Many social media managers have perfected their social firehose, filling the social networks with tons of posts for their company or clients. But often when examining these posts over a time period, I fail to see a consistent strategy that guides their efforts.
Creating a Social Media Calendar which follows a clear strategy can improve the results you get from social media marketing. Just the act of creating a social media calendar can help you to stop and think more strategically about your social media goals. If you'd like to see a sample calendar template, here's a free, downloadable Social Media Calendar Template.
Here are four important things to make sure you address on your calendar:
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Social Media Goals. Try to think of your goals in terms of moving fans from point A to point B. What do you want them to do? How is this helping you move them down a funnel to your goal of purchase, recommendation, registration, or response? When you've identified several social media goals you'll be able to make sure your post mix, content sources, and editorial calendar are all working toward those goals. Goals can be a simple as:
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Boost engagement on a social network
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Increase fans and followers of a certain profile
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Increase sales from social driven promotions
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Engage with influencers
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Share and download educational content
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Ideal Post Mix. It's a well-known tactic to vary the topic or your posts. But have you written down specific post mix guidelines? Most experts recommend that posts that try to sell your product or company be limited to 10-15%. What other categories of posts should you include? Here are some examples:
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Humor
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Educational
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Information sharing
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User comment or photo sharing
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Product sales or promotions
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Event registration
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Content download
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Be sure you have identified the major categories and your ideal post mix percentages. That way, even if you don't track each post's category, you can at least eye-ball them every week to make sure you're close to your planned mix.
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Content Sources. Once you've identified your goals and ideal post content mix, you'll need to fill your social media calendar with engaging posts. These can be developed by you or your team or curated and shared from other sources. When you're planning out your posts on your calendar make sure to include the source of each so everyone knows where they're coming from. Externally curated content could include:
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Social media influencers. Keep track of what influencers in your space are posting to find useful content to post.
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RSS/Blog feeds. Subscribe to blogs and other feeds using a tool such as Feedly to track new articles published.
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Newsletters. Receive email newsletters from bloggers or news sources in your space.
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Editorial Calendar. Every organization will have special events, publications, holiday themes, annual promotions or product releases. Create an editorial calendar to plan these out at least six months in advance to make sure that the most important campaigns get first priority on the calendar. Most organizations have a monthly editorial calendar but this could be weekly if the activity and volume are high. For example:
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January - New Year Resolutions promotion
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March - Major new products available for spring
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June - Annual conference
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September - Annual open house
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November - Thanksgiving, Fall, Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotions
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If you've completed the four items above, you'll be well on your way to managing your social media calendar for best results. Of course, you'll need to manage your actual posts on a daily basis to accommodate last-minute additions and events. You'll want to be able to view and manage your posts easily, and a social media marketing tool such as Rignite can help you be efficient.
Don't forget to measure your results by post category and social media goal, so you'll be able to continuously adjust and improve your calendar. I won't get into the details of social media analytics, but at a minimum you'll want to measure the reach, impressions, engagement, and shortlink clicks across your posts, not just for each post, in order to make strategic improvements.