how to manage social media marketing calendar 2020
Rajendra Zadpe
In the competitive world of brand marketing, nobody wants to miss out on the important dates where they can engage with their target audience or make a public splash
Digital is increasingly becoming a key part of brand communications. Unlike traditional where brands could choose to advertise on just a few occasions, being a part of every occasional conversation is important.
India is one of the leading countries when it comes to the number of Facebook/Twitter users in the world.
That's why it only makes sense that Indian companies and brands use these social media platforms to market their services and products to their target audiences.
What is a Social Media Calendar?
It’s exactly what it sounds like — a calendar you create to organize and schedule content across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and more!. There are a few different types that marketers might use:
- Paper Calendars: These might include desktop planners, notebooks, or hard copy calendars kept at your desk.
- Excel Spreadsheets: This is a low-cost option that many marketers start off with.
- Apps: Robust tools like CoSchedule’s Social Organizer fall into this category. They offer more powerful automation and scheduling features than static calendars.
Why Do You Need A Social Media Content Calendar?
In short, working in social media marketing without one forces teams to operate in the dark. That inevitably leads to confusion, frustration, and a lack of focus. That’s no way to effectively create consistent content that makes connections with audiences and helps build businesses.
Here are a few more specific benefits:
- Social calendars give your team an overview of what content needs to be published, what’s coming next, and the strategy behind why content is being published at a certain date and time.
- They also help you keep up a consistent posting schedule because you never have to scramble and figure out what to post next.
- When your marketing team has several different things going on at one time, knowing your social posts are lined up and ready to go frees up time and mental energy for other tasks.
A social media calendar will save you time and allow you to track and test different strategies to see what resonates most with your audience. As a social media manager, planning out a social calendar months in advance and scheduling posts ahead of time will save you from scouring trending topics and news stories every day looking for ideas. It will also build greater consistency in terms of your brand voice and style than posting in a reactive or unplanned way.
How to Start Your Social Media Content Calendar
Whether you choose Google Sheets or Excel to map out your content to be scheduled in Later (or use Later exclusively), you’ll want to do a quick audit of your currently active social channels!
Pin-point your active channels, and then take time to look into who your target audience is for each. Plus, jump into your platform analytics to check which platform has the most active audience.
How to Manage Your Social Media Content Calendar
- Once you’ve garnered a good amount of content ideas and have set a game plan for how often you want to post, it’s time to start planning out the actual content!
- This is where the editorial calendar comes in — try spreading out your content ideas over the course of several weeks.
- If you’re planning for a holiday like Memorial Day Weekend, start planning at least 1 month ahead of time to give yourself enough room to create content!
- Regularly Review and Update Your Social Media Content Calendar
- Once you get the ball rolling with your social media content calendar, be sure to regularly check in with each social channels’ analytics to see what’s working and what’s not!
- Visit your Instagram Insights, Facebook Insights, and Pinterest Analytics to see your most ideal days and times to post across each platform.
- Plan Your Social Media Marketing Themes For The Entire Year. Coming up with a year’s worth of content can seem a bit intimidating, but there are recurring events that you can add to your calendar to help fill it.
Some popular events to add to your calendar could be:
- Holidays: Use the National Day Calendar to find ones you might not have even heard about.
- Events: These can be company, local, or national events.
- Sales: If you have recurring sales like a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale you can use them to fill your social calendar.
- Product or feature launches: If your team is launching new products or a new feature that accompanies your project build that momentum with a social media campaign.
- Themes: Create your social content around different topics that relate to your organization. This saves your team from posting about the same things over and over again.
For this, brand managers, marketers and social media professionals must stay ahead of the curve. So, as you put on your thinking caps for balance year’s plan, here’s all the help you need in terms of planning ahead of schedule. From birthdays, designated days, to festivals – the list aims at including all events that would help you connect & engage with your TG.
Why is this Social Media Calendar 2020 a MUST for you?
While the audience grows more active on social media each year, their attention span has reduced to goldfish levels! Marketers have to try harder to impress this tough crowd. In this scenario, last-minute generic posts on Diwali and Janmashtmi are doing your brands no favours. Smart content, driven by visuals is the ticket to engaging them. In most cases, this can only happen with proper planning and scheduling.
So let’s dive right into the Social Media Calendar 2020 (Oct - Dec) for India:
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Using the above calendar make sure to cover the following points in your Social Media Marketing Strategy to be success:
- Produce Multimedia Based Content
- Customized Posting
- Engaging Campaigns or Contests
- Focus On Highly Popular Social Networks
- Create a Company Page on LinkedIn
- Brand Setup on Social Profiles
- Build Communities & Conduct Events
- Integrate Both Offline-Online Campaigns
- Make Use of Facebook Offers
- Make Use of Social Media Tricks
- Respond to Comments Promptly
- Conduct Online Polls & Surveys
- Follow a Systematic Posting Schedule
- Focus On Online Marketing Metrics
- Track & Share Results