7 Reasons You Need to be Using a Social Media Content Calendar

Zuckerberg is old hat. Yes, Facebook still has billions of users, but he ain’t the Jesse Eisenberg teenager that we recognize from days gone by. Since the demise of MySpace and Friendster, Facebook has long become the standard. Now you also have your Twitters, Instagrams, LinkedIns, and TikToks molding and shaping the future of social media. To keep up with all this hubbub, you absolutely need a social media content calendar to maintain a presence without posting your life away.

You might be thinking, “Why do I need a social media calendar when I could just post once a day and forget about it?” If you are serious about marketing your business digitally, having a social media posting schedule will save time and provide consistency. Take a virtual journey with me as I give you several reasons to make your life easier.

1) Organization? What’s that? 

That “one second Facebook post” will definitely fall through the cracks. You WILL get busy doing much more technical work when it comes to running or promoting your business. Using a tool like Sendible will ease all that mess. Simply click on the calendar days for the month, add the content you want to promote, and hit the schedule button. 

In one hour, you can have a month’s worth of posts to hit on most or all of your social media pages. When not promoting the latest blog, special promotion, or new service/product, you can promote LITERALLY anything else on your page. Go ahead and send people to your FAQs or your testimonials on a “slow news day,” because driving traffic to your site and staying high up in your customers’ feeds is the only way you can expect digital conversions. You can create a social media content calendar the old fashioned way, but using an app like Sendible comes with a lot of benefits you WON’T get from using a regular calendar.

2) Rock Me Like a (Mental) Hurricane!

Aside from a cool rain in the hot summer heat, the only kind of storm I like is of the brain variety. The best thing about a social media posting schedule is that it can be changed. Sometimes you don’t know exactly what will be in store for you two Wednesdays from now. No brainstorming is necessary when you can predict the weather.

If nothing is happening, you can post about whatever you want. Use the extra time to think of new and inventive ways to sell your standard products and services via social media. Have fun with it. Grab attention through humor. If something is not working, you can go through and change the style entirely. Having a social media content calendar adds trial and error to your long term brainstorming session and it gives you the ability to course correct on short notice and for the foreseeable future. Once you’ve established what kind of presence works for your brand, creating a social media content schedule becomes even breezier.

3) Consistency is Key

Steven Tyler once said, “You got the right key, baby, but the wrong keyhole.” That phrase isn’t consistent and doesn’t send a clear message. If it was the wrong keyhole, then it wouldn’t be the right key. Duh! You don’t just want to be consistent with your messaging, though. Timing is still everything and those crawling bugs of social media want to see you posting regularly. Two times a month is amateur numbers. We gotta get those numbers up!

Posting every other day is a great way to keep up with consistency. Between consistency and engagement, you can be a newsfeed fixture without spending extra money on paid ads. A social media posting schedule is an easy way to ensure consistency.

4) If You Liked it Then You Should’a put a Ring on it! 

You have to be ENGAGING! See what I did there? This point really ties into the last one. DON’T go longer than a week without posting. You wouldn’t do that to your crush, and right now you are courting an audience. 

Of course, don’t post everyday, either. You don’t want to look like that overly attached girlfriend meme. However, a couple of messages now and then would be nice. Just kidding, I’m not your overly attached ex girlfriend. I promise. 

It’s usually recommended that you post 2-3 times a week. Once a week isn’t enough for “us,” my dear. Using a social media content calendar will help you regulate the best days and times for your content and hashtags.

5) Information Travels Both Ways

This might blow your mind, so make sure you’ve got a brush if you have a lot of hair. Your blog schedule doesn’t JUST have to inform your social media content calendar. Instead, your social content schedule COULD inform your blog ideas. If you see that October 10th is National Cake Decorating Day and you happen to own a bakery, then you already know what you need to do. You need to bake your most amazing creation, schedule some beautiful pictures on IG, and mail it directly to my house. I will give you my address in the contact us section of the website. 

My point is, the relationship between your website content and your social media content is dynamic and symbiotic. Using a social media posting schedule will both guide and be guided by several coexisting processes.

6) Apparently, it’s Transparent

When you have multiple teams working on a single goal, having a social media content calendar helps everyone. Nerdy people on the numbers side (like me) can tell the creatives which pain points to address. In turn, the creatives can tell the numbers nerds (like me, again) what they want to talk about, and the numbers people can tell them the most successful way to address it.

Going willy nilly on your content doesn’t really do you or your brand any favors. Marketing is 90% numbers and 10% creative. Ha, take that you creatives! I am absolutely kidding, I made up that number. However, it is true that planning across departments will help everyone achieve success.

7) See What Works

It’ll take time to develop your social media strategy. Don’t let it get you down. Using a social media content calendar will help you measure what approaches work and what approaches don’t work on your various channels. Gather this information over time and focus on what’s working. Sure, it will constantly evolve as you gather more data and try new things, but without a consistent social media posting schedule, you won’t ever be able to start collecting that data. 

Now that we’ve answered the question “why do I need a social media calendar,” you can sleep well knowing that your obstacles are not that hard to overcome. If you would rather outsource that component, HDIC would be happy to get your social media calendar popping like a bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve. Contact us for more details.