Are you feeling overwhelmed with your social content? Need a better way to organize your themes, posts, and ideas? A social media content calendar is your solution! A content calendar acts as a roadmap to success for your small business on social media. Making sure you take the time to plan ahead and create a social media content calendar for your business could make or break the performance of your business on social media.
You can find countless examples of content calendars on the web, but we've found that they are so specific to each unique business and social media goals.
We've outlined five steps to creating a social media content calendar here to provide you with all the considerations to take into account when building a calendar unique to your business.
Step 1: Outline your social media goals
Don't skip this step! It's important to consider a goal for everything you share on social media. Always ask yourself, "what is the point of sharing this piece of content"? You should be able to answer your question by citing one of your predetermined goals.
Here are some common social goals to get you started:
Driving people to your website
Increasing engagement on social media
Increasing brand awareness
Follower growth % increase
Step 2: Decide how detailed you want to get
Do you want to create your content calendar one month at a time? Or maybe you want to outline content for the next three months? What components are you going to include on your content calendar? Make some decisions on detail before you start:
Considerations:
How far in advance do you want to plan?
How much detail do you want to include?
Do you want to have every detail nailed down, or do you want to outline a looser plan?
Some common components of a content calendar for social media include:
Post topics and goals
Post dates
Captions and hashtags
Links and CTAs
Images or videos to include
What platform(s) you're posting to
The status of a post (drafted, scheduled, published)
Step 3: Determine what types of content you want to share
The types of content you share will help you achieve your social media goals (see step 1). Be sure to include a diverse portfolio of content for your followers to engage with. Here are a few different types of content to consider:
Sales and promotions
Blog posts
Inspirational posts
Quotes
Personal content
Customer testimonials
Interactive engagement posts (polls, Q&A)
Resources and news
Seasonal topics
Step 4: Outline monthly themes
Consider common themes when planning your content calendar and use them to brainstorm seasonal and promotional content:
January themes
Resolutions
Clean up and clean out
Fitness and wellness, self care
Dry January
February themes
Romance and love
Coworker appreciation
Black History Month
March themes
Spring cleaning
Spring break
Gardening and crafting
March Madness
April themes
Spring cleaning and organization
Showers and weddings
Baseball
Planning for summer
Ramadan begins
May themes
BBQs and camping
Showers, weddings, and graduations
Summer planning
June themes
Summer vacations, BBQs, and outdoor activities
Dads and grads
Pride month
July themes
Summer activities
Fourth of July
August themes
End of summer
Back to school
Black Business Month
Fall trends
September themes
Back to school
End of summer sales
Football season and tailgating
Fall fashion and fall trends
Oktoberfest
Fall food and drink
October themes
Fall and autumn
Halloween themed cocktails and food
Halloween costumes and parties
Holiday planning
November themes
Holiday planning, holiday sales, holiday gift guides
Friends and family, home entertaining, and hosting
Volunteering and community
Customer appreciation
December themes
Holiday, holiday parties, holiday hosting
Advent
Gifting, gift guides, and stocking stuffers
Holiday sales
Friends and family
Step 5: Build your content calendar
Create your content calendar on paper, in excel, with Google sheets, or using more sophisticated content calendar tools. You can organize your content calendar by dates, by topic, or by individual posts. Find what works best for you!
Bonus: use Ripl's social media content calendars to brainstorm content
Tap on our latest social media holiday content calendar below for templates and post ideas for every day of the month!
