Crafting excellent social media posts and calendars is vital if you want your social stay to be a powerful and successful one. However, you might be hitting the proverbial brick wall with your posts, and might not be sure just how to go about crafting great posts all the time. Fret no more; I have gathered several great templates that can help you begin planning excellent social posts and content!
Throughout this post, I will be focusing on a great resource from Content Marketing Institute with a great list of awesome templates. Take a look and see which will be perfect for you and your brand.
Important: Customize These Templates for You, But Don't Copy
When you utilize these awesome templates for your business, make sure you use them for your business with your own posts. Don't copy everything that you see; tweak it to fit your brand and needs as well as possible. Remember, being original is vital in everything - always stay original! These templates are simply to help give you direction and streamline the content creation and auditing process. If you do share any of these templates with others, always make sure you reference back to where you located them on the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) site or Hootsuite. This is a great practice to get into, and is also very professional and will reflect greatly on you!
1. LinkedIn Posting Schedules Can Help Significantly. When it comes to using LinkedIn Groups, and scheduling posts in a non-spam way, you can find help with that in a template. Joshua Rodriguez from Content Marketing Institute came up with a very crafty template that can help you create a great, non-spam content schedule that is sure to boost engagement. However, it can be a bit time-consuming, so make sure you have enough time allotted to try this template out. Take a bit to study it before implementing anything, to help you understand it before diving right in. This can keep it from being overwhelming, giving you the chance to use a helpful tool adequately.
2. Doing a Twitter Chat? Here is a Helpful Template. Twitter chats are a great way to engage with your audience base and bring in more people. Typically, you will "host" a Twitter chat by informing your followers of the date and time with a hashtag to use. This can allow them to ask you questions, but also show up in their followers' feeds. If you've never done one before, then it is a good idea to utilize a template to help keep it organized and get you going. Even if you've done one before, the more organized you are, the easier it is to get great results. You can utilize this excellent template to formulate your various Twitter chats, making them easy and successful. You can find the template in the CMI list provided in the first paragraph.
3. Get a Handy Editorial Calendar to Make Planning Easier. When you are planning your content marketing, you should have a great editorial calendar at the ready. This will help make the process easier, and help you create excellent content for your campaign. You will find it is significantly easier to maintain a theme and promote engagement by creating an editorial calendar. However, you might be wondering just how to do this. Both Content Marketing Institute and Hootsuite provide excellent, and free, calendar templates that can help you start the process and make a big impact on your content campaigns.
Here are a few tips on crafting an excellent content marketing calendar:
· Take a look at your sales cycle. This is mainly to see how you get customers, whether through pay-per-click ads, social media posts or a different method. This will help you craft a better, more effective editorial calendar that can help bring in and keep more customers for your business.
· Create a brainstorming session for topics and put them into groups. This is a great idea, no matter what you are planning. Brainstorming can help you come up with some great topics and marketing ideas, especially if you brainstorm with another person. This will help you with your editorial calendar because you can come up with topics, and then separate them into various themes and trends for your campaign. Once you come up with a solid idea, you can easily decipher several ideas that can branch off, which is always a great experience!
· Use a calendar to implement your schedule. Once you have brainstormed everything, it is time to implement it. This is where the template can come in handy. Look at your month and begin deciding where various ideas will go. Once you have implemented your ideas, you can flesh them out more and create more in-depth ideas to create a powerful calendar. You can focus on month-to-month or do a campaign over several months, whichever way you choose, an editorial calendar will be a major help.
4. This Brand Storytelling Template Is Excellent! You should know by now that storytelling is vital to content marketing and copywriting. It is a great way to engage with your audience, build relationships, and make your marketing fun for all. However, you might be stuck on just how to do this. Luckily, Content Marketing Institute gives us a great template that can help you along the way of creating a valuable brand story for your content campaigns. Their angle on storytelling is to help get your employees more involved in and excited about your company, but you can easily transform this into a way to get both your employees and customers involved in your business. Take a look and see how you can use this template for your business to bring about great success!
5. A KPI Tracker for Your Content Marketing. Tracking your KPIs and the effectiveness of your content marketing is important when creating excellent social media and content campaigns. CMI offers an excellent template that you can use to do just this while also giving you basic tips on how to effectively measure KPIs. As you track the effectiveness of your campaigns, you should make sure you have a few basics such as
· Knowing how often you will gather your data.
