Your social media posts are a great way to attract your target audience, boost engagement, and promote your brand. However, as a brand, you have to think about social media activity more carefully than you would as an individual. Abandoned accounts or sporadic posting can be more harmful to your brand than not having those accounts at all.
One thing that many social media marketers use to organize their social media activity is a social media calendar. This is a monthly or weekly calendar that allows you to plot out when you will publish your posts. It may even connect to your social media posts and post them automatically across platforms on the day they’re meant to go out. In today’s blog, let’s discuss the benefits of a social media calendar.
#1 – Organize Your Social Media Posts
Think about how many ideas for social media posts you may lose on post-it notes that you accidentally threw away or notes on your phone. When your content is scattered across several different storage methods, it can become frustrating to bring it all together. With a social media calendar, you can keep all of your social media drafts and scheduled posts in one place. You know exactly when they will go out and to what social media platforms.
#2 – Great For Collaboration
If you work with a team for social media marketing, social media calendars can help to improve your communication. You can invite them to edit your calendar, and they can post their drafts or schedules to the same calendar that everyone else sees. This will cut down on the chance that one platform is missed or that the same content is accidentally double-posted by different team members.
#3 – Keeps Your Social Media Consistent
It’s smart to have a posting schedule for each platform. Maybe you post 3-4 times per week or maybe you post daily. Whatever works best for you, the important thing is to stay consistent. This can be draining, however, especially across multiple platforms. That’s where a social media calendar can help.
On your social media calendar, you can queue posts ahead of time so that even if you’re not available on the day they need to go out, they can still go out. Even if your calendar doesn’t automatically post the content, it may serve as a reminder for when you should post by laying out exactly what days have posts scheduled and what days don’t.
#4 – Save Time
Because you can draft content whenever you want and schedule it when it’s meant to go out, you can draft a bunch of social media content on a slow day, freeing up your time for busier days when needed. You will also have plenty of time to review the content before it goes out by posting in bulk, so you have less of a headache, and the content goes out with fewer errors.
#5 – Helps With Event-Based Marketing Campaigns
Does your brand have a big event coming up that you want to do a lot of promotion for? You can plan ahead with a social media calendar by promoting it with social media posts before the event, during the event and encouraging your audience to follow up after the event. You can also prepare for annual events or promotions with little effort by drafting posts once and then scheduling them to go out every year simultaneously.
#6 – Improves Brainstorming
Having a hard time generating new social media content? Every SMM professional reaches a point when their initial ideas dry up, and it can feel like pulling teeth to develop new ideas. When you feel that coming on, look at your social media calendar. Your calendar will tell you about any relevant holidays coming up, as well as show you posts that you’ve created recently to bounce off of. This will help you generate a whole new list of social media content ideas to keep things fresh.
#7 – Your Audience Knows What To Expect
Want an audience that engages with your content and becomes interested in your brand? Utilize a social media calendar. By being more consistent about your posting, your audience will know when to expect your posts. They may even start to seek them out on the day they know you’re likely to post, especially if you post relevant and interesting content. As their interest grows, so does their likelihood of becoming a customer. Posting regularly will boost your relationship and trust with your audience overall.
