The Anatomy Of A Successful Social Media Content Calendar

Can’t stop wondering how your competitors keep publishing relevant content 24/7?

What would you sacrifice for a chance to connect more with your audience?

If you’re getting frustrated - Don’t give up. Great things take time. Taking the time to plan your social media content makes it more likely that you’ll reach your business goals.

In this article, you’ll find a step by step guide on how to build your very own social content marketing plan.

Content Marketing 101: How to Create A Successful Social Media Marketing Content Plan

Step #1: The Journey From Awareness to Conversion

Regardless of the number of years you’ve been in business, this can always be a demanding part of the process. Most people think it’s easy to define your target audience down to the last detail. You may want to think again. Creating the profile of your ideal customer is only half the battle. If you manage to map out how your customer moves from idea to conversion, you’re halfway there.

Forget what you know about demographics, gender, age etc. You need to dig deeper.

What’s the first thought that comes to mind when they search for your product, your service or your brand? What’s the next step in their thought process? What is most likely to hold them back? There are typically three stages in this process, and it differs from person to person. Make sure you answer those questions whenever you are defining your target customer.

If you really want to offer your audience an experience that transcends the ordinary, psychology plays a massive role. So go ahead. Put yourself in their shoes.

If you really invest the necessary time to come to grips with how your customers think, the chances of creating content that really resonates increase exponentially.

Step #2: Identifying Key Performance Objectives (KPIs)

When it comes to your objectives, you need to have a clear, well-defined picture. Your social media efforts will go in vain without clear goals. Let’s examine three popular goals in turn:

Boosting Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is obviously crucial to your bottom line (if people don’t know about you, they can’t buy from you), so it’s important you know how to quantifiably prove how social media is impacting this goal.

When it comes to your brand, there are two main areas to focus on:

Awareness: Increasing the amount of people that know about your brand.

Perception: Changing how people think and feel about your brand.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with You need different strategies to achieve these objectives, and different metrics to measure them.

Social engagement metrics such as followers, likes, comments, and shares are sometimes called "vanity metrics " since they’re often used by social marketers to toot their horn while neglecting to demonstrate how social is actually impacting business goals. But these metrics are the currency of social media, and they represent how well your brand’s messages are resonating and spreading. So if your main objective on social is boosting brand awareness, then these metrics are integral to proving success.

For sake of showing off KPI 's, we can take the example of Twitter. Use the following KPIs (all available in Twitter analytics) to assess your objective:

Impressions

Retweets

Follower count

Mentions

Popular tweets

New followers and more.

Increasing Engagement

Perhaps the second most crucial business metric is engagement. It helps you build solid trust with your audience, provide recommendations, help them overcome buying objections, and manage your image. Social media engagement is essentially like a long-term relationship. You can imagine a committed and lengthy relationship takes dedication, readiness to adapt, the ability to think about the future and ensure the other party involved is happy for years to come.To add to this list, both Facebook and Instagram prefer posts with higher engagement. They prioritize them, by showing them higher up in the feed.

Building a Community

A loyal community following could mean the difference between an ever-growing social fan base and having your platform fade into the rest of the social noise on the world wide web.Your online tribe helps people stay connected and remain interested in your blog, product or company.

Managing your social community is art more than science. There’s no single algorithm that’ll lead you to success but there are plenty of metrics to look at when looking at an active community.

Imagine you’ve spent the past 6 months building a private community full of people who have engaged with your content and purchased your product or service. You’ve built your Facebook group to 280 members, and even though this may not seem like a lot, the group is strictly invite only and full of devoted fans.

There are metrics you want to check when trying to evaluate how healthy is your community.

Likes / Comments

Live video views

Live video engagement

Number of members

Number of questions/post published daily

Step #3: What’s The Best Social Network?

The name of the game is demographics. Before targeting every social network out there, you need to see which one has the users you’re looking for. Do some research and discover where your customers hang out. You may also want to look at network reciprocity, meaning for example the possibility of a Twitter user to have an active Facebook account.

Step #4: Research, Research, Research

Trying to create the next viral sensation would leave you disappointed. You need to be realistic! Your content needs to be unique, relevant and highly specific. At the end of the day no one will care about your business, unless you give them enough reasons to do so. (Hint: They must be getting something in exchange)

The number one content calendar question companies ask is usually something like this: “How to come up with the right content calendar for my company on social.

With content calendar, my advice is simple: always focus on value. Write something that is going to help the reader, something that will make him laugh or cry or simply something that he can relate to.

So you’ve taken some time off your day, you’ve done your research and you’re now starting to plan your content calendar. Keep your feet on the ground.

If you think about it, this part of the process is the simplest, you have already identified your audience and are supposed to know them to some extent, simply give them what they want from you, give them the content they are expecting from you (you don't need to always surprise them, even though a few surprises never hurt)

Step #5: Bring It All Together

Have you ever wondered why people love eating at buffets?

It’s not because all-you-can-eat options are better for your wallet; in fact, economists have proved ordering traditional dishes are actually cheaper.

Humans crave variety. With a buffet ticket, you can try the dumplings, the salad, the spare ribs, brussels sprouts, and the pasta—and that variety makes you feel good.

This principle of variety definitely applies to social media content: It’s easier to surprise and delight your followers when you’re not always serving up the same things. By continually introducing new content format types into your content lineup, you’ll keep your audience members on their toes and engaged. Raw text, imagery and video are the usual big three types of content, you will most of the time digest but many more can come into play, custom gifs, cinemagraphs, interactive infographics, live polls or transitional sliders to name a few.

Step #6: Trust & Consistency

Publishing content is the tip of the iceberg. If you really want to establish yourself as a trusted thought leader, you need to create a dialogue.Your content calendar should allow you to spark conversation with your followers and interact with them through responses, pictures, memes or videos. By implementing conversation into your calendar you will realize how important dialogue in social media really is.

Love it or hate it, people say what they feel on social media, and this extends far beyond just how their day is going. They talk about brands, personalities, businesses, and products. Take advantage of this and take part of it, Positive or negative, monitoring and engaging in two-way conversation on social is a great way for you to not only learn about what your customers love about your company, but also their frustrations -- and take action to remedy them.

All you need to do now is be consistent. Far too often, brands fail to make time for their social media calendar because they overthink it. Simplifying your social media marketing plans when you're getting started or making your way out of a rut will ensure you at least have a steady stream of relevant content. Remember, you don't have to become a social media marketing guru overnight. The key is to think about who you are marketing to, and focus on building content that your audience will enjoy and find valuable.