What is a Content Calendar?
Many business owners find social media to be a burden. In fact, it’s one of the most common pain points my clients have when it comes to marketing their businesses. Panic-posting and spending excess time on writing content don’t have to be associated with your social media marketing anymore. There’s an easier way to create a solid social media strategy! By creating a content calendar, you’ll be able to create quality, engaging content, all while saving time.
According to Belay, a content calendar is simply a template that can be used to chart out your social media posts by category and platform. There are online tools available to help (we love Planable), but you can also keep things simple and start your calendar using a word document or spreadsheet.
Here’s a few advantages of creating a content calendar:
Having a plan set in place will allow you to implement a strong strategy in your social media marketing efforts
You’ll create better quality content
Your consistent schedule will help you track your analytics, which means allowing you to create more content your audience finds valuable
You’ll save time
Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging to figure out how to make this work for your business! Here’s my tried-and-true workflow when it comes to creating and using my content calendar for TAC(t) clients.
Pro Tip: I would recommend batch working your entire content calendar once per month. You’ll save yourself a ton of time, and your social media content will be prepped in advance— which means the month ahead will go much smoother.
Step One: Create a calendar or use an online template.
I’m not anti-pen and paper by any means, but I’d strongly recommend using a digital calendar. Google Sheets is my personal favorite because it’s easy to share with other team members, it can be edited in real time, and Google has awesome (and easy to use) collaboration features. Plus, everything in Google Sheets saves automatically.
Here’s a free Google Sheets template from Belay.
Step Two: Decide your post frequency.
Are you going to post twice a week? Once every day, Monday through Friday? Decide what frequency works best for your business. My suggestion to clients is that two to three posts per week is typically sufficient.
Step Three: Create post topics.
The key word here is topics. You don’t need to get specific or down to the nitty-gritty here. To start, take a look at your recent blog posts or a key aspect of your business (for example, if you’re a photographer you could have a topic be “wedding tips”). Write down each of these topics on the days you chose in Step Two.
Congratulations, you already know what you’re going to post this month!
Step Four: Create the actual post (captions and graphics/images).
I use Canva to create most graphics and Planable to schedule social posts (captions included). However, you could also schedule posts for Facebook and Instagram in your Facebook Business Suite— or write out the copy in your content calendar and include a link to your graphics there. Find a system that works for you and go with it.
This step takes the longest amount of time to execute, however, having your topics already chosen should help you get the ball rolling much faster than before. I would suggest spending one day on steps one through three, and an additional day on step four.
At the end of the process, you should have a month’s worth of content prepped and ready to go! It will take you some time and brainpower, but having a plan is so worth it. Trust me, you’ll do this once and you’ll never look back.
If this sounds great but you’re already overwhelmed at the thought of content creation, a calendar, or social media in general, it’s probably time to outsource some of your marketing. My team can help!
Drop me a note and let’s get this party going!
