Social Media Calendar

We all know what a calendar is. We’ve been seeing calendars, and using them, since back in the childhood. It could have been a single sheet, with all the 12 months filled in across it, or different sheets for each of the months, to be affixed on the wall. Or it could be a table calendar that you can glance at any time you wish to, on your study/work table.

Such calendars still exist, of course, but a social media calendar is somewhat different, though also the same in some respects. It goes without saying that a social media calendar is a digital version of a normal calendar, though you can take a print of it too.

But another key difference lies in its focus on time, which is missing in a regular calendar. That’s because a social media calendar helps you’re your social media messaging, where time is of great essence.

The essence of a social media calendar

To understand how a social media calendar works, it’s important to grasp its essence. At the core of this is the same concept that makes you prepare properly for a public presentation or lecture. The idea is to be well prepared so that the audience isn’t left wasting their time trying to guess what you’re actually aiming for.

Similarly, what you do or don’t post on a social media messaging site depends on how well prepared you are to communicate effectively to the social media audience. This means you should have an effective messaging strategy in place. That’s where a social media calendar comes in.

Now what really is a social media calendar all about?

Any tool you use to plan your social media communication is an effective social media calendar. It can be a printed calendar or an app that works as a planner. How it helps is by enabling you to organize better, especially when you’re trying to manage your multiple social media accounts at the same time (and that incidentally happens with most of us these days).

With a calendar to guide you, you can be assured that you won’t go wrong in managing your multiple accounts and the posts on each of them. A calendar also ensures adherence to deadlines, so that there’s no or little possibility of procrastination.

All about efficiency

It’s quite evident that a social media calendar works to enhance your efficiency online. If you’re better organized and follow deadlines stringently, your efficacy naturally gets boosted multifold, with no wastage of precious time  – either yours or that of your audience.

Efficiency also gets enhanced with the use of a social media calendar in the sense of optimal messaging, which means you shoot your messages at optimal timings, in a way that improves the chances of them being seen.

Creating a social media calendar

So the question now arises – how easy or difficult it is to create an effective and easy-to-use social media calendar? Given the large variety of free-to-do apps available online, creating such a calendar is quite a breeze. Of course you can always innovate and build your own, customized to your needs. But the various apps provide an easy way to do it, saving you from thinking through the process and then spending precious time in the actual execution.

So it’s a good idea to opt for, perhaps, the Google Spreadsheet or some other template for a social media calendar. Designed as they are for facilitating easy use, these templates can also be customized to your use to some extent. So they’re a good place to start, especially for beginners on the task.

Conclusion

Whichever option you go for (self-created or template-based), remember that the social media calendar you’re creating is a major tool to facilitate the process of social media messaging and management. So the simpler you make it the better.

And if you’re wondering how to make it simpler and more effective, check out Social Media Business Blueprint for some useful tips for better social media management. There’s enough guidance to take you through the intricacies of enhancing your social media management techniques, right from building an effective calendar to scheduling, and more.