We all know how important social media marketing is for your business, but it can be hard to come up with content or stay consistent with posting. Each day you might scramble around trying to find something to post, which is not a good strategy. Here’s how you can plan a whole month’s worth of content in just one day.
Get Organized
First, you’ll want to find a way to keep track of your social media posts, also known as a content calendar. If you like paper and pen, you could use a planner, a journal, or print out a calendar for the month. If you’re more into technology, you can use google calendar or an app to help you keep track (more on that later). Once you have decided what you will use to create your content calendar, find a nice quiet place where you can work and you’re ready to go. It could take a couple hours, or it might only take 30 minutes. After you’ve done this for the first time you will know how long it takes for your business and can plan for that in the future.
Important Dates and Promotions
Check your calendar for the month ahead. Do you have a sale going on for your business? A new promotion or campaign that you are launching? A contest or giveaway? Maybe an event that you are speaking at or sponsoring? Write these dates down and plan at least 1-3 social media posts about them. These posts could include a photo of the product/tutorial on how to use it, a text graphic announcing your sale, or video of the event. Make note of any national holidays that are relevant to your business as well. For example, if you own a coffee shop you’ll definitely want to post something on National Coffee Day.
Pinterest is a great place for finding ideas for social media posts. Type “social media content ideas” in the search bar and you will find tons of inspiration. There are 30 day calendars that give you post ideas for every single day. You can also get more specific to your business by searching for “social media content for _______”. So again, if you owned a coffee shop, you could search for “social media content ideas for coffee shops” to find posts related to coffee shops and coffee.
Create Posts
Once you know all of your important dates and promotions and have extra posting ideas from Pinterest, you can go ahead and plan your posts. Find the pictures you will use, or plan a photoshoot. You can even prewrite your captions. Write them down or save them in the notes app on your phone, that way you can copy and paste later. When it comes time to post, everything is ready to go and it will take much less time.
Schedule Posts
If you want to take it a step further, there are several scheduling tools that you can use to preschedule your social media posts. Some of them will even post for you when the day comes, saving you even more time. These include Planoly, Later, Hootsuite, Buffer, and Unum-just to name a few. They have free and paid subscriptions, and you will need to play around with them to learn how they work. Once you get the hang of it, they can be very helpful in automating your social media marketing.
Now that you have all of your posts scheduled for the entire month, you can stress a little less. Having things planned out will allow you spend more time on all the other things that you must juggle in your business and life.
By: Denecia Graham