Why is a social media content calendar so important

Social media content calendar – your most vital tool

So, you run a little cute cat cafe. A customer asks what you are doing for #nationalcatday. Well you had no idea this day even existed and now you’ve missed a chance to promote your business on this very relevant day.

That’s why your business needs a social media content calendar.

With a social media content calendar, you’ll never miss #nationalcatday again – not even by a whisker (sorry!)

You need to stand out, especially as a small business, in today’s digital marketing age, where a vast majority of companies use social media as part of their marketing kit. You need to ensure your content is planned, relevant and engaging.

Creating a social media content calendar will enable you to deliver this.

This calendar will not only ensure you never miss an important date:

• Ultimately creating a social media content calendar will save time. By spending a few hours every three months creating one, many posts can then be scheduled in and simply post themselves. For a small business, where time and resources is often sparse, this is important
• It means you can stick to a consistent posting diary, so your followers can expect and look forward to regular posts from you, building long-lasting relationships, and there will be no forgetting about a certain platform for weeks or posting too much on another at one time
• You will have organised, relevant, thought-out posts where you have the time to source additional content such as image and videos. It will also give you time to research the best hashtags to use and enables you to edit each post for every platform, for example you cannot add direct links to Instagram, so this will need to be thought about when posting
• You can have a variety of content and will not have to fear repeated or similar posts because you have not time to think about them – you can also ensure you do not just post about products the business sells for example, but have balanced posts that the audience can engage with
• A social media content calendar means you can efficiently analyse your content and see what is working and what isn’t. When looking at social media analytics you are able to correlate results against the content as it is all there in black and white!

Of course, there are times when you will have to change posts at the last minute or add in posts. For example, a small spray tan business may need to stop promoting their summer glow range if it has been raining for weeks – let’s face it we can never rely on the weather. But this content calendar will mainly enable your company to plan your content and fundamentally make life easier.

Where to start

So it’s all very well but how do I achieve this? I hear you all cry.

What are you doing currently?

A good place to start would be to audit your current social media activity, look at which platforms you use, if they are all relevant and creating followers and engagement (looking at the analytics), and what has been posted and see what is engaging or not.  

Research

Remember to know your platforms – what is the character limit on Twitter? What format do images on instagram need to be? This is all vital when creating posts across all platforms and can be included in the calendar.

The future

It would then be wise to work out frequency of posting, create a long list of what you need to include in content and research important dates that are relevant to the company.  Remember to include other employees etc in your planning to ensure you have a fair balance of business content.

You can then schedule your posts for publishing!