Growing your organization’s social media presence requires time, patience and creativity. While posting quality content on a regular basis positions your organization as a key influencer, it’s crucial that your team consistently and efficiently follows a plan and process behind the scenes.
Consider this – you’ve received increased traffic to your website and blog, and an overall increase of engagement on all social media platforms thanks to your regular posting of interesting and engaging content of value to your audience. But have you done the work behind the scenes to ensure that you can recognize patterns, such as from which content your audience takes the most value, the posts shared at a higher rate, the duds, etc.? Creating and maintaining a monthly social media editorial calendar will help to organize your social media efforts (which means saving time!), allow for experimentation and optimization, and provide valuable analytics and audience insights as time goes on.
Here are five simple tips to get the most out of your social media editorial calendar:
- Experiment and determine where and when to share
Decide which social networks to include and your daily posting frequency for each. Not every social network is a good fit for your organization. Don’t annoy your fans. Don’t neglect your fans. Experiment and find the sweet spot.
- Get organized
Consider creating a key to color-code each post so you can quickly identify which posts are promoting your organization’s website, posts that lead to external sites, conversational posts without links and posts honoring national observances.
- Recognize national observances as opportunities
In addition to your organization’s important dates and events, don’t overlook national observance months, weeks and days. National observances relevant to your organization’s mission provide a great opportunity to create, repurpose and share relevant content. Create a side column each month with reminders and ideas for ways to recognize national observance days and weeks.
- Include graphics in your calendar
Sure, it takes a little up-front time, but a graphic provides a quick reminder of the post’s content and ensures the correct graphic is included.
- Go with the flow and update as needed
Last minute changes happen. Do yourself a favor and update the calendar as needed throughout the month. You’ll be happy you did when you review the analytics at the end of the month. Keeping the calendar updated will also save you time when dealing with future requests for analytics specific to a campaign or event from a past month.
Let’s Collaborate! Every professional and every social media editorial calendar is different. What else do you find valuable to include in your monthly social media planning?
By Cause Collaborator Christina Stallings
