With 2024 getting closer, manually posting your social media content across multiple accounts wastes your time and energy. Social media scheduling is the obvious solution, allowing you to consistently post high-quality, pre-planned content that gets the engagement you’re looking for.

In this article, we’ll look at how to schedule your social media posts with a social media scheduling calendar, explore the benefits of doing so, and point you in the direction of some tried and tested tools to help you on your way.

What we’ll cover in this post

What is a social media calendar?
The benefits of social media post scheduling
Integrating social media with other marketing processes
How to make a social media calendar
What to do if you’re too busy with socials for SEO

Understanding social media scheduling

Social media scheduling is the process of creating your social media posts in advance and scheduling them to be published. Whether you use an official social media publishing platform, manually schedule your posts on Facebook or LinkedIn, or make your own social media calendar from scratch, scheduling is a must-have for a consistent social media presence for your brand.

Running social media accounts is more than publishing content—it’s a multi-step process that involves planning, creating, scheduling, publishing, and sharing. A social media calendar is a strategic method of staying on top of these processes.

A social media calendar needs to include:

Platforms you’re posting on (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.)
Types of content you’re creating (image, video, live stream, poll, reel, story, etc.)
Tasks involved in creating content (from brainstorming to publishing)
Those responsible for each task

Having a centralized social media calendar helps your team stay on the same page about what you’re posting, where and when you’re posting it, and who’s responsible for making sure that happens.

Social media calendar example

Here’s an example of how you can set up a social media calendar. In this instance, we’ve created a “board” on Monday.com. This great project management set-up lets you organize tasks on a “virtual whiteboard.”

We’ve chosen to include:

Item: The name of the planned social media content item
Publishing date: The date we’ll schedule this item to go live
In charge: Whose responsibility this item is (this can be status-dependent)
Content status: The status of the item (e.g., “published”)
Media & copy link: Where the item can be located
Content category: The type of content
Design: Place to reference post design at a glance
Platform-specific columns: Status depending on platform

When creating your social media calendar, add all the information that is relevant to the type of content you create on the platforms you post on.

Scheduling your social media posts has a whole host of benefits. Not only does it aid all-round organization, but scheduling can help you:

Save time by planning social media content in advance
Provide opportunities to plan posts for special occasions and holidays
Create a more streamlined, organized process
Keep everyone on your team accountable and informed
Ensure multi-platform consistency
Engage with your audiences on their schedule
Establish a posting frequency that your audiences can rely on
Extend your reach outside of business hours/time zone

Thankfully, scheduling your social media posting is made a lot easier by making use of social media publishing tools.

Integrating social media with other marketing processes

Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and in an ideal world, your social media calendar would work hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy.

Integrating your social media strategy with your other marketing processes also lets you repurpose existing content. Blog posts can be broken down into key points to create Instagram carousels, while website infographics can be easily shared via all your socials. Repurposing isn’t limited to using website content on social media, either—user-generated content or ideas from social media engagement can serve as great inspiration for your content marketing calendar.

To make the most of your social media, plan to:

Create an editorial calendar for all your content
Link your social media scheduling calendar to your editorial calendar
Repurpose blog content on social media (and vice versa)
Focus on having a consistent voice across all your marketing copy
Keep up communications between social media team and content marketing team (if they’re different)

It’s time to create our social media publishing calendar so we can get started scheduling social media posts and reaping the benefits we discussed earlier. Luckily, this calendar doesn’t need to be anything fancy—simply a centralized location to keep track of all your social media content and when it’ll be published.

Reference your content strategy and plan

Before you start to build out your social media calendar, make sure you’ve got a comprehensive content strategy in place.

This will act as a touchstone as you plan and schedule your content, and help to make sure you’re creating content that hits your goals. It can also be a concrete way to check in and assess whether your content is performing as expected, by taking a closer look at performance metrics and comparing these to your KPIs.

Your content plan will also help you determine which platforms and content types to focus on, target audiences, and content cadence.

Decide on some social media publishing tools

Social media publishing tools can help take the grind out of your social media posting schedule. The best tools will be able to handle multiple posts, channels, and accounts with ease.

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok all offer native publishing tools that allow you to schedule the publishing of your content. However, to be able to manage all your accounts from a centralized location, you’ll need to invest in a dedicated social media management tool.

Some great options for hosting your content calendar include:

There are a whole variety of social media content schedulers out there, so make sure to do your research and assess which features are most important to you and your business.

Establish a scheduling workflow

Now that you’re able to see what you’re planning to post, it’s time to create a scheduling workflow to keep your posting schedule consistent.

Creating status tags is an easy way to track where things are at. Some tags you might want to consider include:

Researching
In progress
Editing
Pending approval
Approved
Rejected
Revising
Scheduled
Published
Shared

Feel free to adapt these to accommodate the specific needs of your team, social media content, and marketing channels.

Keep track of needs for different platforms

If you’ve already got an active social media strategy, you know that getting the platform specifics straight is a key factor in keeping things running smoothly.

In addition to the demographic differences that you might encounter between audiences on your different platforms, there are some platform-specific requirements to bear in mind as you build out your social media calendar. For example, you should house any links for Instagram in the bio instead of post captions, and both Facebook and X have 2-minute video limits.

You’ll also want to ensure your content dimensions and other format specifications are aligned to each of the platforms.

Whether your social media goals are focused on lead gen, brand awareness, community-building, revenue growth, or all these and more, make sure you’re directing your social media traffic towards your website.

Too busy with your socials for SEO? Ranq has you covered

Social media can be an excellent tool for generating leads and increasing interest in your product or service, but these platforms are rented space. You should really be directing customers to an SEO-optimized website.

If scheduling your social media calendar has you maxed out on digital marketing, you don’t need to compromise your online presence. Ranq’s end-to-end marketing solution works hand-in-hand with your existing social media presence to craft custom content and technical optimization strategies to maximize your digital presence and boost organic traffic.To find out more about how Ranq can transform your digital marketing, reach out to us today!

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