Establishing a strong social media presence is one of the best ways to interact with your audience and attract new customers. The internet is the dominant way that people obtain their information these days, and social media platforms have become a hub for not only personal entertainment but education and promotion as well.
Blog posts and other SEO content have their place in your marketing plan, but you won’t want to overlook the visibility that social media can provide for your business. However, just like your more long-form SEO content, you will need to approach social media content production with a cohesive strategy as well.
By strategizing correctly and making sure you are organized and consistent, you can develop a healthy follower base and maintain frequent interactions with your audience. This is invaluable to brand visibility and may present the best return on investment you can ask for from your marketing goals. If you’re looking to make the most of your social media content strategy, then you’ll want to turn to a social media content calendar.
You may utilize a content calendar in some form with your other marketing content, but social media content calendars come with their own unique formats and advantages. To help you understand the true power of this tool, we have created this guide that breaks down some of the more important details.
Preparing your social media strategy
One of the best aspects of a social media content calendar is the level of organization that it will provide for your organization after you have begun your work. This does require some more organization and effort upfront, but this time will be repaid to you in the long run. A social media content calendar is concerned with providing a simple and straightforward layout of your social media content goals for the months ahead down to an hour if not minute basis. To make sure this can run smoothly, you’ll need to make sure your social media reach is well defined.
One of the most important things to do to maximize the power of your social media content calendar is to conduct a social media audit. This involves thoroughly analyzing all the accounts and content you currently have on the web and making sure you can account for it. You’ll want to make sure your team is unified and understanding of your current social media presence, so you’ll want to make sure you have a thorough history of all your activity.
Once you have accomplished this, you can look toward trimming down any unnecessary accounts or revamping areas where you have been lacking so far. Your brand should have a consistent voice across all your platforms, so you don’t want visuals and language to vary too drastically from platform to platform. Once you have solidified all the areas of social media where you want to maintain a presence, next you can start planning out your content. Let’s go over some ideas you should consider for your campaigns.
Make use of social media holidays and other recurring events
While it is always a good idea to come up with your own original events and ideas, social media offers a wealth of opportunities for your business to piggyback off larger events. With big holidays and other occasions where a lot of eyes will be on the same topic, you can insert your business into the conversation, and generate organic interest through customer interactions.
On top of social media holidays, you will want to develop a routine of consistent events that you can plan and produce. Your audience will appreciate it if your posts are interactive, and if you don’t post frequently enough, you may risk losing out on their attention. Now there may be such a thing as too much content, and you don’t want to overload your audience with ceaseless information. To avoid this, make sure you are diversifying your content, and offering enough variety where interaction does not feel forced or tiresome.
One creative avenue for recurring events is turning to things like contests or giveaways on your social media channels. These are always sure to drive engagement from eager viewers, and with enough regularity, you can build up an audience that is regularly tuning in to your content.
Schedule content for consistency
And speaking of regularity, this is perhaps the most important feature of social media content calendars: consistency. Every area of marketing will require your consistent care and attention, but social media may be the most demanding avenue. Social media users on just about every platform will have access to thousands upon thousands of messages and posts a day, and if your content is not impactful, or if it does not appear regularly, you risk getting lost in the sea of other content.
Consistency is good for attracting an audience that values regularity. If you are a business that posts intently for a few weeks, only to disappear for months at a time, it can seem like you are unreliable. The best way to prove that your business will be here for customers, and be able to respond to and acknowledge them, is to do just that: be there to regularly interact and respond with them.
Social media platforms have become so varied in the type of content you can even the audiences they are geared towards, so your team has endless possibilities to explore when it comes to finding social media success.
That being said, this abundance of choices can become overwhelming, and without a strong lead to guide your strategy, you risk becoming lost in the process. A social media content calendar is one of the best ways to keep your team on schedule and understand the content they are being asked to produce. And one of the best social media calendar programs you can find is at Business Intelligence.
Plan ahead with Business Influence
With our social media management suite, you can create a Business Intelligence app that will help you start planning your social media content calendar today, and offers you access to tools that help define your content, where it will be posted, who your audience is, and even conveniently reply to comments from all of your accounts in one place!
The Business Intelligence platform offers the tools any marketing team needs to take their social media strategy to the next level. In just one location you can publish and schedule posts for all your accounts, allowing you to stay organized and plan ahead so that you can provide consistent content for your audience.
If you want to obtain a powerful social media planning tool, then download our app or start a trial with us today.
When it comes to understanding how to create a social media content calendar, we at Business Intelligence understand the importance as well as the process and have helped numerous clients find success with their own social media goals. You may have great ideas for social media campaigns, and an individual post may come to mind every now and then that you know is sure to make a big splash with your audience. However, long-term strategies require a tight framework and the ability to communicate these big ideas to your team at large, and for that, you should rely on a social media content calendar.
