The Importance of Creating a Social Media Calendar

Social media has become an essential to the way that businesses and consumers interact, and has broadened the ways in which people connect and share experiences. Any successful modern business needs to maintain an organized and relevant online presence, and integrate multiple media platforms to reach as many people as they can. In order to do so, it is essential to create and maintain a lucrative “social media calendar.” A social media calendar allows marketing agencies and businesses to schedule all of their posts across platforms in one place, and plan ahead for specific marketing opportunities.

What is a Social Media Calendar?

A social media calendar is a well-organized outline of all of your upcoming social media posts, ordered by date and time. Your social media calendar can take the form of a post deck, a spreadsheet, a calendar or scheduling software, or any other type of dashboard, and will include the following details for each post:

The date and time it will go live, the platform it will be published on, and the creative elements, assets, links, and/or tags that will be included.

Why Your Business Needs a Social Media Schedule

While fleeting social trends are fun to join, keeping a planned social media calendar is essential for several reasons: it will help your business track analytics across an organized database, enable you to maximize your time by automating posts, and allow you to curate a cohesive theme and visual concept for your brand. But most importantly, it will allow you to ensure your business is hitting opportune marketing dates based on KPIs, or key performance indicators.

Tracking Analytics

A social media schedule is essential to tracking and analyzing social media activity over time. Here at Bright Age, we pride ourselves on conducting extensive market research by analyzing our clients’ performance over the course of each month in order to come up with the best possible social media marketing strategies. Our social media schedules make this process organized and seamless, and through keeping these schedules and working weeks in advance, we are able to make sure our clients’ online presences are constantly growing.

Maximizing Your Time

With a social media calendar, all of your posts are planned out ahead of time and will be published automatically, and in turn, you will be able to share content every day without logging into multiple platforms every day, on the hour. This also frees up time to interact with your community via comments and messages! Internet users regularly frequent many platforms, and a calendar allows you to make sure all of your pages are consistently updated in one place. Our Bright Age Clients’ social media pages are constantly being updated automatically––check out our Instagram pages for Galaxy Theatres and Woodland Hills Magazine to see what a scheduled Instagram feed can look like. All of these posts were planned ahead and automated with a social media schedule, so we get to spend more time telling our clients’ brand stories and less time logging in and out of social platforms.

Maintaining a Cohesive Theme

One of the most important components of social media marketing is making sure that your social media pages are aesthetically appealing and tell your brand’s story through visuals, which we have talked about more in-depth in this blog post. Having a social media theme that reflects the values of your brand is integral to your online presence, and by creating a calendar, you will be able to plan your posts to ensure that your feed is visually diverse, relevant, and consistent. For example, our Instagram page for our client “The Golden Girls”  is maintained with the help of a social media calendar which allows us to plan our content so each post offers followers something new and exciting even for an off-air television show.

Maintaining a social media calendar is the best practice for growth in this industry, and allows you and your business to curate an online presence that you can be proud of. Through organizing and automating your content, you will be able to maximize the benefits of social media marketing like a professional. To learn more about what Bright Age can do for you, head here.