Planning Ahead with a Social Media Calendar

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The beginning of the year gives everyone a chance to get everything together and organized before your to-do list becomes like a monster of a science fiction movie. Next thing you know you’re too busy to creatively write and track your social media posts. A way to prevent this is to do what many editors and authors have done for years, which is to create a social media calendar.

 

Added Benefits

 

Similar to traditional publishing calendars, a social media calendar helps you break down what and when you want to be posting. There are many benefits to a social media calendar other than staying organized. The first is it will give consistency, so your co-workers or boss will have a schedule to work by as well. Blaise Grimes-Vlort, a writer for Social Media Today, points out that a social media calendar also helps you with planning for the events/milestones you want to promote. For example, if you want to celebrate your company’s birthday with your followers, you would know in January that the month of May’s social media posts and blogs would be about the founding and creation of your company.

 

Organize, Organize, Organize

 

Another Social Media Today writer, Danielle Leitech, suggests creating an excel document with columns for: post date, post content, social media outlets, post type, content theme, and tracking links. This detailed worksheet will help your organize your posts any way you want. You can track how many photo or video posts you have compared to how many written posts. Leitech also suggests creating tracking and reporting tabs in your worksheet as well. These tabs will help you notice trends in your posts and how your followers shared them.