Social media content has an important and beneficial place in the business world. However, so many businesses do it wrong.

Developing a social media content calendar can see the difference between your social media presence being a channel for increased profit, or it costing you time and money. Consider the following tips when developing a social media content calendar.

Dedicate a social media timeframe
Unless you have a social media team whose role is strictly to manage these platforms on behalf of the business, social media marketing and posting can quickly fall to the wayside. This can be avoided by allocating a daily or weekly time slot (depending on the size and needs of your business) to focus on maintaining the business’ presence on social media platforms.

Set goals within the calendar
Rather than simply blocking out 9am-11am on a Monday as ‘social media time’, actually list what goals or tasks you want to accomplish. For example:
– 9am-9.30am – responding to comments, reviews, messages.
– 9.30-10.30am – research and write posts and content for platforms.
– 10.30-11am – create an infographic for promotion and share on Instagram and Facebook.

Schedule content
Scheduling content is a great way to create content within the allocated weekly timeframe. Once the content is created, by scheduling when it is posted, you can maintain your presence each day, without it interfering with other tasks that are important to increasing profits.

Review
You may create a calendar that in theory, is functional and time efficient. In practice, it may not be the best strategy to use. Using the example from above, after a few weeks you may find that by focusing on social media for the first 2 hours of the working week, you have lots of emails and phone calls that go unresponded to. Always take note and reassess if the way the calendar is set out is the most effective for both the business and the team doing the work.