The importance of using a Content Calendar!

Why should you use a social media calendar? Social media has seen a huge rise in benefits for brands and small companies over the last decade. It has levelled the playing field in many ways; allowing smaller companies to punch well above their weight. We’ve seen million dollar companies born overnight due to viral traction. Something that would have not been possible previously without a big TV budget or online ad spend. Driving these success stories is content, and driving content is teams. Teams working together to build content that’s clever, creative and share-worthy.

The best way to organise this content and meticulously plan your attack for social media domination is by utilising a content calendar. Simply, a content calendar is a shared work detailing to the day what content you will post on each of your social media channels in the upcoming weeks or months.

So, why should you use it?

Never miss an important date

Some of the biggest drivers of conversation on social networks are events. This could be a big sports match or awards ceremony, a popular TV show or a big local event.

Tweets or posts about happening events are 78% more likely to be engaged with, and by knowing these events are upcoming, you can plan your social content in advance so you can initiate or participate in the conversation. To make this easier for marketers, we built a handy events calendar in Zaapt so you can always see what’s coming up and add in events important to you.

Save time

Social media can be full-time and consuming work! A significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 37% for 11 or more hours weekly. As more and more time is spent on social media it is crucial for any business to ensure that time is spent the most efficiently.

Working from a well-planned schedule saves time by allowing you to create content in a focused window rather than day-by-day. It also means you are less likely to skip a day’s content if you a particularly busy on a given day. Zaapt saves users even more time by cutting the process of copy and pasting to schedulers, once your content is marked as scheduled it will post straight to Facebook or Twitter.

Transparency

Transparency brings many benefits to organisations, and having your content plan in one place for everyone to see means everyone knows what is going out and when. Someone in the company may be better placed to cover a certain upcoming topic or another member of the team may be struggling to think of a good piece of content to fit an upcoming event that your business should be talking about.

Having a content calendar means multiple members of your team can share the load by adding ideas, content or events.

Consistency

Marketers will usually define a content strategy before they start building their content plan. This can cover all manner of things, from tone of voice guidelines, to content pillars (the main topics you want to cover) and channel distribution (ensuring your spread is even across channels). Consistency builds trust in your brand and allows you to grow your authority in targeted areas.

Keeping a content calendar means you can better see and stick to your strategic goals. It will take time, but a consistent approach will pay off in the long run. Zaapt has a super easy tagging system which means you can easily tag posts by topic and then filter later on to see an entire content thread. Each post also has a social icon against it so you can quickly see the spread of your content on your channels.

Accountability

As your company grows its presence and the role of social media becomes more important, introducing a governance layer within your business can be useful to avoid any social media faux pas. When creating this process you will want to ensure it is as frictionless as possible so that key stakeholders can signoff or provide feedback quickly, and not hinder any posts that need to go live.

This is one of the big pain points of social at scale and can prove a headache for larger businesses or agencies. It’s one of the main reasons we built Zaapt as a collaboration tool, so that everyone can provide feedback in real-time and content can be signed off at the click of a button.

How effective is your social media content calendar? Is it helping to grow your success on social media and fuel your business growth? Is it helping your team stay focused and saving them time? Sign up for a free trial of Zaapt.