According to recent findings, over 3.5 million people use the internet, and roughly two-thirds of those people spend some of their online time logged in to social media. It’s crucial that your business takes advantage of these established online communities by making their presence known across platforms. Why? So that social media users take the time to navigate away from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and over to your business’s website – which is why calendar planning is important.
As a business owner, you may feel that you don’t have any time to spare to run multiple accounts. However, with a little bit of calendar planning, it doesn’t have to cost you much in time!
We’re here to give you some pointers on how to utilize social media calendar planning to keep your online presence streamlined, organized, and geared for success. Read on for 7 tips that will change the way you think about social media!
1. Post Consistently
For your social media presence to be effective, you need to have followers and continue to grow that fanbase. But when social media users come across accounts that rarely post, they have a tendency to move on.
Dumping a ton of content periodically won’t work, either. In fact, this will likely come across as spam for the followers you do have.
Use your calendar planning time to decide how frequently you want to post and on what days you want your new content to go live. This doesn’t have to be every day, but it should be a few times a week if you want to draw attention!
2. Have Fun with Hashtags
Hashtags are a great way to tap into the social media hivemind and find out what’s trending. Plus, having fun with trending content is a great way to humanize your business and show that you have a silly side!
One way to take advantage of hashtags is to tap into the always-growing National Days phenomenon. We’ve seen everything from National Dogs Day to National Broadcast Traffic Professional’s Day. Take a glance at the official National Days website and map out a few that you can create some fun and relevant content for—and don’t forget the hashtag!
3. Think Beyond the Business
Of course, you want to drive up your sales with your social media, but not every post needs to link to a product or service directly. Find topics that generally relate to your business and create content surrounding those topics. The goal is to attract attention, show off your expertise, and avoid boring people with a constant stream of strictly promotional content.
Optimize your results with these kinds of posts by hiring SEO professionals to help you generate ideas. They can uncover the most sought after information within your niche so that you answer the internet’s most burning questions!
4. Know Your Creatives
As you’re planning your social media content calendar and taking notes from social media professionals, you’ll notice that social media content tends to be very diverse. We mentioned SEO-fueled articles, which will be best handled by a content writer. There are also high-quality pictures, videos, infographics, and more.
Don’t expect that one person in your office will be able to perfect all of these content styles. Take stock of your employees’ strengths and delegate types of content accordingly.
5. Know Your Platforms
Don’t expect that you can upload the same content across all of your social media platforms. Social media experts will tell you that different types of content perform better on some platforms than others, and you should cater your content to each platform.
For example, longer videos tend to do well on Facebook, in part because they won’t get cut off in the middle and require viewers to navigate elsewhere to watch the rest (which they probably won’t). Stylized photos and short clips do well on Instagram. Twitter is designed for short-form blurbs, especially of the humorous variety.
Don’t start your calendar planning before you know what works best and where!
6. Hold on to Old Calendars
One of the best things about social media content calendars is that they can prevent you from repeating old content. However, with consistent and frequent posting over a number of months or even years, you’re bound to forget that you already made a certain joke or posted about a certain topic awhile back.
When it’s time to draft up a new content calendar, break out the old ones to cross-reference. It’s okay for posts to bear some similarities, but you don’t want to post content that appears stale to your longtime followers.
7. Adjust When Necessary
Calendar planning isn’t meant to be rigid. It saves you the headache of coming up with new ideas on the fly every few days, but be prepared to adjust your plans when it seems necessary.
Let’s say you roll out a hashtag that you’ve planned to incorporate into the rest of your posts for the foreseeable future. After the first few months, it isn’t gaining steam. Or perhaps you’ve decided on a series of online contests, but people don’t seem to engage with them and it’s not worth the money you’re investing in the prizes.
Allow yourself the flexibility to change directions, even if you’ve planned heavily around a certain style of content. Social media can be a very trial-and-error-based process, especially when you’re in the early stages!
Boost Your Business with Calendar Planning
Social media calendar planning is a great way to set your business up for success. It gives you the opportunity to do a bit of research and find new ways to reach new customers in the digital age. It also saves you the time and stress of coming up with things on the fly, which can lead to inconsistency and incoherency.
If you’ve read through these tips on calendar planning and still don’t feel up to the task, don’t hesitate to invest in a professional social media team. At Killer Spots Agency, our social media team is ready to come up with a strategy for you and even manage your social media interactions!
Contact us for help with your marketing and outreach strategies, whether you want to take them the internet, the television, or even the radio!
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