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Social Media Content Calendar Guide 2024
For social media managers, a social media content calendar is a saving grace. Scheduling your posts using a content calendar helps you save time and keeps you organized.
Most times, social media managers are balancing many clients on many different platforms so using a content calendar is an absolute must. By dedicating your time once a week or whenever you need to focus on content you take away a lot of the risk for typos or errors as well as writer’s block from trying to come up with new ideas each day.
What Is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar is the schedule of all of your posts on each platform that are scheduled to go out during specific dates and times.
These content calendars can be organized in a spreadsheet, document, or calendar dashboard. Inside the content calendar, you usually will have the media, caption, tags, links, etc that will be a part of each post.
Why Use a Social Media Content Calendar?
There are several reasons why social media marketers should be using social media content calendars in their everyday workflow. Here are some key benefits.
Saves Time
As a social media marketer, you are often juggling several clients and several accounts. By utilizing a content calendar you can carve out specific time to schedule your posts for each client or each account so that you can spend your time coming up with new ideas.
Post Consistently
To be successful on social media, it is important to post consistently and stay active on your accounts. Posting manually can make this extremely tough. By scheduling your posts you know exactly how many posts are going out consistently each week.
Quality Posts
Rather than simply throwing up a post on social media just to post, scheduling your posts and dedicating specific time for content helps you come up with better ideas and more focus on text to avoid mistakes.
Post at Optimal Times
By scheduling your posts you can research the best time to post on each platform specific to your audience. By doing this your post can go out when the majority of your audience is scrolling. This helps your engagement immensely.
Using Metricool, we offer two ways to see when the best time to post is. One is through a darker shade on the calendar and the other is through a specific percentage. The Higher the percentage, the better the time is to post.
More Collaboration
With content, calendars come with easier workflow. You can create a full calendar and send it to your client for review before any posts go out. They can easily come back with edits so that each post that goes out is seen prior by everyone.
With Metricool, you can plan out your whole calendar and apply our approval process. We offer a system for content approval that allows you to create a natural flow, starting with the content creator/planner, to the reviewer, and then Metricool publishes the content automatically.
Automate Tasks
By auto-publishing content you can avoid manually posting your content as well as manual reporting on how your posts are performing.
How to Create a Social Media Content CalendarÂ
To create a social media content calendar you must complete these steps we will explain in depth below.
Conduct a Social Media Audit
Social media audits are a process of updating, optimizing, and reviewing the accuracy, value, and health of your social media profiles.
When conducting these, you could research and keep a collection of information about your social networks and those of your competition. This way, you can determine in what exact situation your company is on social platforms and compare it with your competitors.
Metricool makes your audits easy! Use our social media audit template.
A social media audit usually consists of:
- Checking if you are focused on the right asocial channels for your brand.
- Analyzing the performance of your content against your competitors.
- Ensuring your brand is representing its visual and verbal identity correctly.
Use a Social Media Calendar Template
Use a template whether it be a spreadsheet, a document, or a third-party planning platform like Metricool.
You should include:
✅ Social media platforms and accounts you are posting for
✅ Content or multimedia files
✅ Caption, tags, location, links, etc.
✅ Date or time you would like the post to go out
✅ Space for notes
Define Your Posting Schedule
This is important for consistency. You must define the amount of times per week you want to post. For example, on Instagram you may want to post 3-5 times per week, and on Twitter maybe 3 times per day, etc.
As you can see social media content calendars are game changers for the organization and quality of your work as social media marketers. Make the right choice and use a social media calendar for your next set of posts.
Metricool is the best way to schedule and organize your content. Register here!