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When it comes to the continuous stream of fresh content, knowledge, and concepts, it is simple to get carried away with the everyday administration of many accounts across several social media platforms. Many popular brands are recognized for their sharp banter and skill to hop on to trending issues as and when they arise.
Real-time tweeting for significant occasions and posts responding to notable headlines keep your audience involved and engaged. However, social media marketers shouldn’t miss out on the greater vision, which implies mapping out and adhering to a well-planned calendar for all their social media activities, focused on the content they recognize as most interesting to their audiences.
Such a calendar will assist social media marketers in saving a lot of time and also enabling them to keep track of what sort of content works the best for their target audiences. Planning out a calendar months ahead and scheduling every post is a great alternative to carrying out strenuous searches for trending news and stories every single day. This will likewise create more comprehensive compatibility with respect to the brand image than a disorganized or spontaneous posting strategy.
This article is intended to shed light on the fundamentals of organizing content to come with a comprehensive social media calendar.
Carefully Contemplating What Your Posts Should Be About
- All experienced social media marketers are aware that the most notable hindrance to devising a social media calendar is comprehending what to post on. Coming up with sufficient ideas for a complete calendar, months ahead, can seem impossible. However, putting in the effort to devise a social media calendar for the long-term will assist in setting up practical objectives. This also helps in making the entire process of posting and making adjustments easier.
- If you intend on only posting about trending topics as and when they happen, you are setting yourself up for failure. Exciting incidents and news might not occur every day. That is why it is essential to keep constantly active on all your social media pages at all times.
- In order to start things off, begin by assessing what sort of posts did well in the past. Find out the posts that had the most user engagement. Make use of all the social media analytics you can get your hands on, be it from Facebook Insights, Twitter, or Instagram. To make things easier, you can get the Sprout Social tool where metrics for all your social media pages will be consolidated.
- For those who are just beginning their social media marketing journey and don’t really have any historic data to analyze, checking out what your competitors are doing is a great alternative. You can do this by looking for key search terms and hashtags relevant to your industry and focus on the pages and posts with the most traction.
- Augmenting the insights you have gained from doing this with the insights you are likely to gain from the social media listening tool will be great. This will give you a great idea of exactly the sort of content that your audience is interested in. Right from trending hashtags and keywords to top topics and brands, you will acquire a fair view of the best of the best in your industry.
- Trying and testing diverse approaches and ideas is key to nailing the social media marketing game. Keep trying different things until you come across a topic or style that ticks for you. Doing so is important for marketers who do not have sufficient analytics on what works best for their audiences. Utilizing a blend of promotional, general entertainment and user-curated content is the way to go in such cases.
- All in all, it is essential to be certain that the bulk of your content should be helpful to your target audience in some way or another. Try to make at least two-thirds of your content informational and restrict promotional posts to just a third of all your content. If the majority of your posts are promotional, you could be alienating your audience. Make sure that a good portion of your social media posts is focussed on engagement rather than predominantly only sales.
Devising & Executing A Planned Social Media Calendar
- Upon deciding exactly the sort of content that you intend to post, you can begin devising a schedule for posting. Once you have analyzed what your competitors are doing, you will acquire a fair idea of their posting schedule and frequency. Make use of these trends in devising your own social media calendar. Find out what the best times and days to post on are, for each of the top social media platforms. Find out which themes tend to do the best at what times and on which days. This will help you devise a calendar and plan posts so as to acquire the most engagement.
- There are conflicting opinions on what the ideal frequency for posting on social media is. While some suggest frequent posting to remain in the conscious of users consistently, others recommend posting only when there is something important to say.
- However, on average the below-listed frequencies should help give you get started on your social marketing journey.
- For Facebook – one to two posts each day,
- For Twitter – anywhere from three to ten posts each day,
- For Instagram – between one and three posts every day,
- Instagram Stories – two to five posts each day,
- Pinterest – three to twenty posts every day,
- LinkedIn – one to two posts every week.
- Just as important as the frequency of your social media posts is the time that you choose to post at, on every platform. These times vary according to the industry and your brand’s niche.
- While posting regularly will help you remain constantly in touch with your target audience, it is important not to overdo it. Spamming your target audience with posts that have little value to offer, could backfire on your brand badly.
- With Sprout’s ViralPost tool, brands can focus on posting their content at the best times that their target audiences seem to respond to. ViralPost suggests the best time to post content for every single platform by analyzing your historic data.
- The audience of a brand continues to grow and evolve as the brand does. That is why it is paramount for social media marketers to constantly keep tabs on their audiences and find out how they are responding. By making tweaks to your social media calendar based on this data, you can ensure that every one of your posts is having the intended effect on your target audience.
- Incessant fine-tuning and adjustment making is crucial to devising a stable and successful social media marketing strategy. Gaining a concrete understanding of your target audience and keeping up with their likes and dislikes is key to achieving the best results. Experimenting with varying posting times and posting frequencies and paying attention to their performance will help you fine-tune your social media calendar to perfection. Doing so repeatedly will give you a great idea of the target audience for your specific niche.
Keeping Tabs On The Performance Of Your Social Media Calendar
- A social media calendar isn’t just an agenda for what to post and when. It also helps you determine what is the best way to target your audience, on each platform that your brand has its presence on. Keep tabs on the performance of every one of your social media campaigns so that you can adjust your calendar accordingly the next time around.
- When you notice a certain campaign doing well, make sure you take note of it, so that you can use it to your complete advantage the next time around.
- Make sure you do so for each social media platform separately. This is because every single social media platform serves a different purpose and a different target audience. Your strategy as a social media marketer should be separate for every platform that your brand has its presence on. What works on a particular social media platform might not necessarily work on others. Different platforms necessitate different strategies to address content formats distinctively. Careful research into the nuances of every social media platform is required when you devise a comprehensive social media strategy for a brand.
Conveying Your Strategy To Other Teams And Getting Them On-Board
- A successful social media marketing strategy necessitates the cooperation of all teams within an organization. Cooperation amongst the individual teams of an organization with social media marketers is key to developing great content and campaigns. A degree of cohesiveness between varying departments will help in the successful execution of a social media marketing calendar.
Is your brand devoid of the expertise required to design, plan and execute a great social media calendar for all the platforms that you wish to target? Then you should reach out to Open Designs India for our cost-effective, result-oriented social media services. We one of the most highly sought after social media agencies in the country. We offer tailor-made social media services for brands and companies belonging to diverse industries.
