As tempting as it is to throw a half-baked post on Facebook every few days, there is a much better (and less stressful) way to approach your social media strategy. Having a weekly, monthly, or even yearly plan relieves stress and is much more effective in helping you reach your goals. Need a little convincing? Here are 7 perks of creating a social media calendar:
- Cohesive Marketing
When you create a content calendar, you can plan your posts around what’s going on in the rest of your business. Using social media as a part of your overall marketing strategy will strengthen brand awareness and consumer trust.
When you plan posts ahead of time, you’ll have the foresight to incorporate holidays, community events, and national happenings your audience might be interested in. This will also give you lead time for any images you need to create or needed collaborations.
- Steadiness
Making a social media content calendar gives you the peace of mind that there’s something scheduled to post EVERY day. This eliminates last minute “scrambling” for ideas and unnecessary stress. When you’re ready to publish on social, just find your calendar and click “post!” Easy as pie. Another benefit of consistent posting is a higher SEO ranking. Who doesn’t want that?
- An Eye on the Prize
Creating a content calendar for social gives you the opportunity to consider your buyer personas. When you have their needs as the top priority, centering social media content around them will be a cinch AND incredibly effective. We really dig these Buyer Persona templates from Hubspot.
- Simplicity
A social media content calendar is REALLY simple to create. All you need is a calendar template and about thirty minutes. If you want to post several times a day across multiple social media channels, you might want to use an Excel spreadsheet or a more comprehensive scheduler like Sprout Social, or CoSchedule.
- Freedom
Since you’ve created your content calendar ahead of time, you can also start pre-scheduling your posts…AHEAD of time! There are so many options: Hootsuite, Latergramme, the prescheduling function on Facebook, Tweetdeck, and Buffer. Once you have your posts queued up, pat yourself on the back and go grab some coffee—you deserve it!
Ready to start your own calendar? A Social Media Audit would be a great next step. Give us a call to get yours today!