Imagine this: You are a florist who is running a good business. It’s Valentine’s Day. And you had no idea until a customer asked, “So what’s the offer for today?” You silently stand there looking like an idiot. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know. This is where the obvious need of a social media calendar steps in.

A social media calendar is simply a meticulous plan of action that helps in planning and scheduling of your activities in advance. It helps you stay prepared for all the social media buzz & campaigns you are going to create surrounding your brand. It is just like a regular calendar but with specificity of dates and social media platforms you’ll be publishing content on.

Enlisted below are a few benefits that this calendar will offer to brands and agencies alike:

1. Never misses important dates - This calendar helps you stay ahead of all the future events. You’ll never miss an opportunity to leverage your brand’s sales.
2. Sticks to a consistent posting schedule - Customers love consistency of your content. It helps in building a long-lasting relationship that eventually leads to sales.
3. Finds your ideal content mix - This should be a mixed bag of various formats of marketing information like articles, blogs, videos, new stories, user generated content (UGC)and personal interactions like polls, opinions, Q&A, etc.
4. Engages collaborations - The calendar should be shared with your team and your clients alike so that there is a two-way communication & flow of ideas.
5. Saves time - If you have worked out the plan of action beforehand, you will be relaxed & can focus on other jobs rather than running at the last moment to decide what content should be sent out.
6. Effectively allocates resources - A great social media post often involves designers and copywriters, making it a joint effort. A social media calendar helps to allocate all your resources & their time so that no stone is left unturned when it comes to quality work & delivery.
7. Avoids cross-platform errors - This calendar helps to curate the right content for the right platform, which helps in minimizing duplication or publishing errors.
8. Ensures crisp content- This is very useful in avoiding duplication of content on social platforms. You can just refer to the calendar to ensure that you don’t post repeated content. It helps to curate fresh, new content.
9. Figures out what works - Once the calendar is generated & applied, you can analyze & modify it the next time to serve your customers better in terms of content mix, post timings, and an overall content experience.

How to design an effective social media calendar

• Start with a social media audit to understand which platforms work better for your brand.
• Undertake a content audit too to identify your past content & to analyses what your current competitors are posting & their user behaviour and engagements.
• Familiarize yourself with the demographics of each platform to serve every mix of users.
• Determine your posting frequency.
• Determine your content ratio (the ideal content mix)
• Maintain a content bank to store and fetch content when required.
• Always approve your content with your client for corrections & flawless postings.
• Schedule your content for publishing

It can take even the most socially-savvy companies’ time to set up an effective calendar for creating and posting social media content.  But once it is ready, you can schedule all of your social media posts, engage with your followers, and track the success of your efforts.