Building Social Media Content Calendars for Small Business Owners

Building social media content calendars are essential in this day and age. According to the Content Marketing Institute in a 2019 report, 61% of B2B Marketers’ use of social media has increased for content marketing.  They also found that the top three social media platforms, B2B’s use for content marketing purposes are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.   But, if you’ve asked yourself if a content calendar when posting to social media is something YOU should be doing, then keep reading. You’ll find that the amount of content saturation out there is overwhelming. You want to stand out on social media.

Before you start creating compelling content to schedule out, you should ask yourself these three questions.

Some of the immediate benefits of building social media content calendars are:

        1. Never Miss a Holiday!

Even those fun #nationaltodays you see all over the internet.  Never miss #nationalcookieday again.

       2. Ability to gain more followers.

The more often you post, and the more regular you post, the more your audience will expect posts and want to engage with you.

        3. Connect with your audience and finds out what interests they have.

Followers LOVE knowing the people behind the business. The owner, the staff, sometimes if you’re a smaller business and more or maybe on the creative side of the world, your audience even likes to know your family members. A loyal following wants to celebrate not only your business wins, but they want to celebrate your wins: family birthdays, soccer games, and even school graduations. If you only post when you have a sale happening or a new product you might be launching or selling, you might lose interest and see a slow in engagement.  Don’t forget to comment back and don’t just LIKE or HEART a comment. Engage with them and tag them directly. The bigger your following and the more you take the time to tag individual people, the more they feel like more connected. 

Having your social media scheduled out throughout the month also allows you to track your marketing efforts, track your goals and gives you the ability to look back to make sure you’re not repeating the same content. You also save a TON of time. You’re not spending time every day, thinking of what you should post with what picture and at what time. Scheduling those posts out, allows you to take the daily thinking out of social media and then gives you time to focus on new fresh ideas moving forward. I can’t tell you how often we hear that pre-scheduling posts and interacting with the audience help with new content ideas. You can take one post and elaborate on it in more posts in the future.

If you are not using social media for marketing reasons here are FIVE reasons you should be. You may also be interested in outsourcing your social media content to people who really can identify your target audience and help take something you may or may not be good at off your shoulders. You may find outsourcing to virtual assistants things could help.

Be on the lookout for Social Media content examples coming soon to the blog to give you a head start on prescheduling into the New Year!