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With so many things on your to-do list, such as organizing social media content, looking at the editorial calendar, and the overall content marketing calendar, you may have trouble finding time to keep up with your social media… but an inactive account or poorly organized schedule could mean missing out on potential leads.
Creating and maintaining a calendar for all of your social media accounts is important.
Here’s why:
Organization: When you have more than one account on the different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and stressed out, especially if you’re trying to keep them all updated and current at the same time. Getting overwhelmed can lead to overlooking or forgetting posts, creating mediocre content in an attempt to catch up and missing out on new subscribers and new leads all the time. Keeping your thoughts and posts for all of your social media profiles organized is a proven way to increases post effectiveness, thus helping you increase brand exposure and promote your content. Plus, it will help you keep your head on straight, even with multiple social media accounts.
Set Deadlines: Sometimes, if there are no set deadlines, there is no pressure to keep on task. Using a social calendar to plan posts and set deadlines helps create some accountability for posting to your social media profiles. Of course, you may schedule in a little wiggle room to work with your busy schedule, but if you follow an organized calendar, at least postings won’t get put off for too long.
Save Time: If you add up all the time you spend every day maintaining social media accounts, you’ll probably find that you spend a good amount of time doing it. Creating a social media content calendar ahead of time can save you time every day, leaving you more time to generate leads or handle other important tasks. You can create your calendar monthly or yearly to help you get ahead.
See Results: Perhaps the most important reason to create a social media content calendar for your posts is because being organized and on task will help you create effective posts that get more shares and likes, thus creating more brand exposure for you. Because you are carefully following a predetermined schedule, you’ll be able to post to your profiles at the most effective time of day, too, which can help further increase exposure.
There are a several ways to keep your social media calendar organized. Let’s talk about a couple of your options:
Organize Your Calendar Manually with Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are a popular solution used by many marketers to keep all of their social media posts in order. You can download free “social media calendar” templates through a quick web search.
Using spreadsheets has proven to be an effective way to keep everything on task, as well as plan ahead for the future, meaning you can invest a little time now to save tons of time later. Here’s how using a spreadsheet will help you keep organized.
First, you should download a template, unless you want to take time to create your own customized sheet. Either way works just as well, you just need a spreadsheet to start on. We are going to assume you’re using a template in this post. Most templates are laid out in a similar manner, with all of the networks listed to the far left.
The columns can represent categories like Time/Date, Content, Material Link, Comments. Another option is to use the tabs at the bottom of your spreadsheet to separate your networks. This may make it easier to look at your schedule for each network individually but may make it more difficult to simultaneously see everything you have scheduled for a particular day.
From here, filling in your calendar should be easy. You simply choose the network you’re planning and insert the post details as well as the future time and date for the post into the correct columns. Then, be sure to add any links to images, landing pages, products, or anything else you plan to promote in the “Material Link” column.
Remember, most posts are more successful with images, so don’t overlook it. Use the comment section for noteworthy material related to the post, like related promotions or time-sensitive material.
Once you have filled in your calendar, you simply refer back to it daily and copy and paste the content into the corresponding networks.
Once you have finished a day, don’t delete the content. Instead, use the strike-through function to mark it off and collapse the column. Then, you can easily refer back to certain days or posts without scrolling endlessly through your social media profiles.
Of course, in order to do this, you’ll need to find content and create posts to fill in your schedule. You can manually search the web for trending industry news or use the help of a content suggestion system to find brilliant content to write your posts.
Using spreadsheets is an effective way to make sure that you keep all of your social media profiles up to date with new material, but it is not the easiest. In fact, there is another better, faster way to stay on track that can also increase the effectiveness of the posts you create for your social media accounts.
Delegate the work to a Social Media Manager
Perhaps the easiest way to keep your social media on track and regularly updated with quality, engaging material is to find a social media manager.
Our service, MixBloom combines our automation features with the help of a real person, your Social Media Manager, who learns all about your brand and creates content for your social profiles.
Here’s a little more about MixBloom’s exciting features and how it can help you organize your social media calendar.
Work with a real professional. MixBloom connects you with a real person who is experienced in managing social media accounts and creating engaging content. This person, your Social Media Manager, will thoroughly research your brand or business and use the information they find in order to find and suggest content tailored to fit your needs.
MixBloom creates quality content for your social accounts. You know how great that can be if you’ve ever spent hours scouring the internet for useful content. MixBloom uses our automated system and real professionals to hand-pick content for you, giving you up-to-date, industry-related content that is engaging and fresh, helping you increase likes, shares, and overall engagement.
Connect all your major social media accounts to your MixBloom account. MixBloom supports all the major social networks supported by Buffer, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This means we can plan all of your posts for all of your accounts in one place, which helps keep everything streamlined. Being able to view all of your accounts in one place will save you time as well.
Your best content gets automatically reshared. Resharing content is an important and effective way to increase customer engagement, promote old and new content, and keep your social media profiles consistent and active. That means your blog posts or product pages get shared multiple times, rather than once, giving you more exposure and traffic.
Reshared material is recreated, not recycled, meaning it’s given a new headline and posted with different images, so it doesn’t just look like you are repeating yourself. This allows you to continue using your best content without your social media profiles sounding redundant.
We can easily transform a single blog post into 10 social media posts you can use across all your social networks for the most effective promotion.
You get total control with the ability to preview content. All content that is created for you is added to your dashboard. You have the ability to edit, change, or delete posts before they are posted to your social media profiles.
Your dashboard is also fully white label and customizable with your company logo, colors and domain name. This is essential for agencies. They get to share posts with their clients with a single link and all feedback, comments and requests for changes go straight to MixBloom’s team.
Simply put, MixBloom will help you organize your social media calendar, increase the effectiveness of your posts, and save you tons of valuable time.
