What, How, Where, and When to Post
Social media is now a non-negotiable part of digital marketing, whether we like it or not. We went from coding our own pages on Myspace to now having thousands of connections across multiple social media sites. It is the cheapest and most effective way for businesses to reach large demographics of people, and we will need to establish a calendar for all our social media ideas.
The benefits of having a concise social media calendar will really help us out in the long run. In this insight we are going to go over the basic structure of your social media calendar, its benefits, and its limitations. We are also going to touch on the applications you can get on our browser, computer, and phone to help us with scheduling and cross-posting.
Let’s start with the basic concept of a content calendar, we will explore the types of content we might want to create for different social media sites, and then we will cover how to upload and post to them using tools and just doing it inside the site natively. We recommend using an outside tool like Hootsuite, Sprout, or Buffer, but if those options cost to much there are other ways to mass-post your content.
Understanding the Basics of a Social Media Content Calendar
Do we use a digital calendar or physical calendar? Well, we have options. We here at Acclaim are bound by the digital landscape and use Outlook’s calendar religiously, but we also use daily planners for our video editing schedules. We recommend using both, but some of us are prone to a physical planner while others are more acquainted with digital calendars on their phone or computer. A social media content calendar is a regular calendar with the days and times you are going to post, but you also need slots for content creation as well.
Let’s look at the different kinds of content you can post on most social media sites:
- Text
- Photo
- Carousel
- Video
- Shorts
- Livestream
Now let’s look at a couple different sites we can post on:
There are far too many social media sites to go over, check out our other insights here and here for more information on the descriptions of the most popular ones.
Our Social Media Content Calendar is going to revolve around those types of posts going up on those types of social media sites. It’s important to have a variety of different content on all these sites, and the list we made goes from least difficult to most difficult.
To start, let’s look at a template content calendar made for a content creator:
Notice how there is room for creation and posting located throughout the week? We will have to allot time for creating the content before we post it, though the process for a small business creating content may be in another insight, we must mention the creation before we can flush out the posting schedule.
What to Post: Content Planning
We have a buffet to choose from when we start to create a post. Each social media site has different strengths and weaknesses; for example, YouTube is better for videos, Instagram is better for photos. We need to think about the most effective tactics available, that means posting more video content on YouTube, posting more text content on X, and posting more informational content on LinkedIn.
You need a balance on each social media site, but it is common practice to utilize that specific site’s strengths. Each type of content requires time to create; a video will take longer than a photo, and a photo will take longer than text to create. Keep this in mind as we get to building out our social media content creation calendar.
Take some time to brainstorm ideas for the content. We want to gauge how much time we have in a week to create, and then gauge how often we want to post. Let’s write a list of ideas that we are interested in creating and putting out onto the internet:
- Sales graphics – letting customers and clients know about a deal
- Informational newsletters – Keeping the public informed about a topic we know well
- Overview video – A two to three-minute video explaining who we are and what we do
These are fantastic ideas that most businesses could utilize, and we are going to plan around those three things. There may be more we want to put on our social media content creation calendar, but we are going to narrow our focus for the purposes of this insight.
How to Post: Crafting Engaging Content
You have probably heard the term “Call to Action (CTA)” which means it encourages the audience to either click a link, like or subscribe, or to purchase an item or service. This is meant to draw our audience in and convince them to buy something or to give them information you think they find valuable. Value is the lynchpin, if consumers don’t see value they will not engage.
We will also be following the “visual rule” where any text or video is accompanied by a picture or thumbnail. Visual advertisements are much more impactful, and videos are even more so than still graphics. We do not want to post something like “Sale today” with no information, no graphic or picture, and no context for anything. This is a weak posting method, and it should be avoided.
Alongside the visual rule we are going to utilize tags (hashtags). If you were born before the year 2000 you might remember the # sign being “pound” on your house phones that helped navigate menus when calling a business. Well, tags are now a way to narrow a search in social media sites. In the search bar of Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. if you type “#” and a topic it will display posts that have that exact tag in the description or under a video’s text description. These will be important when crafting a post for our social media content creation calendar.
