Creating Social Media Calendars for Small Businesses

Insights from the article:

• Social media calendars allow you to plan your content for the long term.
• Planning your content lets you see overall themes and focus points, and determine which ones are working as you move forward;
• There are different formats to creating your own social media calendars for your small business. Consider the ones that are more convenient for you and slowly improve your process over time.

Like every other marketing discipline, social media calendars for Filipino small businesses have to be planned. Social media calendars are definitely one of the basic steps towards seeing your social media marketing in a big picture perspective. From here, you can plot out the content that you want to share in your social media, and look at everything and see if they are all pointing towards achieving your goals through the digital marketing strategy you have just defined.

Getting organized can help your small business in a big way, especially in social media in the Philippines where it can get very messy very quickly. Are you looking for a guide on how to design your social media calendars for your small business? Then read on.

Why Do We Need Social Media Calendars for Small Businesses?

Easy – it’s because small businesses like ours can be very stressful and disorganized with all of the tasks we’re hustling, sometimes simultaneously. Having your social media calendar for your small businesses planned out, for you not to miss out on the benefits of consistently and continuously populating your page with helpful, useful, and relevant content.

Some of our clients report incremental growth in their organic reach and engagements for their social media pages by following these simple steps:

1. Know what your consumers want to read more about;
2. Share relevant and useful content that’s not a hassle to digest; and
3. Share them consistently and continuously.

Like how we’re all hustling for our small businesses, social media marketing in the Philippines is a continuous long-term grind with results that need time for us to realize. We just have to constantly do it, but we shouldn’t also be afraid to change up our content themes to better fit the needs and wants of your target audiences.

What Do I Put in My Social Media Calendars?

A mentor once told me that digital marketing can be as easy or as complex as we want it to be. Similarly, the answer to this question is yes, it depends on how much information we want to see that’s attached to the post at one time. I mentioned that social media calendars for small businesses help managers be on top of their social media content all the time, to see the big picture and be able to plan and prepare.

Before we enumerate what kind of information fields we can include in our social media calendars, let’s discuss our top two formats.

1. The Excel (or Google Sheets) Table format. Simply said, it’s a spreadsheet table. This format helps you keep track of all important info about your posts, and lines up all of them in a horizontal format, with each row allotted for each post. This is important if you want to see a lot of details and you want to keep a very detailed calendar, or if you just want more data associated for each of your posts. It’s really best to use Google Sheets vs. Excel because of the former’s collaborative features. You and your entire team can work on one document and input your contributions, check each other’s work, and just help each other out.
2. The Boxed Calendar Format. This is important for social media managers who just want to see which post captions and images are supposed to go out in a prescribed date. This format looks exactly like a calendar, with an uncluttered view and a clear schedule showing when each post is supposed to be published.

I definitely love Asana for its detailed calendar format. If you want more functionality with planning your social media content, use Asana. This blog isn’t even sponsored by them, it’s just that we’ve been using Asana for more than half our years in marketing and it’s so packed with features that even though it’s a productivity app, you can create projects where you can lay out all your social media content in a calendar format, and make each entry clickable where you can add in more data and information about your post.

That being said, what are the fields or types of information you can include in your social media calendars, whichever format you wish to use?

• Date and Time of Posting. This is definitely important, for very obvious reasons. You need to know when each post is going out.
• Caption. Again, very important, because you want to be able to plan out the caption for each post that’s being shared. It helps to be able to plan how each caption is written so when you look at everything, you can make sense of all of the posts.
• Image. You can attach the assigned images for each of the posts, so that if ever you assign someone else to post for you, that person will have access to the images you need shared.
• Social Media Channels. If you’re handling more than one social media channel for your small business and you’re creating separate posts for each, it’s best to indicate where each post will be shared.

These are the essential fields you need for your calendar. You can add more information, such as which groups you can share the posts to, which person the post is assigned to, or even include the boosting budget for each post if that’s part of your strategy. Alternatively, if you are more comfortable with writing on the spot, you can opt to use the Calendar format and include only the content theme or a short description of what the post should be about and go from there.

That’s it! Did I miss any fields that you’re also using in your calendars? Let me know in the comments or contact me via email.

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