Social media is one of the most effective tools for generating interest in your business’s products and services. By posting on popular social media platforms, you can attract attention to what your company is offering.

However, as with most marketing efforts, lack of preparation often leads to failure. To get the most out of your social media activities, it’s essential to have a strategy in place for when, how, and what you post. Just as you would create an editorial calendar for your blog, your social media efforts should be guided by a dedicated social media content calendar. Here are some reasons why this is important.

How Calendars Help Keep Teams Organized?

One of the key reasons to embrace a social media calendar is that it helps bring structure to your content creation process. Whether you use a dedicated social media calendar app or simply adapt a spreadsheet, it’s an effective way to transform your social media posting from a chaotic, last-minute scramble into a smooth and organized activity that you can plan for weeks or even months ahead.

As you might expect, the largest brands don’t create their social media content on the spot. Instead, everything is carefully planned, logged in a system, and reviewed before being published online. By organizing your social media using a calendar template that works for you and populating it with your content, you can bring structure and efficiency to what would otherwise be a chaotic process.

Calendars: Perfect for Reviewing Your Schedule

Social media calendar apps provide a clear overview of the content scheduled for publication across your channels. If there are any gaps in your schedule, they’ll be immediately visible on the calendar. This allows you to quickly address the gaps by having your team create relevant content to keep your audience engaged.

A key to social media success is maintaining consistency in both the volume of content you post and the frequency of updates you send to your followers. You don’t want to overwhelm users one day and then disappear for months. Using a content calendar is an effective and simple way for social media managers to ensure your company consistently shares content across all channels at a frequency that resonates with your target audience.

Ideal for Efficient Content Review

Another major benefit of using a social media calendar is that it streamlines internal review and approval workflows for marketing teams. While social media may be managed by a specific team member in many companies, having multiple people review the content ensures higher quality. By scheduling social media posts in advance rather than publishing them on the spot, you can have:

• A second team member suggest improvements for how the content is phrased.
• Another team member checks for typos and grammatical errors, ensuring the content is polished.

Simplifying Social Media Management at Scale

Managing social media across multiple networks (like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram) can already be challenging when it comes to keeping schedules and feeds consistently filled. When you add the complexity of operating in different geographies, which many companies face, the task becomes even more overwhelming.

A major advantage of creating a social media calendar is that it makes it easier to:

Monitor what’s being published across all networks. When multiple team members are involved in content planning, one can adapt content from other platforms and adjust the messaging accordingly.

Get a comprehensive view of the entire social media calendar. This allows departments, like sales, that have a stake in marketing activities to offer input on the content being published and suggest improvements.

Ensuring Consistency with a Social Media Calendar

When you publish social media content without a calendar, you usually post on each network as inspiration strikes. While this may work if your goal is simply to get content out there, it’s not the best approach for several reasons.

For one, managing social media this way makes it difficult to maintain consistency across networks. Ideally, your messaging should be at least somewhat coordinated between your various social channels (though this doesn’t mean you should use identical posts on every platform you shouldn’t).

By committing your posts to a social media calendar template before they go live, you gain a bird’s-eye view of your social strategy, which allows you to:

• Ensure consistency across all platforms
• Ensure that each network you’re active on receives the proper attention and content tailored to its audience.

How Social Media Calendars Improve Your Strategy

Using a social media calendar instead of creating content on the spot can greatly boost the effectiveness of your social media marketing. Social planning templates ensure consistency across channels, eliminate awkward “radio silence” gaps, and provide other departments with valuable visibility into this important marketing function.