How To Create A Social Media Marketing Calendar

Social Media Calendar Tools

A social media marketing calendar allows you to plan, organize, and evaluate content.

Your content calendar will allow you to develop a more effective strategy that will produce better results while saving you time using methods that do not work.

In just a few months, you will start to see patterns of strategies that work and ones that fall flat. Revising your plans according to your gathered results will help you build a social media art marketing plan that will grow your art business quicker than you could have imagined.

This post will give you an example of creating a social media calendar using excel, but you can use the same strategy using a spreadsheet or even pen and paper.

But first, let’s talk about the benefits of creating a social media marketing calendar.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Calendar

Creating a social media calendar will only take a few minutes to make and save you several hours during the week, publishing social media content. 

Benefits Of A Social Media Editorial Calendar

• Save Time
• Diverse
• Stay on Track
• A/B Testing

Save Time

Spending thirty minutes every week developing a plan for your social media content will save you hours during the week.

When it is time to post on your social media platforms, you will know what to post and when.

There will be no wasted time wondering what you should post and when to publish the content.

Diverse

If you post on social media without a plan, you will increase the chance of posting the same content frequently.

Creating new and exciting content for your audience will increase the engagement on your posts.

Publishing the same post several times throughout the month will help increase the visibility of the content, but publishing the same type of posts will become monotonous after a while.

Stay on Track

There is no better way to stay on track than a to-do list.

A social media editorial calendar will keep you on track and prevent you from putting specific tasks on the backburner.

A/B Testing

A social media calendar allows you to A/B test your posts.

A/B testing is when you post the same content in different ways to see what will produce more engagement.

For example, you might include an image with text on one post, and on the other post, you will only have text to see which type of post receives more engagement.

Before You Create a Social Media Marketing Calendar

Before adding content to your calendar, study your social media analytics and identify what types of posts received the most shares, likes, and comments. 

Write them down with the links on the posts.

Ask yourself, “Why did this post perform better than the others?”

• Was it educational?
• Was it because it was motivational or inspirational?
• Did it contain humor?
• Was it a video, image, or text alone?
• How many people click on the link to be redirected to the blog post?

In just a few months, you will be able to discover what type of content your target audience is interested in reading.

If you want to grow your fan base, you have to write for the reader, not yourself.

Azure Collier created a beautiful infographic, sharing some valuable information about how often to share content on some of the largest social media platforms. You can see the infographic at [Infographic] What and How Often Should You Post on Social Media?

Here are some of the highlights of the infographic:

• Facebook – post up to 10 times per week. Focus on quality, not quantity.
• Twitter – Post more frequently. Focus on quantity versus quality.
• Pinterest – Post 5-10 times a day. 
• Google+ – Maximum 10 x per week. Use relevant keywords to increase your ranking in Google searches.

Once you have decided on what content you will be sharing and how often, it is time to create your calendar.

There are many tools available for creating editorial calendars. Some options will be free others will have a fee.

I will be showing you how I use a spreadsheet for all of my social media marketing calendars.

On the top of the spreadsheet title the columns as:

• Date
• Post title
• Link
• Publish time
• Text
• Likes
• Shares
• Comments

You can create a specific page for each social media site you use on the bottom tabs.

Once a week or once a month, you can sit down and plan your calendar. You will save many hours during the month just by spending a few moments planning.

Your posts will be more productive every month because you will start to see what is working and what is not working.

Depending on what platform you are using, you might be able to schedule your posts once you have finished your calendar, freeing up even more time during the month. There are tools available for scheduling social media posts as well. You will want to look at the pricing to see if it is something that will benefit you and your business.

Assess

At the end of every month, evaluate how your posts did. Document how many likes, shares, and comments each post received. This task can be done daily, weekly, or monthly. Find out what works best for you.

The important thing is to keep proper documents of your performance to tweak and adjust your strategy to make it more productive.

Best Social Media Marketing Template Tools

We showed you how to develop a content calendar using excel, but many tools are available for creating a social media marketing plan.

Why are there so many social media planners available?

Because companies understand the importance of a social media calendar, businesses of all sizes use social media to grow their audience and build relationships with their fans.

The businesses with a tremendous fanbase learned how to market on social media with a content calendar and study analytics.

They have a clear vision of what types of content will produce the most engagement.

Here are the top marketing calendars:

• Trello
• SproutSocial
• Evernote
• Hootsuite
• Agorapulse

Final Thoughts On How To Create A Social Media Marketing Calendar

Now that you have some social media calendar ideas, it is time to take action and start filling the calendar.

Your social media strategy will evolve and become more productive.
You will see what strategies are working for you and which ones are not.

The calendar setup will take a little longer at first, but in no time, you will discover that you are spending less time on social media while seeing better results, and you can start implementing different social media tips artists use to grow your following.

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