Tips for Creating Successful Social Media Content

In today’s day and age, it’s almost a requirement for businesses to have a social media presence of some sort. Focusing on a strong social media presence and strategy can not only drive brand awareness, but it can increase website traffic, business leads and even result in increased sales. The reality is social media is now a multi-funnel tactic.

According to HubSpot, companies that publish more than 16 social media posts per month generate 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish less than four posts. Despite this, many businesses do not have a well-documented content marketing strategy in place—including even a content calendar.

A content calendar is an outline of important dates, content themes and post ideas that allows you to keep track of deadlines and help your content creation team stay organized. Calendars should be optimized to your own strategy and include things like:

• A date for each post to go live
• What platforms the post will be posted to
• Each post’s individual copy and creative
• Additional information like relevant keywords, links and hashtags

Let’s break down the 3 reasons that utilizing content calendars will help you produce successful social media content.

When creating social media content, it’s important to be consistent. Social media algorithms change constantly, but one key factor that has always stuck is that consistency will drive success. Posting 2-3 times per week not only appeases the algorithm, but it builds quality engagement, organic reach, credibility and brand loyalty by continuously showing up on your follower’s and customer’s newsfeeds. When you post sporadically, your followers may not know when, or where, to find your content.

A social media calendar can help your team plan accordingly to ensure the content is ready to go out.

Like all aspects of your business, it’s important to keep your social media team and calendar involved in the latest company news. Social media is often the most customer-facing form of communication that businesses have, so keeping your content calendar up to date so the important information can be posted in a timely manner. For example, if a new product is being launched, you can create promotional copy and content and schedule your posts in advance so that these posts don’t fall through the cracks.

A content calendar allows your team to develop thoughtful, strategic content without having to scramble for last minute ideas. Your team can brainstorm content in advance, identify strategic themes and goals and include relevant dates like industry holidays and more. It can also help reduce mistakes. By planning your content and copy in advance, your team can review and provide edits, ensuring that misspellings, broken links, or incorrect images rarely occur.

Now that we’ve explained WHY a content calendar is important, let’s explain how you can develop one. There are many different variations that you can find, below are some of our favorites:

• Free Social Media Calendar Template from Hubspot
• Content Calendar Template from Later

Social media is relevant. And it will continue to be relevant in the years to come. Focusing on a strong social media presence and strategy can not only drive brand awareness, but it can increase website traffic, business leads and even result in increased sales.