By Neil Patel

Are you striving for consistency with your social media marketing? A good social media content calendar could be the missing ingredient.

Creating a social media calendar is a simple process, but it can have some impressive results.

Here’s how to quickly set up your social media content calendar and start leveling up your performance.

What Is a Social Media Content Calendar?

A social media calendar gives you a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts.

This helps you to be more strategic with your content, maintain consistency, and delight your target audience on a regular basis.

Your social media calendar can be as simple as setting out what dates you’re going to post on, or it can be much more detailed.

Many successful social media content calendars will include high-level information to help you get more from each post:

• Platform: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
• Content-Type: Behind-the-scenes video, testimonial, product, etc.
• Date: Proposed schedule date.
• Time: Proposed schedule time.
• Title: The title of the post.
• Topic: What the post is about.
• URL: The URL of any links you will use.
• Visuals: A description of any visuals you want to use.

This information gives you an initial framework you can use to build out each post.

Be careful when you are planning, though.

There’s a clear distinction between a content calendar and a content plan. Generally, a content calendar will set out the dates and times for your posts, whereas a content plan will detail the strategies and topics you want to use for your social media marketing.

Since these ideas are closely related, they’re often referred to interchangeably—and can be incorporated into one document.

To give you a better idea of what to include, and where, take a look at this example of a content calendar:

By taking a strategic approach with your planning, you may find a social media content calendar helps you save time and be more effective with your social media marketing.

Why You Need a Social Media Calendar

Over 72 percent of the U.S. population use at least one social media platform, so your social media marketing is clearly important.

The question is, how does a social media calendar fit in?

Let’s take a look at two of the most important aspects of social media marketing: understanding your target audience and being consistent.

If you don’t understand where your target audience hangs out, what content they want to see, and how they consume information, then how do you expect to reach them? It’s difficult to connect with your audience when you’re making social media posts on the fly, which is why a social media content calendar can be so valuable.

The other thing that takes you a long way in social media marketing is consistency. It might not seem like it, but this one is actually very difficult to pull …read more

Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog

Author: Aaron