Most people think that as a social media manager you just wake up and post whatever.
A good social media manager has a social media calendar, this calendar is meant to guide and lead you on what to post. It is meant to help you plan content and to make it easier for you and the company that you’re managing is terms of planning. It sounds like a big commitment at first, but you can rest assured it’ll pay that time back in the future.
So how do you get started?
1. Understand your audience
Developing a clear picture of your current social media efforts will let you identify areas for improvement and opportunities for new efforts. An audit is key to fine-tuning your strategy and maximizing your efforts. Budget some dedicated time to go through all of your social assets. What does your audience like? what kind of content do they react to? as you track engagement it will lead you on what kind of content you should be posting.
2. Choose the social media platform you’re going to use
In the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, it takes concerted effort to find the time to stay on top of new developments. Like, should your brand care about Instagram Threads? And is your audience even on TikTok?Managing too many platforms at the same time can be quite hectic so you should choose one that works well for your brand.
3. What kind of social media calendar do you need?
Maybe you’re starting fresh for, say, your side-hustle doing social for local indie rappers. In which case a simple spreadsheet might do.
But if you’re managing a seven-person team with a dozen different consumer-facing brands, you’re going to want something that can tell you who’s doing what, when it’s done, when it’s approved, and when it’s published—and then how successful it was.
4. Create a social media content library
Some people like to call these content repositories or media resource databases or digital asset banks. You can use Dropbox, Google Drive, your company’s internal network, or made-to-purpose database software. This is where you can store your content ahead of time, so every time you have cool images or ideas that you’d like to use, just store in the content library.
5. Establish a work flow
Ok, now that you’ve gathered all possible information, it’s time to start sketching in the bones of your daily, weekly and monthly social media cadence. How many times will you be posting, what times will you be posting and is there anyone who needs to approve your content before it’s published?
6. Schedule posts
As you start publishing consistently, you may realize that it’s still taking time to sit down and manually publish your posts. This is especially true if you’re working with some high-volume feeds, you will most likely need a scheduling app that will save you a lot of time and if anyone needs to reviewed before being posted it makes the process a lot easier.
