If you struggle with the demands of an active and engaging social media profile, lacking the time to post or the creative energy to find new things to post about on a regular and consistent basis, then this is the blog post for you.

Focussing on the benefits of a social media calendar, sharing advice on content creation and scheduling, and offering a few tips on how to overcome the pressures of a lack of time, this blog post is all about social posting. Starting with the benefits of a social content calendar and how to make it work for you.

What are the benefits of a social media calendar?

First thing’s first, there are a variety of ways to approach this - with the best and most straightforward approach combining the standard world calendar with your own business activity, campaigns, and deals.

Creating a social media calendar means mapping out how and when you will post, which format your posts will take, and how you will navigate different content streams and ideas. When you develop and complete a social media calendar, you give yourself the power to create content ahead of time and schedule it - ensuring that posts are shared at the best time for your audience, without pressurised demands on your time and routine.

Now, like we said, there are different ways to approach a social media calendar. Our recommended approach is to start with the days of note which strike a chord within your industry and with your audience and go from there. Events like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other important dates of note are all major stepping stones that you can’t ignore when plotting your content - with businesses and brands able to build around those based on what they offer.

How do you know which dates to post on and acknowledge

There is truly a “date of note” for everything - and a thing to celebrate on every single day, if you decide to acknowledge them all. Of course, it goes without saying that you should only share and acknowledge the key dates that mean something to you as a business - with one of the best ways to choose the best dates starting with what you sell or market.

Product-based brands lend themselves to the holiday season and to gifting - narrowing this down further based on their target demographic. Meanwhile, service-based solutions and businesses can tap into the “fresh start” messaging of a new year or even a new financial quarter or month.

Position your brand within the key dates of note and build your content calendar from there. Keep reading for advice on how to build out the rest of your social calendar with ease.

Tips for creating a social media calendar

The first thing you need to do is start with a clean slate in terms of your social presence. This doesn’t mean deleting your profiles and starting again, but rather conducting a social audit which allows you to check your presence on different sites and ensure that your presence is consistent in design and messaging across all channels. Doing this creates a standard through which all your content can be created, matching that initial outline.

From there, you need to work out your end goal for each social channel.

How do you want to use Instagram? Is it purely for discovery and engagement, or do your posts need to market and sell as well? Do you want to use Facebook for community engagement or product information? Crucially, does the content across different channels need to be adapted according to the end goal?

Once you know which channels to use and how you want to use them, it’s time to develop your calendar - with simple tools like Google Sheets providing an ideal starting point for idea generation and content creation. Once content is agreed with other stakeholders, it can be moved into scheduling tools ahead of time, allowing you to focus on other areas of the business, knowing your social posts will be shared at the right time.

A few other top tips…

• Where possible, only schedule up to a month in advance and leave room for potential reactive posts and last minute changes in light of ever-changing trends and industry news
• Use different visual formats regularly - covering static images, carousels, and reels / video content
• Be flexible and move content around if it doesn’t work - responding to seasonal deals and trends, as well as user demand

Finally for a quick hack - when you’re really lacking time and want to post consistently but don’t have the time to generate ideas and posts, fall back on user-generated content. Reshare review posts and user videos and churn out a few FAQs to effortlessly highlight your connectivity with your audience.

Here at Social Loop, we work with businesses to fine-tune and manage their social media presence - and creating a solid social media calendar is an integral part of the process.

Reach out to us to find out more about this and other services that we offer.