• Personal

• Funny

• Selling

• Testimonials

GATHER AND CREATE YOUR CONTENT

Now that you have a plan, it’s time to put it in action. Research and curate the content to fill in your calendar. Once your calendar is full, batch your content ahead of time and auto-schedule it in a tool such as Planoly (Instagram) or Hootsuite (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn).

TRACK POSTS AND PROMOTIONS

Now that you have a content calendar organizing your social media posting, you need to set up a spreadsheet to track your Instagram analytics. If you set up your calendar in Google Sheets, simply create a separate tab on the spreadsheet. A few metrics you need to track from month to month are: followers, impressions (this is how many unique accounts see your posts) and engagement rates.

Now that your content calendar is built out, you can create your content.

Still lost? Take a look at our membership where we provide content calendars for you so you don’t have to!