image: kayla hollatz
When it comes to marketing and business, creating a plan is the first step towards success. Creating a social media plan reinforces your marketing strategies and helps you stay consistent with your business' online presence.
A social media calendar creates an efficient schedule and lines up the dates and times for each post you plan to present on social media and helps you monitor and track the reach of each of those posts.
For example, a business/company may have a social media marketing manager that posts to several different social media platforms a day. Using a tool like Hootsuite can help schedule those posts hours, days, weeks, etc in advance. Before scheduling each post, having an idea of what topics to share with Twitter, links to share with Facebook, or photos to share on Instagram, organizes the way you curate and create content. It helps ensure high quality performing content and cuts out extra time from your marketing strategy.
Using a simple template or spreadsheet including a section for the link, picture, author, social platform, post copy, date, and time are the most significant elements of a social media content calendar. Including extras like audience reach, retweets, shares, or a section for notes also allows you to go back and record how well each post performed on the different platforms.
The best part about creating these calendars is that you can always easily keep track of information that you upload to social media and be sure that you aren't creating similar posts, unless of course that is your motive.