Social Media Content Calendar
Have you ever been scrolling through your social media feed and seen the words “posted via Hootsuite” or “scheduled by AgoraPulse”? In the business world, most of the content you are visiting is scheduled days, weeks, and even months before it reaches your timeline. When it comes to maintaining a public image, having a consistent social media presence is paramount to bringing continuous customers and new faces to your business.
Is There a Difference Between A Content Calendar and an Editorial Calendar?
While similar as a guideline for the business to follow, they both serve different functions in communications. An editorial calendar helps plan the outline of your business’s content strategy; this can include social media, event hosting, guest panels, collaboration events and many more. The content calendar plans specific social media moves on a day-to-day, week-to-week and even monthly basis, slotting in crucial messaging for your business around scheduled events.
Editorial calendars are usually shared with the entirety of an organization as a snapshot, whereas content calendars are more insignificant to anyone except the social media manager.
Why Use a Social Media Content Calendar?
Planning social media communications can help your business develop consistency with its messaging while always staying visible on your audience’s feed. Putting careful thought into what posts you are making and when can help guide the public reputation of your business and encourage growth. This allows you to stay proactive in your branding while saving time to be reactive to the social environment around your business and save you from the headache of scrambling to find a post every week.
Having content planned well in advance, as you can expect, can bring a lot of peace of mind to a business owner – no more worrying about what, or if, you’ve posted this week. This proactive behaviour facilitates responding quickly to a changing social media landscape, thinking about global events, local news, rescheduled events, snow days, etc.
Tips To Getting Started
To start, you need to get your hands on some software to manage your social media content calendar. Many web-hosted programs do this, and finding one that meets your needs at a reasonable cost can be challenging, but some tools are more flexible than you might think.
These tools often have free options and even free trials for premium subscriptions. While trial and error might be adequate, keep in mind that transferring all of your assets, logos, colours and images to the software will take a lot of time out of a workday, and your time might be better spent dedicated to a single service.
Here are some reputable programs, with free trials or tiered subscriptions, that we recommend:
- Hootsuite: Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard
- Sendible: Social Media Management Tool for Agencies
- Agorapulse: Social Media Management Software
- Later: the social media scheduler & link in bio tool
As a smaller business that might be struggling to find the funding to finance a hefty bill every month, there are old-fashioned workarounds to making a content calendar if you aren’t ready to commit to a paid software just yet. Creating an excel spreadsheet categorized by “text,” “image,” “post by,” and “copywriter” is an excellent way to plot your content without spending money.
This strategy will not automatically schedule your posts on social media; however, there is the option to schedule the posts internally through social media platforms like Meta and Twitter’s scheduling option.
No matter what program you choose, a social media content calendar serves the purpose of seeing the forest through the trees – scheduling messaging in advance so you can focus on what key messages you are looking to share with your followers.
If you need help organizing your social media calendar, check out our post: How to Create a Social Media Calendar: Tips for Finding Content and Organizing Your Posts.