· Learning what your marketing goals are for various campaigns.
· How you plan to gather the information.
· Knowing who you will have collect the data, whether you or someone else in your company.
Once you know these vital elements, you can begin tracking your KPIs and using the template.
6. See Just How Effective Your Content Marketing is With This Template. This may seem like a repeat of point five, but there is a difference between effectiveness and KPIs. You need to track both in order to have great content marketing for your website and social media sites. There is a handy template you can use to track content effectiveness, which can utilize different formulas of tracking. You don't have to focus on one way to track effectiveness, but a few ways that you can do this are:
· Audit your content on different platforms to see which provides you with more clicks and engagement.
· Use the KPI tracker template to help figure out the effectiveness of individual posts.
· Continually update your tracking document to make sure it reflects the most recent data to help you tweak your content along the way.
7. Use a Blog Assessment Template to Mark Your Influencers. When it comes time to figure out how you want to frame your content and gain inspiration, you need to figure out who your influencers are. This can simply be for inspiration, or people you would like to work with in the future. You can locate the template in the CMI link provided in the first paragraph and you can also download a handy guide from CMI here.
8. There is a Template that can Track the Effectiveness of your Influence Marketing. Are you wondering just how effective your influence marketing is and want to know how to track it? There is another handy template from CMI that helps you track this along with every other element of influence marketing. Take a look at the link in paragraph one and see how the template can help your marketing out in the future and if it will help you be more successful!
9. Hootsuite Gives a Great Social Media Strategy Template. Another great resource for all things social media is the scheduling site Hootsuite. They provide an excellent guide of different resources for free that you can use for your social media marketing to improve your approach and help streamline your ideas. I shared the link to the resources in point three. One of the many templates provided is one that helps you create a great social media strategy.
Social media strategies are important to your business because it can help you decide which direction to take your posts. It can also show you which elements work, and which don't, as well as which social channels work better for you. Many people find it difficult to create a social media strategy, though, especially those who aren't well versed in social media lingo and needs. With the Hootsuite template, you can easily craft a strategy template to improve your stay on social media and help bring in significant clicks, engagement, and revenue.
10. Do You Need to do a Social Media Audit? When it comes time to make a plan for your social media campaigns, an audit is a great idea to make sure it is successful. When doing an audit, you will need to go to each social media site to learn how much influence you have on those sites. You can look at your analytics and how much engagement you receive. Make sure your different social sites mesh with your brand and reflect is correctly. A great way to do an audit is to use a social media audit template, which Hootsuite just so happens to provide. This can help you craft an excellent social media plan!
11. Social Media Content Calendars Can Help Plan Your Month. Just like with an editorial calendar, a social media content calendar can be very helpful. This is what you will use once you have created an editorial calendar or have an idea of what you want to post. It gives you several time slots for different social platforms, allowing you to choose when you will schedule things and how often. If you plan on sharing your blog post multiple times throughout the week, you are able to write different content for each post easily. You will be able to implement these into your social platform, especially if you use a platform like Hootsuite to schedule out posts for your social media content.
12. Try a Handy Bulk Upload Template. If you plan to do bulk uploads for your social media posts, Hootsuite (in point three) also provides a great bulk upload template. This works with Hootsuite's program, which allows you to create several different posts and upload them at once, instead of publishing tweets or posts individually throughout the day. Take a look at the template to see if it is something that can help you save time while allowing you to utilize your social platforms to your advantage.
13. Just How Big Should Your Cover and Profile Image Be? While not a downloadable template, Hootsuite also gives help on how large your cover and profile images should be for different sites. Take a look at the handy guide they give for making your profile images to make sure you have the correct size and always remember, use high-quality images! Just click on the link listed in point three to be taken to the profile images sizing chart.
Until Next Time
I hope you are able to find some excellent templates to help improve your approach to social media and content. By using these templates to jump-start your content campaigns, you are more likely to see improvement in your reach and engagement. You will also begin to notice that you can bring in more customers and eventually more revenue. Sounds perfect, doesn't it? Which of these sounds useful to you? Do you know which you will start to use first? Let me know in the comments!