Why You Should Use A Social Media Calendar
Posted on October 26, 2017 nerdymind
The truth of the matter is, trying to post content on the spot can cause a lot of problems. Organizing your content ahead of time can help prevent a lot of (sometimes embarrassing) issues, as well as save you a lot of time that you might be spending trying to find something to post on the spot.
Benefits of using a social media calendar:
- plan out your images, links, and more, all in the same place
- organize your thoughts ahead of time
- clearly plan out which days of the week you will post
- make sure you post consistently across social platforms
- customize posts to each social platform
- share with other marketing team members for feedback and proofreading
What is a Social Media Calendar?
It's simple!A social media calendar is a tool used to organize and plan your daily social media content. You can find these kinds of templates commonly in printed calendars, spreadsheets (like this one), and online apps. You can use our spreadsheet calendar, and other tools, to plan your content out from a week, to a month, or even a year out! At NerdyMind, we like to plan and schedule content a month in advance (not including any special promotions or announcements which we might plan even further out than that).
How Do I Use It?
We know that coming up with what to post and when to post it can be difficult and time consuming, so we wanted to create a tool that simplified organizing and implementing it!
1. Fill in the dates and days of the week!
Take this time to call attention to any holidays, special occasions, or any other special dates that you will want to plan specific content for. This will also help you organize how often to post, and to see trends around what days are best for your business.
2. Are you going to boost it?
Specifically for Facebook, do you intend on putting some ad spend behind your well thought out posts? Keep track of that information here!
3. Write your content!
Use this cell to organize your actual post content, this will be the exact content you paste into your social media scheduler. The Twitter tab even counts your characters to make sure you stay under 140!
4. Are you including any links?
Good social media strategy will include links back to your blog or website. At NerdyMind we like to take advantage of the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder to create a campaign URLs. This helps you to better track your website visits from specific campaigns or posts, to see what type of posts are performing the best. Learn more about the Google Analytics URL Builder and how to use it here. (Hint, after your campaign url is generated by the tool, use the short URL converter to condense the link for easier sharing).
5. Include your image!
It's no secret that social media posts that include an image perform better than ones without! Use this tool to organize your images by uploading them to a folder on google drive and pasting the sharable link into the image column.
6. Schedule or post!
This tool is great whether you are using the calendar to organize content and schedule it, or using it to make posting the same day more simple! Just copy and paste the content from each cell and post. This process will help to eliminate typos and mis-posting. Note, Excel does not have advanced spell checking features so have team members copyedit the calendar and use a browser spell checking plugin like Grammarly to double check as you post.)
7. Track your progress.
Use the last columns on the end of each tab to track your impressions and engagement on your posts. This is a great way to see what kind of content works best for each audience!