Keeping up with the increasing social media trends and platforms while managing your brand is quite challenging. No matter how organized you are, having a social media calendar that maps out a month-long schedule can make life much easier. 

Here are four easy yet effective steps to build a social media calendar and enhance your digital marketing strategy:  

Step 1: Review Your Current Social Media Performance

Reviewing your current social media performance before building a calendar will help you make better decisions. Before creating a new strategy, perform a thorough audit of the current platforms you use and how effective the content is. Consider things like: 

- What are the specific goals for each platform?

- Which platform has seen the most growth and why? 

- Which platform has the least engagement and why? 

- Which type of content does well?

- Are your users active during the time you’re posting?

- Are your users active during the time you’re posting?

After analyzing these things, set clear goals and establish what you’re trying to achieve through social media. Narrowing it down will bring clarity to your team so you can create a content calendar accordingly. You should also set platform-specific KPIs that will measure success in the future. 

Step 2: Establish Your Target Audience and Choose Social Platforms

You may already have followers, but are you posting according to your target audience’s demographics? You need to monitor who your audience is, what they are talking about, which platforms they use, and why. For example, your audience uses Instagram for fun and light content, whereas they use Twitter for news updates and professional reasons.

This step is a bit tricky because there are many social media platforms with different demographics. However, understanding the different demographics of your audience and choosing social media platforms and calendars accordingly will bring much better results. 

This also saves your efforts because you’ll only focus your energy on the platforms and posts your audience is interested in. 

Step 3: Plan Your Content

Once you’ve figured out your audience preferences and why they use social media, planning content will be much easier and more likely to achieve the desired results.

 Divide your content into different groups, for example, tutorial videos, stories, short videos, live sessions, product photographs, etc. You can further categorize them according to their nature, such as sponsored posts, user-generated, curated posts, etc. Categorizing the content will make it easier to put it into the calendar and keep track of which content is performing the best.   

Here are some rules that will help you plan your content: 

80/20 Rule: While planning your content, it’s best to keep the 80/20 rule in mind, which says 80% of your content would educate, inform and engage the audience while the 20% would be promotional. You don’t need to bombard your social media with promotional posts. 

Rule of Thirds: Another rule that will come in handy and prevents your content from getting boring is the rule of third. It says one-third of the posts share curated content, one-third share user-generated content, while one-third of the posts should be promotional. 

Step 4: Create a Calendar & Schedule Your Content

You will find many templates for a social media calendar online, download the one that suits your needs and start filling it with your content. It’s important to schedule the calendar in advance and make necessary changes when required. Make sure you have a team who handles everything, such as updating the calendar, posting content according to the schedule, etc., so there are no hiccups in your social media plan. 

If you don’t have a team to look after your calendar, you can outsource the job to us. We will work as an extension of your marketing team to achieve your goals. From creating and managing social media calendar to coming up with unique ideas, we can take care of everything. 

Urban Pixel is a leading digital marketing agency in Detroit, offering a wide range of quality content writing services and SEO services. Contact us for more details.

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