Social media, in any marketing strategy, has become the most influential phenomenon in communication. With billions of active users on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, social media is a powerful tool for marketing your brand. It’s a great way to connect with your audience and showcase your products or services.
However, to get the most out of your social media presence, you need to be consistent with your content. To ensure that you are regularly posting high-quality content that engages your readers, it’s essential to create a social media editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is a plan that outlines the content you’ll be sharing on your blog and social media platforms, along with the dates and times you’ll be posting.
In this post, we’ll talk on how you can create a social media editorial calendar in 10 easy steps. We will also include examples of how our Nelio Content tool makes all these steps much easier to perform:
Step 1: Determine Your Goals and Objectives
Before you begin creating your social media editorial calendar, it’s essential to figure out what you want to achieve with your social media. Do you want to increase brand awareness, grow your audience, drive traffic to your website, generate leads or sales, build customer loyalty, or engage with your audience?
For example, if your primary goal is to increase brand awareness, your social media objectives might include increase your number of social media followers by a certain percentage over a specific timeframe or increase the reach and impressions of your social media posts by using relevant hashtags, tags, and shares.
If your goal is to drive website traffic, then, a social media objective might be to increase the number of clicks on links in your social media posts by a specific percentage or encourage social media users to visit your website by providing engaging content and valuable information.
Conversely, if your goal is to generate leads and sales, your social media objectives might include increase the number of leads or sales generated through social media by a percentage over a timeframe. Or if you aim to build customer loyalty, your objective might be to encourage social media users to engage with your brand by asking questions, sharing feedback, or leaving reviews.
Whatever your goals and objectives may be, make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This will help you create a social media editorial calendar that is focused on achieving your desired outcomes.
Step 2: Know Your Audience
Who are you trying to reach? What kind of content do they like? What topics interest them? Understanding your audience is crucial when creating content for social media. You need to know what kind of content they enjoy, what type of language they use, and what topics interest them.
To know your audience, your need to do some research and analysis. First, start by looking at your website and social media analytics to understand who is visiting your website, who is engaging with your social media content, and what they are interested in. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Instagram Insights to gather this information.
You might also consider to conduct surveys or polls to ask your readers o customers about their preferences and needs. You can also try to monitor social media conversations related to your business to understand what your target customers are looking for.
With the gathered information you can create buyer personas. This is, fictional representations of your ideal customers or followers. For example, David, 38, works as a freelancer developing and maintaining websites. He is looking for tips on on how to grow the drive website traffic into the latest marketing trends.
Defining your buyer personas will help you create content that matches them and achieves your social media goals. It’s important to regularly review and update your buyer personas as your business and target audience evolve.
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Step 3: Determine Your Content Mix
The content mix refers to the different types of content you’ll be sharing with your audience. You don’t have to stick to just one type of content. Mix it up with text-based posts, images, videos, infographics, and more.
The right content mix will depend on your goals, your audience, and the social media platforms you’re using. For example, visual content tends to perform better on Instagram, while Twitter is better suited for short, text-based posts.
In addition, you need to take into account the cost and resources to create each type of content. Different types of content require varying levels of resources and cost to create. Blog posts are usually the most affordable, while videos and eBooks require more time and money. Infographics and whitepapers are also resource-intensive. Case studies and webinars require the involvement of several team members. Podcasts require hosts, guests, writers, and producers. Overall, the cost and resources required depend on the complexity, length, and format of the content.
If you use a tool like Nelio Content, you can enter your mix of content types you want to create in the editorial calendar without having to set the publication date.
Step 4: Choose Your Social Media Platforms
It’s essential to choose the social media platforms that make the most sense for your brand. Although your target audience may have accounts on all platforms, you need to find the ones that they really use to find your content.
Instagram and Pinterest are considered the best platform for designers, photographers, wedding dress salons, cooking recipes, and all businesses that can be represented through attractive photos. Instagram is preferred by a younger audience and users in Pinterest are mainly women.
