The Power of Social Media Content Calendar

With multiple ongoing organic marketing projects for various social media channels, you might eventually feel time pressure. If you're currently creating one piece of content at a time, you could benefit from switching to a multiple-post approach with a social media content calendar. Breaking your process into steps and planning ahead with a content calendar can enable you to group similar tasks together to get multiple posts' content done more quickly as a whole. Be ready to book time for planning, creating and publishing.

Planning

First, define a timeframe, such as the next two weeks, and how often you want to post, for instance twice a week per project. Then for the selected time, reserve slots in the calendar for planning sessions. In these sessions, brainstorm ideas for content that would help meet your goals. Keep in mind the different post types and formats each platform supports and whether some content could be reused across these apps. Organise the social media content calendar so that when there's a chance to shoot videos or take photos for multiple posts with the same settings, items or people, then that opportunity is not wasted.

Doing preliminary work will make the later creation and publishing steps faster, allowing you to spend less time on the details in subsequent phases. For example, when planning Instagram posts, write down entire caption texts. If in the text you ask people to check out links in the bio, ensure that the links are available. If you're going to create a single image or a carousel, specify what exactly should be in each picture. For videos, prepare the shot list that describes what happens on screen, so that when you go filming, you know what you'll need for the final cut.

As a result of your planning, you should have estimated content creation and publishing times in your calendar. It may make sense to keep the shot list, caption texts and other prepared materials outside the calendar in a note-taking app. For occasions that require further editing later, reserve time for that as well in advance.

Creating

The creation task involves executing based on the planning output and making tweaks whenever necessary. Editing multiple pieces of content for various projects within one time slot of the calendar should be quicker because you won't have to shift your focus away from your editor.

Publishing

Choose between publishing manually or through automatic scheduling. There are applications like Meta Business Suite that can publish your posts in the future at the specified time for you. This allows you to create content ahead of time while maintaining regular posting in the background. When opting for this path, add metric review sessions to the content calendar so you can make changes to upcoming content when an already published post does not perform as expected and is connected to what's coming next.