How to Make a Social Media Calendar in 10 Steps
creating a social media calendar is a challenging job. In this article, you can read how you approach it in a structured way, make optimal use of your social media content, and which tools can help you. This way you realize optimal social media planning in 10 steps!
Table of Content
1. Set social media goals
A social media calendar starts with a strategy and the question of what you want to achieve. Four goals often play the main role:
- The growing visibility and brand awareness
- Get more subscribers to your email list
- Collect leads
- Realize direct sales
2. Formulate a social media strategy
In your strategy, you decide who will approach you where and in what way to achieve your goal. Determining your message is essential for this. It must match the phase your target group is in when they are on social media. What are they looking for and what are they open to? Is that an informing, helping, inspiring or entertaining message? Is your target group interested in this latently or is it actively looking? Can you possibly distinguish between beginners and advanced?
Based on these characteristics, you can formulate a number of key messages.
3. Choose content formats and topics
These different goals and messages require different types of formats and topics. For your planning, it is useful to choose topics that appeal to your target group on social media. You package these topics in a format that works well on a certain platform. Video works very well almost everywhere, followed by carousels, stories, and combinations of images and text. To keep your social media calendar and planning organized, it is usually efficient to choose 3 to 5 formats that you use a lot and can possibly use on multiple platforms. When making that choice, look at feasibility/feasibility, the wishes of your target group, and the characteristics of the social media platforms where you want to be most active.
At the bottom of this article, you will find additional information with content suggestions per platform.
4. Determine your frequency
How often do you want/need to be present on a social media platform to have the desired impact? The answer to this differs per company and per goal, but also per platform. You can quietly show and hear from you on Facebook and Instagram several times a day, on LinkedIn this frequency will be too high and is probably more adequate 1 to 3 times a week. Make a choice based on your experience to date and the wishes of your target group.
It is important that you choose a frequency that you can maintain consistently. This is necessary to achieve the desired effect, but it is also important for yourself. It is frustrating and demotivating when you have goals but gradually find that you are not doing the necessary work for them, for whatever reason.
5. Choose days and times
There are social media best practices that help you make choices in the days and times. For example, LinkedIn articles appear to work better on Mondays, Thursdays, and weekends than on other days. But best practices can change and you often have to rely on your own knowledge and experiment. The statistics of your social media accounts then show you the best times and days to reach your target audience.
6. Reuse social media content
If you use multiple social media platforms, see how you can reuse content. Many formats lend themselves to multiple platforms and because you only reach a part of your followers per platform, it can be useful to share something in more places.
But smart reuse of content goes further. Often you can cast a certain message in multiple formats and you can repeat it over a longer period of time in a slightly different way.
7. Start from your basic content
If you have a blog, podcast, or vlog for which you create your most important content, then this is the basis for social media content. Share this primary content in its entirety, choose a fragment, make a summary or pour it into a different format. For example, translate an article into a video, image, or presentation.
That is why it is good to plan that basic content before you make a social media calendar for a longer period of time. This is where your social media calendar touches your total content planning.
Supplement your basic content within hackers
In addition, you can pick up on events, special days, or events in and around your own organization that you can already designate. Put those dates in your social media calendar.
8. A framework for your social media calendar
By scheduling your primary or basic content for a longer period of time and adding in hackers and business milestones (such as launches or collaborations), you create a framework or basic calendar for your social media posts. With this, you can fill in all messages per social media platform. Make an overview for yourself of what you want to use:
- Facebook: profile, page, and/or group
- LinkedIn: profile, page, and/or group
- Instagram: grid, stories, IGTV, Live or Reels
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Google My Business: Posts on your Page
Combine that with the formats and topics that you have created based on your primary content, important data for your company, and hackers. Divide that over the days, times, and social platforms of your choice. You can do that per month and you can work with a list (in Excel or Word) or more visually and then many people find pen and paper very useful because it is visual and you can easily draw cross-connections.
For example, use a PDF like an image below on which you fill in what you are going to do per week: subject and form. Do that until you have a monthly overview. You can leave some slots open on purpose so that you can still spontaneously respond to events. You can also work several months ahead so that you can make connections and have some messages come back later. For example, give a LinkedIn article from month 1 in a text message in month 3 extra attention.
A monthly calendar for scheduling social media posts on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With an ‘open’ row for channels where you may occasionally post messages, such as Google My Business, TikTok, or a YouTube channel.
If you work with several people on a social media calendar, you can add who is responsible for which part. Then pen and paper will no longer suffice, but you can also use some of the tools below for that team collaboration.
9. Social media planning is more than automating
Over the years, most business social media users have also started using scheduling tools in which they pre-create their updates so that they are automatically posted at a specific time. That was a godsend, but it hasn’t been enough to be successful for some time now.
Yes, scheduling messages ahead is smart and efficient. But it’s not enough. The algorithms of many (if not all) social media reward users who not only post themselves but who also respond to messages from others. That means that on the days when messages automatically go live, you also have to set aside time for comments. That certainly applies to LinkedIn and Instagram.
Responding to yourself is not necessarily a difficult thing to do. Because with reactions you also increase visibility and show what knowledge you have. Moreover, your connections on LinkedIn see that you respond so that you are again in the picture with them in a good way.
My advice is therefore to also schedule periods in which you respond to others in your social media calendar. For example, by responding to at least one message from someone else every day or every other day on your main platform(s). It’s a small action that makes a big difference in the long run.
10. Tools for your social media planning and calendar
First of all: don’t focus on tools for a social media calendar. My experience is that situations differ enormously per company, which means that well-intentioned social media calendar templates are not always useful. Sometimes you are just as good or even better off planning your social media calendar with Excel, with pen and paper, and with moments in your Outlook or Google Calendar when you free up time to create several messages in succession. That ‘batching’ of social media content saves you a lot of time and gives you peace of mind because you schedule messages for a week or longer.
Scheduling social media posts with a calendar overview at the same time can be done with various tools. This is more visual and clearer than Excel, and these tools also have additional functions and benefits. Examples of social media calendar tools are Buffer, Later (Insta, Pinterest, and TikTok), Tailwind (Insta and Pinterest), Facebook Creator Studio, or Publer. They also give you an overview in the calendar or list-like form. The public seems to be the most extensive at the moment because you can also post Google My Business messages and YouTube videos there. In addition, it has a media library and integration with Canva.
