How to Create A social media Content Calendar for Your Company

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar is a planning tool for your strategy that helps businesses organize and schedule their content for publication across various social media platforms. 

It serves as a roadmap for the creation, distribution, and promotion of content, ensuring that your (social media) marketing efforts are consistent, timely, and aligned with your overall objectives.

What is the purpose of a content calendar?

The main advantage of having a social media content calendar is that it will help you organize and streamline your content creation and distribution processes. You’ll be able to keep track of all the content you produce and want to produce with clear deadlines and instructions.

How to create a content calendar from scratch

A content calendar is the lifeblood of your social media and content strategy, so here’s a step-by-step guide to get started and get it right.

1. Define your goals

Defining your goals may seem like an obvious thing to do, but with social media in particular, it’s easy just to get lost in the trends, miss the actual purpose of the endeavor, and end up doing things just because everyone else is doing them, too.

Instead, you need a clear vision for your social media accounts. Start by asking yourselves the following questions: 

What is the main goal of your social media strategy? 

What are the secondary goals of your content strategy? 

Who is your target audience?

What type of content will your target audience respond to?

What kind of engagement are you expecting? 

Now, to get the most out of your goals, it’s important that they are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. This will ensure that you can build from the ground up with a clear roadmap.

2. Create a template

The next step in creating a content calendar is to create a template, a fixed layout that you can use to organize your content ideas and plans. It typically includes fields for the content's title, the type of content, the copy and/or visuals appearing on social media, the date and time of publication, and the distribution channels.

You can build such a template in a spreadsheet, design it on Canva, or even use a project management tool such as Monday.com or Notion. The choice is up to you and your team, obviously, and it depends on what feeds your productivity and allows you to work efficiently and hustle-free.

3. Choose your channels

Clear objectives are an essential step toward a smartly structured content strategy because when you know what you want to achieve, it will be much easier to decide the type of content and message you want to put on the various platforms.

This is why deciding which platforms will get your full attention is also a crucial part of your content calendar. It can be one, all of them, or everything else in between, but it is important to decide this early on in the process. 

Doing this will allow you to more easily:

• Differentiate the type of content and interaction. Instagram is not the same as Twitter, which is different from LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Facebook, TikTok, etc. So, to get the best out of each platform, you must understand its specific features and tailor your goals accordingly. 

The possibilities are endless, and it’s only up to you and your creativity to decide what to do precisely, just remember to make the best out of the features each platform has to offer.

•  Sign off on content. Because every platform is different, you should customize the content to each. Yes, a TikTok video can also live as an IG Reel; that’s fair, but the more tailored and personalized you make it, the better it will perform. If you know what you want to achieve with each channel, you’ll be quick to devise ways to put the relevant material in the spotlight and obtain the exact kind of engagement you are looking for.
  
  
• Maintain a balance between different content types. Fun and entertaining content, educational content, informative content, etc. It’s not easy to find a balance between them all. Each social media platform and its audience will be more supportive and engaging with one kind of content. What is also true is that social media is also a place of experimentation, a place where you can inform people in an entertaining way. 

5. Add fresh content

Content is everything when it comes to social media, of course. Good content makes popular brands, and that’s all any of us want to be on social media, right?

Adding content is the most fun and complex part of your content calendar and content creation process. Fresh content will take center stage on your pages month after month, which is why filling the calendar with inspiring content ideas is probably something you should do together with your content team. 

When creativity takes a seasonal break in your team, check out some of our social media content ideas and populate your calendar with them to ensure your output is solid and your pages are full.

6. Repurpose content

Your library of existing content is a consistent content source in your calendar. Shake the dust off it and give it a new life. 

The main advantage of repurposing content is that you give it new life and maximize its exposure and impact. The part of your audience that consumed it the first time is not necessarily the same audience now, nor do they consume it the same way. Repurposing old content and sharing it on as many different channels as possible is also how you strive to make as big an impact as possible:

• It will help you fill in the weeks when you fall short of new ideas for social media posts. Let’s face it: creativity has its highs and lows, but frequency and consistency are fundamental to social media, and they are the key to winning your audience’s loyalty.
  
  
• It can be a source for recurring social media series. Having a series is another handy way to always have some sort of regularity when it comes to publishing new content. At the same time, you won’t be bombarding your audience with content experiments and confusing messaging. 

How to fill in your content calendar with fresh content: a checklist

When you fill in your content calendar with fresh content, some best practices will significantly impact your productivity:

1. Determine responsibilities. You will likely not be the sole responsible for your content calendar and content production. So, to best coordinate your team’s efforts and ensure that the content is produced efficiently, define responsibilities early on and establish them clearly in the content calendar.
   
   
2. Determine platforms. Not all content will appear on all social media channels, so define where each type of content will be posted — if it’s on all platforms, make sure that’s pre-defined, too.
   
   
3. Determine deadlines. This will make it easier to plan and coordinate your marketing efforts, maintain consistency in your content output, and ensure that you're regularly engaging with your audience. Decide on what date the content will go live so that everyone is aware of the available time frame for working on it.
   
   
4. Determine what each post will include. When planning content for your business website and social media pages, several elements contribute to engaging and effective posts: copy, branding and logos, links, visuals or other graphics, videos, and hashtags. Outline what each will look like for your content, and you’ll ensure that your posts are complete and on point.

How to access a virtually endless amount of content

The secret is user-generated content. Or rather, employee-generated content. 

Taking your social media strategy and content plan to the next level means taking one more step — that is, making your employee ambassadors part of them. 

Employee advocacy allows you to establish a collaborative relationship with your employees: they will factor in the equation as both your content creators and advocates, spreading and propagating your content on social media. 

The importance of employee-generate content

Employee-generated content is another smart and creative way to generate more content to showcase and publish on your channels. It is excellent social proof that adds to the value of your product or service. 

On a more practical level, you will not need to scour your mind for another idea that will ‘break the internet’ to advertise your brand online. You can rely on the enormous source of untapped creativity of those who work with or for you and those who love your product. 

With an employee advocacy platform like Ambassify, you can easily create different campaigns for your employees, gather content and feedback from them, and ask them to share your content on social media. 

How does this affect your content calendar?

Practically speaking, this entails one more production channel and one more distribution channel. They will be content creators, audience, and distribution channels at the same time. 

Employee advocacy will become a source of content  whenever your employees create content with photos, quotes, and other ideas—and a way to further promote and support your brand via social media. But they will also be part of your audience, so you have to create campaigns to keep them engaged and make sure they have interesting content to interact with, whether that be sharing your existing content or creating additional content.

All you have to do is factor that into your strategic planning and incorporate it in your content calendar both in terms of production and distribution. Someone will be responsible for creating content for the employees.