Welcome to the Brand and Demand Solutions’ Marketing Impact Vlog. Today we’ll be sharing tips and tricks to create a social media content calendar.
Just to be completely clear – a social media content calendar IS THE MOST HELPFUL TOOL you can leverage in your social media marketing toolkit.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 92 percent of content marketers use social media to distribute their content. But content saturation is making it harder than ever for marketers to stand out in their customers’ feeds.
Many marketers have seen their organic reach and engagement decline. Why? Because we’re way past the days of randomly posting disorganized content. No matter how valuable your content, there are a few critical hacks you need to do to improve engagement with the community you serve.
Hack #1: Never miss an important social media holiday. Real or the hashtag version.
A social media content calendar will help you stay ahead of all these social media holidays (along with “real” holidays like Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day). This is a great way to take advantage of opportunities to elevate your brand and engage with followers.
Review the Sprout Social 2019 #HashtagHoliday calendar to plan for the dates/activities you can leverage. It’s never to early to develop content for #FunAtWorkDay come next January!
What an amazing way to engage followers. It’s too bad we just passed #WorldPartyDay and #NationalBeerDay.
Hack #2: Stick to a consistent posting schedule
Posting consistently is one of the best ways to get more followers. I don’t know about you, but I’m not following anyone who has posted 5 times in the last 2 years. It better be worth my time to follow someone. If they are consistently posting it proves they are passionate and committed to the community they serve.
Hack #3: Leverage cloud collaboration tools
Don’t create your calendar in a vacuum.
Do create your calendar on a cloud platform like Google, Dropbox, Evernote, Trello, etc.
This is a simple way to inform stakeholders or update your team. Using the cloud provides a single source for everyone to know what’s being published and when. It also makes it easy to divide and conquer tasks management.
Hack #4: Find your perfect content mix
We all have first-hand experience of friends who only post about politics or Cross Fit. Don’t be that friend with your brands on social.
At Frost & Sullivan we run a variety of Executive MindXchange events. If we only posted early bird deadlines and when new speakers were confirmed, our followers would easily begin to tune out.
I’m not saying our followers aren’t interested in our early bird deadline for the Marketing Impact Executive MindXchange, but they deserve more value than that.
They deserve original industry content, links to curated articles, industry news and so much more.
Everyone needs to figure out their perfect content mix, but according to HubSpot, they recommend using “the rule of thirds” as a good place to start. This means:
– ⅓ of your content promotes your business or generates leads
– ⅓ of your content comes from other sources that align with your business
– ⅓ of your content engages with followers directly, either through answering questions, responding to comments, or reposting user-generated content
Planning your perfect mix of social content in advance ensures you are publishing a balanced amount of content from each category.
Hack # 5: Save time
I’m sure your thinking, isn’t creating and maintaining a detailed social media content calendar going to cause me more work? Of course, it won’t! Using a social media calendar is going to actually save you time.
A calendar creates a plan and advance schedule for your posts, especially when you leverage tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, TweetDeck, etc.
Hack # 6: Figure out what works & ensure fresh content
A social media content calendar is a record of what you’ve published. Take advantage of it to analyze what works well and what topics/content you’ve beat into the social sphere already.
Compare your publishing schedule to your analytics to gain insight into what type of posts, times, channels, etc. drive the most engagement. Apply your findings to your future calendar and continue to test and optimize so you build the perfect content mix and schedule. While you’re optimizing, be sure look back at what you’ve published to continue to build fresh content.
There you have it! Six hacks to build and leverage your social media content calendar!
We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s installment of our Marketing Impact Vlog.
If you’re looking for more opportunities to learn about Social Media, content marketing and other Marketing Leader topics, we highly encourage you to attend the 20th anniversary of our Marketing Impact event. This is a Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange and if you’ve never attended one, you MUST place this event on your calendar. Adam and I will be there and look forward to meeting you. For more information, please visit marketingmindxchange.com.
As always – remember to Grow Your Brand… And Drive Demand!
