What are the best social media tips? A coherent, organized social media strategy is important if you want your social media marketing to be effective. Planning out a social media calendar prior to embarking on social media marketing can make the whole process much easier. By planning your social media calendar in advance, you will know what you’re posting and when creating a more efficient flow of content. Furthermore, there are a lot of great tools that you can use to keep your social media strategy organized. Let’s review a few easy ones.
1. Create a Social Media Calendar
Microsoft Excel
A content calendar can be as easy as just creating some spreadsheets. You can customize these spreadsheets for your company’s specific needs. Here are a couple of tips for creating custom spreadsheets.
A Monthly Calendar Spreadsheet
Creating a social media strategy calendar is quite simple. Set up tabs for each day of the week. Next, decide what type of content you want to post each day. For example, you can choose to post your weekly blog posts on Mondays, post to Twitter on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, post to YouTube on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and post to LinkedIn on Fridays. You can even color code the types of post to help keep you more organized. This type of calendar will help you to keep your content consistent
A Tracking Spreadsheet
Simply list all your ideas for content topics. With a working list, you can easily track what posts have been created and when they’ve been posted (or when you intend to post them. It might be beneficial to create additional tracking spreadsheets for each platform to which you plan to post.
Google Drive
Google Drive has some good features for organizing your social media strategy. Using Google Calendar, you can plan out what type of content you want to posts on specific days, much like you would do with a spreadsheet. Google Sheets acts much like a spreadsheet too, allowing you to easily track what’s been posted and what you plan to post as well as ideas for new content. Since you can share everything with multiple people, your whole team can have access and add to the content too.
Trello
Trello is an excellent tool for team collaboration. It has customizable boards on which you can easily organize task cards. Within each card, you can describe the task, assign team members who will work on the project, and create checklists to track the progress of the project. Trello also has a calendar view, so you can see what content is being posted when.
2. Automate Content
Hootsuite—Hootsuite actually has a bunch of offerings for all types of social media marketing, so you can pick the ones that work best for you. Hootsuite Campaigns, Engagement, and Publisher are all easy to learn and implement when you’re first getting started. Furthermore, Hootsuite offers free demos as well as a free 30-day trial.
Buffer—Buffer is a great tool for social media marketing novices. You can organize all of your social media platforms on one central dashboard. Once you’ve developed a strategy for your social media posts, you can actually queue up posts in advance and schedule them to automatically publish on the days and at the times that you want. Furthermore, Buffer is relatively cheap, making it a good option for businesses with a smaller marketing budget.
SproutSocial—SproutSocial allows you to schedule posts in advance across all of your social media platforms, so you can set it up for months at a time and not have to worry about it. This also makes it really easy to quickly add posts about anything new that pops up, such as product launches and new trends in social media marketing. It also has a stream-lined messaging inbox that keeps all messages and mentions across all platforms in one central place, so you’ll never miss an opportunity to engage with your audience. You can also use SproutSocial’s analytics, which provides in depth analysis on trends in engagement and responsiveness.
3. Adapt Content for Different Platforms
You don’t want to use the exact same content across all of your platforms. You need to tailor the content based on what works best for each platform that you’re using.
Facebook—Facebook is awesome for sharing blog posts, pictures, and video. Make sure that you set up a Facebook Business Page and not a personal profile. Business Pages have a lot of tools that you can utilize both to engage your audience and to track that engagement. You can add your address, business hours, and even a call to action button, which allows prospective customers to contact you instantly.
Instagram—Obviously, Instagram is your go-to for photo posts. This platform is an awesome method for increasing your audience and customer engagement. Not only can you post and use hashtags to join relevant conversations, others can tag your business, which will then show up on your profile and theirs, so not only is this increasing user generated content, it’s also reaching the followers of anyone who tags you.
YouTube—By now you likely know that YouTube is all about video content. You might be thinking, “How can I create videos that are relevant to my business?” Think about your business goals, your brand identity, and company culture. Video tutorials, product launches, and humorous videos are all great options.
4. Review Past Content to Keep It Optimized
Many marketers think that once you post something, you can just forget about and keep going. However, one of the benefits of social media marketing is that you can go back and edit content. By periodically reviewing old content, you can go back and optimize it based on current trends, keeping your content relevant and adapting it as social media marketing changes. For instance, editing old blog posts to address current trends in search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to keep your rankings high, and it doesn’t take much work on your side.
Does all of this seem like a lot to take on? Maybe you don’t have a dedicated marketing person, or maybe you’re trying to run your marketing as well as the other important aspects of your business. Well, there’s an easy solution to this. Hiring a social media agency is always a good bet. An agency can provide you with a whole team of digital marketing specialists. Most agencies offer single services as well as service packages, so you can tailor your marketing to suit your business and your budget.