Where to Post: Social Media Platform Selection
First, it’s important for us to claim our business’ name on all social media sites we able to do so. You may not use YouTube very often, but it’s important to set that page up anyways. For our three content selections we made above we should utilize the three social media sites that best encapsulate that content.
Instagram – Creating sales graphics inside the app, or in another app like Canva, will utilize Instagram’s strength for pictures and carousels. This will give us the possibility of putting multiple sales graphics in succession on a single post.
LinkedIn – Newsletters are far more popular on LinkedIn than any other site. There is an entire culture on LinkedIn on creating informational newsletters and having other creators and pages reposting them, ultimately spreading the reach a single newsletter can get.
YouTube – No site is better for a video than YouTube. Our overview video will do best on this platform, and YouTube also offers running video ads to promote your business as well. Let’s put our overview video here and promote it as a pre-roll video ad once we get it posted.
Tailoring the content to certain social media sites is the most effective way to get our content out in front of the right audience. For example, posting our overview video on YouTube is the best move as we can link that video to our website, post the link to other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and this cross-posting can be done on our content calendar later.
When to Post: Timing and Frequency
This is the type of search engine optimization that is not seen by the viewers on your website. If you do these correctly your audience will have no idea why they enjoy your website so much, it’s subliminal. Many of these will require intimate knowledge of web design, or the help of a web designer.
The first and most important thing any website can improve is their loading speed. We have all visited a website that loaded in 0.3 seconds, and we thought, “Wow, that was incredibly fast.” Then we reload the page just to test it out again, as if it was some magical moment that only happened once. Compressing your images helps as large image files require a lot more data. Instead of embedding a video directly, have it linked to a YouTube video page to save on data from your webpage. Make sure the text on your pages is evenly distributed and that your homepage is not 50,000 words long as it will take too long to load them all.
If you’re searching for tips on SEO you have probably heard of “responsive design” which is how a website looks on multiple types of devices. You phone, tablet, and computer all have different dimensions on their screen, and you want your content to show up as seamlessly as possible on each one. Mobile usability is so important, that if your site is not optimized for mobile phones Google will just not show your website to anyone on a phone. It’s that important.
Search engines also have preferences for secure websites. The internet used to use a thing called “HTTP” which stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” which would always go before a web address. “http://www.” Remember? Well, now the internet widely uses “HTTPS” which just adds “Secure” at the end. This is a type of end-to-end encryption that ensures the data from a user’s computer won’t be scraped by people with bad intentions.
In addition, search engines prefer websites that have something called an “SSL Certificate” which means your website is certified as safe to be communicated with over the internet. It sounds odd, but these security measures did not always exist and have become common practice for companies.
Tools and Resources for Managing Your Calendar
We are old-fashioned over here at Acclaim and just use a daily planner from OfficeMax with a little bit of Outlook for Zoom calls or video shoots. There are many tools out there to help you manage your posts, let’s start with the free options:
HubSpot’s free social media content calendar
Adobe’s free social media content scheduler
Airtable’s free social media content calendar
For some of the more advanced tools we recommend:
Post Planner – $27 a month for seven social media accounts
Buffer – $30 a month for 5 channels (The app is pretty good, and adding channels increases it by $6 per)
Hootsuite – $100 a month and has some of the most advanced tools available
It’s important to remember to track your progress while you are posting to recognize the patterns of your audience and then adjust accordingly. If you notice more of your audience is active at 2pm on Thursday for some reason you should plan to post around 1pm that day so it’s fresh for that audience. Don’t be rigid in your schedule, once you batch your posts you should be able to reschedule them throughout the month or week.
My Calendar is Your Calendar
Just to recap:
- Create ideas for posts pertinent to your business
- Create those ideas and schedule them out
- Use a content Calendar to remember what posts go to which platform
- Use a social media posting tool to manage it all and get analytics
We here at Acclaim want to bring you the best up to date marketing tips and tricks, and we do appreciate everyone reading these insights. If you ever have any questions on social media posting, calendar creation, or content ideas reach out to us to talk!