Creating a social media content calendar - Why & How!
A content calendar is a tool to help you plan your organisation’s social media posts. It helps you to keep track of the type of content you are publishing (carousels, articles, videos or podcasts to list a few) and allows you to highlight the themes and topics that you would like to communicate to your audience.
Content calendars are an effective way of keeping your posts organised, following the strategic direction of your marketing and maintaining consistency in posting across all of your social media platforms. Analysis and evaluation of the audience engagement in your content, which posts have performed well or not, considering why this may be the case and uncovering areas that your audience may be interested in, can all help to support future content calendars.
Planning and brainstorming: Content calendars allow you to plan posts ahead of time taking into consideration the upcoming events in the year in your field. This phase of the content calendar is crucial as it includes the strategy that you will be employing for the next few months and the themes and topics which your posts will cover. Once this plan is in place, you can film, write and batch-create the content that you need.
Say something: Your content needs to stand out and be interesting to capture the attention of your audience. It should be well thought out, informative and worth engaging with. What do you have to say which will connect with your audience, make them think, entertain them or inform them?
How long should it be? With the ‘tiktokification’ of social media, people are veering towards short-form content. If they are not hooked within the first 5 seconds of watching your video then you have lost them. Of course, not everything can be condensed into a 1-minute video, you mustn’t fall into the trap of dumbing down everything. However, in this social media landscape, you are vying for attention like never before. So consider what your hook will be when creating content, whether you are writing a post, filming a video or streaming a podcast.
Diversity of content: Videos, podcasts, image carousels, articles; there are a myriad of ways in which content can be communicated. Think about using a good mix of media to engage your audience. You can also create the same type of content in different forms e.g. turning a how-to carousel post into a short video. Different people like to consume their media in different ways and this allows for you to cater to all tastes whilst also repurposing your content.
Dynamic not fixed: Remember, your content calendar is a tool to assist your planning and posting and it is not set in stone. You can switch the order of your posts if a topic more pressing comes up through current affairs or popular culture or even an achievement or news within your organisation that is worth celebrating.
