You’re in it with the big wheels now. You have a goal you want to achieve on social media and you’re committed to fulfilling it. But soon enough we all came to a realization that running a business online (no matter if it’s a personal or business brand) is much harder than it seemed when we were just casual users.
It happens every so often that you run out of ideas and have trouble coming up with new and fresh posts. And before you know it, a few days have passed without a post in sight or, even worse, with posts that you’re not proud of. Luckily, there’s a way to never (well, almost, we’re human after all) get in this situation ever again.
If you’re any serious about your social game, you need a social media calendar. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a detailed schedule of your online activities for a particular amount of time. Basically, it’s the thing that will enable you never to go through the ever too familiar feeling of complete and utter panic once you realize you have no idea what to post today.
This all comes into an even clearer perspective once you take a look at how often you should be posting:
Facebook: 2x per day if you have a page with over 10.000 followers and if the number is lower – it’s best to keep it to a couple of times a week.
Instagram: at least once a day; of course the numbers vary slightly, but all agree that it shouldn’t be lower.
Twitter: ideal would be to keep it around 5 tweets a day.
Pinterest: another one with quite a dense schedule – 5-10 pins a day.
LinkedIn: 2-5 times a week.
If it seems like quite a bit of work it’s because it is. Of course, if you’re on all these platforms, chances are you have someone helping out, but even if that is not the case you should never sacrifice quality for quantity. Nothing less than stellar content won’t cut it. It’s always better to skip a day than to post mediocre content that people have seen a million times before.
Here are just a few of many perks of having a social calendar:
- Planning out the content you’ll be posting will enable you to know exactly for when you’ll need what, leaving you just enough time to write that article, take the perfect photo or shoot the video you wanted to use in a particular occasion. Ultimately, this will lead to having higher quality content, and who wouldn’t want that?
- You could include national, international or personal holidays and anniversaries in your calendar and address them through your content appropriately. For example, if you notice that you have quite a bit of followers from China, why not congratulate Lunar New Year? It would be a lovely, personal touch that you should make sure never to miss.
- You could try out doing different themes for different months for the ultimate testing. If you want to test how 5 different color schemes perform on your Instagram account, dedicate a month to each and closely follow the metrics (if you use Archie, you already have a user-friendly analytics feature at your service). Of course, it doesn’t have to be only testing, you could also, for example, change up the theme of your blog posts on a regular basis.
- It will be much easier to strike a good balance between promoting your business and providing value through posting educational or purely aesthetically pleasing content. This is extremely important when building a trustworthy brand persona that your followers love to come back to.
Another advantage you can make out of having social calendar is that you monitor what performs how in a much more controlled manner. This is especially true if you’re splitting content into seasonal or thematic chunks which will allow you to make comparisons. With that said, it’s important to note that social calendar should be an ever evolving thing, something that you use to see what should you post more of and when.
When it comes to the tools that you can use for it, if you’re just starting out something simple like Google Calendar or Excel spreadsheet will work just fine. For example, check out the this easy and straightforward template:
As you can see, it will give you space to insert copy, image links and the time when the post is supposed to go up. You could also have different months as different sheets. Here is when Google Calendar could come in handy with its push notifications feature. If you’re a bit more advanced, there are tools that are specialized in social media scheduling such as this one. Using something like that, you’ll be able to both plan out your posting agenda as well as to schedule what is going up when.
Another useful set of tools that could come in handy once you decide to get more diligent with your social media posting are websites that will help you come up with content generation. Because sometimes you’ll just run out of ideas on what to talk about that day. And that’s ok – happens to the best of us. When something like that happens, you can try to get some inspiration from websites such as Buzzsumo and Scoop.it.
Final tip: This only can take up a full day of work if you’re taking your social media presence seriously. And this of course isn’t the only thing you should be doing. The actual creation of the content as well as engaging with your followers are equally important. That’s why you must be smart about your time and automate whatever you can. And this is where Archie comes in play.
Start for free today.