Social Media started off as a tool for friends and family to stay in touch with one another. Now, it has rapidly expanded into a platform for PR, marketing, and advertising, with almost every industry participating. It has ultimately become the place to be seen and be heard.
With that, there’s become a higher demand for companies, brands, and individuals to post on these social media platforms in hopes of promoting themselves or a brand. In the public relations industry specifically, PR agencies are running social media campaigns for their clients to optimize brand awareness, drive traffic to websites (ultimately increasing sales), and gain & cultivate relationships with their audience.
In order to do this successfully, both to engage followers and elevate a brand, there’s a few things that must be done:
- Post consistently
- Don’t miss an important day for the company or industry they’re in
- Make the visuals aesthetically pleasing and preferably color coordinated
- Share the correct content from both a business and a consumer facing side
You’re right, that’s a lot to think about, and that’s not even all of it. So how does your business keep track of posting the best content every day? The answer: Content Calendars.
Content calendars are a helpful tool for social media that allows you to plan and schedule all social coverage in advance. 92% of content markets use social media to distribute information and sometimes it’s just hard to keep track of all the above on a daily basis.
Content calendars are also a way to lay out the posts and images to see how it looks from both a marketing perspective and a creative one. They’re sharable too, which allows multiple team members to be working on the same calendar at the same time – a huge help and time saver! When using a content calendar there’s a rule of thirds to go by, according to Hootsuite – a social media management program.
- ⅓ of content promotes your business
- ⅓ of content comes from other sources that align with your business
- ⅓ of content engages with followers directly through reposting user-generated content
User-generated content and giveaways have proven to be great ways to engage followers and even increase the total number of followers. It allows for a brand’s audience to feel like they’re part of a family and they’re supported by a brand community. To see that a brand is then reciprocating the love of their followers is just an extra cherry on top!
Content calendars are an excellent way of planning and preparing the rule of thirds to make sure your brand’s social feed checks each of the boxes. This proves to be incredibly helpful because it’s often hard to remember the rule of thirds each time you post. In addition to posting the actual imagery, you can also add captions ahead of time as well as any necessary tagging of people or places.
So why is this better than picking up your phone each day and posting? First off, it saves time. That’s right, it seems like more work in the moment, but actually it lays it all out in advance so you don’t have to remember or bother doing it in the middle of another busy work day. As said before, you can share it with other people in the office for an extra set of hands…or five. Second of all, you can visualize a whole month of posts and see what you’re doing wrong or right, what areas you might be lacking in content-wise, where the color scheme is getting lost, and so on. If you’ve struggled with social media in the past, this is again, just a great way to lay it all out and use as a reference for future postings.
Finally, you can plan anything as far as a week to two months out, depending on the content calendar you use and the social media platform it’s for. Planning for the month of July? Start posting anytime you want – we recommend a-mid June start just to give yourself enough time to get all the content you want as well as a visual layout that fits the brand and their audience. Determine your calendar needs, the content ratio, the posting frequency, a color scheme, and more. Then you can go back in and make your edits! After all, no one wants to go delete a post once it’s up because it doesn’t fit in the grand scheme of things.
One of the most important things you can do is tailor your content so that it’s relevant to your brand and is recognizable and relatable to your audience. According to Statista, 64% of Instagram users are between the ages of 18-34. Take information like that into consideration when creating and posting content. After all, social media is meant to engage people – if you’re not connecting with them, especially your primary followers, you’ll begin to loose eyeballs on your social pages. Specifically, if you’re a fashion or beauty business, you’re aware so much shopping is done online and through ads and posts on social media. If you’re losing those followers and additional eyes, you’re ultimately losing sales.
Here at AMP3, we help a lot of clients with their social media from the implementation and management, to the analytics side of it. Therefore, depending specifically on what we’re doing for them, content calendars have become key to their social success. Not only is it a time-saver during our busy schedules, but it’s an accurate, effective way of posting content that is both aesthetically pleasing and fitting, as well as informative and engaging. It’s truly a life-changer!
Want to learn more about what we do? Curious about working with us? Have any burning questions you simply need to ask? Get in touch with us and we will get back with you as soon as we can.
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