Facebook is typically used by an adult audience to keep in touch with friends and family. Twitter can be an effective channel to increase brand awareness since it is great platform for tracking opinions and supporting real-time consumer experiences. LinkedIn is the best platform if you’re targeting B2B clients. YouTube and TikTok are suitable to promote video content.
Ultimately, the best social platform for promoting your content will depend on your target audience and the type of content you are promoting. It’s best to experiment with different platforms and track your results to determine which ones work best for you.
Step 5: Determine How Often You Want to Post
How often you post on social media will depend on your goals, your audience, the social media platforms you’re using, and, of course, your available resources to create content. Generally, it’s a good idea to post at least once a day on most platforms. However, you may find that your audience is more engaged when you post less frequently but with higher-quality content.
If your starting point is that the contents of your blog will be the nerve center of your promotion on social networks, first determine how many posts you will be able to publish on your blog with the resources you have available.
Then, set the frequency of publication on the other social networks. This can be easily settled if you use an automatic tool to promote content on social media such as Nelio Content.
Step 6: Define Your Content Ideas
Now that you have a better understanding of your goals, your audience, and your content mix, it’s time to define the specific content you want to talk about. This has to be a fun process in which you take the opportunity to share the topics you think will interest your audience, help you improve your SEO, or topics that you simply feel like talking about. Consider the following sources of inspiration:
- Your existing content: Repurpose blog posts, videos, or other content you’ve already created for social media.
- Industry news: Share relevant news articles or industry insights.
- User-generated content: Share posts from your followers or customers that align with your brand.
- Holidays or events: Create posts that tie into upcoming holidays or events.
- Trending topics: Share content related to trending topics or hashtags.
- ChatGPT: Ask for ideas on what to write about a given topic, and you’ll be surprised.
With Nelio Content, you can edit any type of content that you have previously defined and write its title.
This way, you can easily complete the set of posts to publish in the near future.
Determining the content of a blog is no easy task. Separate the process of generating the post titles from writing them. If you have to think of an idea for any content on the same day you’re supposed to write, you might not have time to finish.
Step 7: Plan Your Content
Now that you have a list of content to write, it’s time to start planning when you’ll be sharing them on your blog.
Consider the timing of your posts, as well as any upcoming events or promotions that may impact your content schedule. It’s also important to ensure that your content is balanced and covers a variety of topics, so your audience doesn’t get bored.
With Nelio Content, you only need to drag all the content ideas that you have previously defined into the calendar.
Step 8: Create Your Content
With your content plan in place, it’s time to start creating your content. This may include writing copy for your posts, designing graphics, or creating videos. Be sure to stay consistent with your brand voice and messaging across all of your content, so your audience can easily recognize your brand.
Step 9: Schedule Your Social Media Posts
Once your content is ready, it’s time to schedule your posts on your social media platforms. Nelio Content helps you schedule your posts in advance. At the end of writing any post, you can manually or automatically create all those messages that promote your posts on social media and view them on the Post Promotion Timeline.
Be sure to include any relevant tags, hashtags, and links in your posts, so your audience can easily engage with your content.
On the editorial calendar you can view the scheduled blog posts and social messages to promote them.
You can move any post in the calendar so that all upfront task planning and subsequent social media promotion is consistently accommodated with a new date.
Step 10: Monitor and Analyze Your Results
Finally, it’s important to monitor and analyze your social media performance regularly. Use your analytics to track the success of your posts, including engagement rates, click-through rates, and follower growth. Use this data to adjust your content strategy as needed and to ensure that you’re continuously improving your social media presence.
To Sum Up
Creating a social media editorial calendar takes time and effort, but it’s well worth it in the end. By planning and executing a consistent content strategy with the help of an editorial calendar like Nelio Content, you’ll be able to connect with your audience and grow your brand on social media more easily.
Featured image by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash.
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