How To Create A Small Business Social Media Marketing Calendar

If you want to be successful with social media marketing in 2022, you should be planning for it with a calendar. A social media marketing 2022 calendar will let you plan your content around your goals and coordinate campaigns to reach them.

How To Create Your Social Media Marketing 2022 Calendar

A social media calendar provides a framework for sharing content that resonates with your audience and promotes your business. Here are the steps to create an effective social media marketing 2022 calendar.

• Set Your Goals - Set monthly short-term goals to reach long-term goals. Working backward from your long-term goals, create short-term goals that will generate leads and sales. Smaller goals tend to revolve around content, followers, traffic, subscribers, and sales. Decide what you want to achieve on social media for each of these and create a goal-setting spreadsheet. Have an end goal for every piece of content you share on social media to track what’s working and what needs changing based on performance. With short-term goals, start small, be specific, and set a realistic timeframe to achieve each goal. At the end of each month, track your growth, see what worked, and set future goals. 
• Make An Outline - Outline content post types and categories for each social platform you use. Before creating your calendar, plan content around specific campaigns and goals. Determine the types of content that make sense for your business and audience, such as blog posts, quotes/motivational, product promotions, holidays, user-generated content (UGC), and events/announcements. After choosing your categories, create a spreadsheet to use as a working library to plan and gather the original content, products, events, and promotions you will share. Color-code each content type to easily tell them apart on the calendar. Include publishing dates, post descriptions, URLs, images, action items, campaigns, and any other important details. If you have weekly or monthly content themes, add a column to the left of the spreadsheet for your theme. Plan your content on or before the first of each month and during the week, create content, design images, manually share posts, and add them to your scheduling tools.
• Make A Template - To create a social media calendar, you can either design it manually or download a template to work from. If you decide to create your calendar manually, you can use Google Sheets or another spreadsheet to do it. 
• Plot Your Content - Plot your content in your social media calendar. Once you’ve created your calendar framework, it’s time to choose the specific days you will share each piece of content. Using your color-coded categories scheme, add the content from your working library. Customize the calendar based on how often you’ll be posting, including the specific times you plan to share posts and the additional distribution channels, such as email, that you will be using. You can even use the additional rows for each day to note important events and promotion dates. When regularly sharing the same content on each profile, it can be helpful to use a color-blocked version of your calendar to easily see what pieces of content you plan to share each day.
• Create, Schedule, Publish - Create, schedule, and publish your social media posts across the platforms you use. Once you’ve planned out your content on your calendar, the next job is to research and gather your content, create posts, and design images. If it’s hard to find the time to execute your social media plan and create the content you need, there are tools available to help you with the process.
• Confirm Post Publication - After planning the content you want to share each day on social media, you need to follow up by ensuring that your content publishes when and where you want it to. Use a spreadsheet to track when and where you’ve shared content on each social media channel. The tracking sheet will also help coordinate content promotion and keep track of older posts you’d like to share with any new social accounts. You can use notes to add descriptions for each post.
• Engage And Analyze - Watch each of your social media channels for engagement and react and reply to the people who engage with you every day. Check the analytics of each platform to see which pieces of content are resonating with your audience and use that to information craft more effective future campaigns.

If you want to know more about social media marketing, you can read our article “Best Social Media Platforms for Small Businesses”, or contact us.

Tags: marketing calendar, social media