Social networks were born to generate communities and conversations, and it is the best way you can take advantage of them for your business as well. Planning with a content calendar for networks is key to achieving optimal results.
One of the most common mistakes is using social networks solely to sell. The reality is that they are the perfect place for your potential customers to connect with much more than your products or services.
You can implement strategies so that they know your history, the values of your brand, your world, and all the work and love that your entrepreneurship implies. And to get to know them too, to generate conversations and a back and forth.
There are two crucial words: planning and consistency.
The only way to tell a story is by thinking and organizing your social media content calendar ahead of time. Thus, each publication will have consistency and coherence with the others and the Instagram feed, your Facebook wall, or the TikTok profile in general.
Having a content calendar helps you to have your publications planned and prepared ahead of time. Your community and potential consumers will see a point in your communication strategy. In addition, a much stronger connection with your brand is generated.
Today we share 4 master tips to take better advantage of your social networks and create an annual or monthly calendar that allows you to plan and create your content with time.
Advantages of having a content calendar
An editorial calendar for your social networks will allow you to design a consistent strategy and clearly visualize your plans and the results you are obtaining with each action.
This transparency in managing your content allows you to understand what efforts are worth the time involved.
Let’s see all the benefits of having a content calendar for social networks:
- Organize your broadcast channels, understanding if it is effective to share the same content on all social networks.
- Diversify the content according to each network’s specifications or publication type. For example, in your content calendar for Instagram, it is important to specify if it is about photo designs or video creations in the feed, stories, or reels.
- Generate increasingly engaging and relevant content by analyzing and comparing which posts perform best.
- Guarantee consistency in your communication channels. Seeing in your monthly calendar how much content you are uploading, you will understand if it makes sense to continue with that strategy if it is necessary to add volume or, on the contrary, not produce as much.
- Post content at the ideal time when you know the majority of your audience is active on the platforms. For this, we suggest you review the best hours of each social network.
- Increase the quality of your content by producing, for example, photos or special designs for each strategy. Instead of using improvised images because you have to publish “now,” by planning ahead, you can prepare specific content.
- Optimize working time. We know that maintaining and promoting a business can represent a lot of effort. Since being present on social networks is a must, this is a good way to use your time efficiently.
- Measure results to optimize your strategies and design increasingly profitable actions. Having the posts in order allows us to compare metrics and understand which actions are bringing more and better results.
- Anticipate important dates of the year where you can increase sales for special occasions or anniversaries. At this point, we especially recommend you to download our commercial calendar with all the key dates of e-commerce.
- Avoid mistakes and impropriety such as repeating publications or being too insistent with any dissemination campaign.
Content calendar for social networks: how to create it
1. Be clear about the most strategic definitions
The first point is to have security in the strategic definitions so that everything you communicate makes sense and is coherent with your business in an integral way. That is, avoid isolated efforts.
The primary objective at this point is that each of your actions effectively helps you capture more customers and sell more. Some of the key definitions that you have to be clear about are:
- Who is your ideal client? Who exactly are you talking to when you post on your social media? Trying to talk to everyone is the same as not talking to anyone, so this first point is the most important of all.
- What is your brand personality? Imagine your brand as a person and write all its characteristics.
- Is it cancer or classic? Elegant or relaxed? Is she active or calmer? Is it serious or funny? I defined the characteristics of your public to connect with your ideal client.
- What is the visual identity of your brand? Once you are clear about the personality and values you want to convey, how is all that reflected visually? What kind of images, colors, and fonts are you going to use?
Remember that one of the main goals is consistency. It is key that you choose these visual elements to keep them consistent in your publications so that potential clients can begin to recognize and remember you.
2. Determine a base scheme
Once you have those strategic definitions, the next step is to think about what you are going to talk about to put together the content calendar for social networks: your base scheme or pillars.
The idea is that you think of a base scheme that you repeat every month, so you don’t have to be inventing everything from scratch every month.
Let’s imagine a possible structure to see it clearly:
On Mondays, you will share something behind the scenes about your design or production process.
On Tuesdays, you will present a new product.
On Wednesdays, you will share some advice or tip on how to better use one of your products.
On Thursdays, you will do a raffle or some promotional activation.
On Fridays, you will show yourself as an entrepreneur.
The idea is that you define these pillars in your monthly calendar and complete them with specific ideas.
As we seek that not all publications are for sale, take advantage of your social networks to show much more. Creativity is the limit here!
The behind-the-scenes, the things that inspire you, your day-to-day as an entrepreneur, tastes and passions that you know your ideal client has, the values and beliefs of your brand, advice or ideas on how to use your products better.
3. Complete the concrete ideas for the following month
Once you have the blocks clear, the third step is to fill in the concrete ideas in your monthly calendar.
So, if you defined that on Mondays, you are going to share something behind the scenes of your process, now it is a matter of effectively thinking about what behind the scenes you could share for the 4 Mondays of the following month. And so, with each of the pillars, you defined!
Thinking about and defining the pillars before will allow you to think of content ideas more easily. Instead of openly asking yourself, “what do I share today?” you are going to consider, “what can I show from the day to day of my business?”
Being a much more concrete and specific question, you will avoid blocks and develop ideas much faster.
So, build your content calendar for social networks by writing what you will publish each day, following those blocks you defined in the previous step. Here you will also consider if there is an important date or event to consider in your forecast.
4. Bringing Ideas to Life: Effectively Creating Content
Once you have specified what you will share for each of the days of the following month, the last step is to plan the creation of that content.
For example, you have a store of products with natural ingredients, and you define that one of the days you are going to share “5 benefits of lemon”. With peace of mind, you can think about what photo to create showing that ingredient, the copy of each publication, etc.
The objective of these steps is that you plan your content calendar in advance to increase its quality.
If the same day you want to publish, you have to think about what to upload, take the photos and write the text. It is most likely that you will not be able to create the best content.
On the other hand, by putting together this calendar days or months in advance, you can generate content that stands out on your audience’s social networks.
Tools to schedule the calendar in social networks
Many tools and applications are available to practice the actions planned in your content calendar. We recommend the most outstanding.
- Google Sheets: Google spreadsheets will allow you to dump ideas into a spreadsheet. This is the tool we use to design our editorial calendar, and you will see how useful and clear it is for you. We will share it with you at the end of this section!
- Hootsuite Planner: This tool is for both creating and scheduling content. It gives you an overview of your copy, images, and links.
- Trello: This is a simple and friendly option to start organizing your content over weeks or months. It works with the board modality to structure the information.
Conclusion
Once you follow these steps for the first time, then it’s a matter of repeating steps 3 and 4 every month.
With practice, you will find the routine that works best for you, and it is about trying to find your own rhythm!