By: Cori Widen, Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks

As a small business owner, you might be asking yourself ‘Do I really need a social media content calendar?’ The reality is that you’d be surprised at how important they are and how easy it can be to create a social media content for your business.

So what exactly is a social media content calendar? It’s much more than a typical calendar where you’d jot down a few notes. A social media content calendar is like your master-document when it comes to everything related to your business’ social media. Creating a social media content calendar is a rewarding task and a powerful tool to help you brainstorm, plan, manage, schedule and post content to your social media platforms. 

Keep reading to learn why your small business needs a social media content calendar and how to build one in just a few quick steps.

Why Small Business Owners Should Create a Social Media Content Calendar

• Be on Brand: When you plan out your content in advance and schedule all of your posts at once, you can instantly see what your social media platforms will start to look and feel like. This is a good chance to review each post and ensure they support your brand goals –– both visually and within your description.

• Save Time: It’s definitely going to take some time upfront to create a social media content calendar, but we promise that it’s going to save you time. By spending some time at the beginning of each week or month planning out your content, you will actually save time every day since your content will always be done and ready to post. Here are some tips on how to streamline your content creation:

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• Achieve Goals: Instead of posting in the spur of the moment, it’s important to share content that is aligned with your business goals. Planning your content ahead will help you ensure your social media content is optimized to help you achieve all of your big goals.

• Stay Calm: It might seem stressful at first to plan out (and create!) an entire month of social media content, but once you’ve done that, you will be much less stressed the rest of the month now that you no longer have to scramble to figure out what to post on social media each day.

• Be Consistent: Have you ever been so busy that you totally forgot to post to social media? If you create a social media content calendar and organize all of your posts ahead of time, you will be able to consistently maintain your social media platforms – which is key to social media success. 

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar for Your Small Business in 5 Easy Steps

1. Make a Plan: Before you get started creating a social media content calendar, there are several things you need to decide on in order to move forward. For example, will you be planning out your social media content weekly or monthly? Are you going to create your own calendar document or download a premade template?

2. Hold a Brainstorming Session: Now, here comes the fun part…brainstorming! Take a look at the week/month ahead and take note of any upcoming holidays, product launches, etc and begin brainstorming some content ideas for your social media platforms. Come up with a few ideas for each platform and start thinking about how you will execute those ideas.

Pro Tip: When researching upcoming seasonal holidays, head to Boosted’s ‘Seasonal’ category to see which holidays are coming up. You can then customize the seasonal templates of your choice and incorporate them into your social media content calendar.

3. Plan Out Content: Once you’ve reviewed all of your ideas and have nailed down exactly what type of content you would like to post, start mapping out what content you plan to post on each day and for each platform. Focus mainly on your top platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram. By planning out the order of your posts, you will have a better idea of exactly what type of content you should create for a balanced social feed.

4. Create Content: Now that you’ve mapped out what you want to post for that week/month, it’s time to actually start creating the content! It might sound like a ton of work to create a whole month of photo and video content at once, but it can be even harder to try to get into a creative groove every single day. Check out 7 Creative Ways to Use Video on Social Media for tips on how incorporate more video content into your content calendar.

5. Schedule/Post: And the final step is of course posting! You can use a scheduling tool to schedule out all of your social media posts or you can go into your calendar each day and post manually. Just make sure to include all of the important details  for each post including a caption, photo or video assets, a link, any hashtags to include, the date to post and which platform/s to post on. 

We hope these tips have inspired you to create a social media content calendar for your business! If you are looking for more ways to improve your social media platforms for the new year, check out 21 Ideas to Revamp Your Social Media for 2021.

Cori Widen is the Product Marketing Lead at Boosted by Lightricks. She has been leading product marketing campaigns and doing qualitative market research in the tech industry for 10 years.