If you’re a social media manager or you’re looking for a social media virtual assistant, it’s time for you to stay on top of social media by downloading our free Social Media Calendar Template for 2023.
A social media content calendar is a calendar that contains your plans for upcoming posts which includes details such as:
- Dates and times to post
- Content themes
- Captions and hashtags
- Content (including images, reels, and carousels)
If you want to be smart and strategic about social media, you’ll need to have a social media calendar that you can refer to in order to plan your upcoming content. This should be something that is easy to update and understand because you’ll want to assign the management of your social media calendar to your social media manager or social media virtual assistant.
Our Social Media Calendar Template for 2023 includes things such as:
- Holidays like Easter and Christmas
- Sales events like Black Friday or EOFY sales
- Hashtag trends like #InternationalDogDay
- Big events like Mardi Gras or the Superbowl
- And suggestions for your content themes, types of posts, and time of day to posts.
However, simply having a social media calendar isn’t going to solve all your problems. Here are the key learnings that we recommend you take into consideration before you start.
KEY LEARNING 1: QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
A lot of people think that the more content you can pump out, the better, but this is not the case with social media content. You really need to focus on the quality of content over the quantity.
This means that you need to have:
1. Clarity over your content pillars
Identify at least 3 to 5 key content pillars that your social media manager or social media virtual assistant should focus on.
To give you a bit of guidance, they should roughly cover these 5 goals:
- Build trust
- Educate your audience
- Promote your business
- Inspire others
- Connect with your audience
2. You don’t need to be on EVERY social media platform
We used to think that EVERY social media platform was important and put in the same amount of time and resources into Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Podcasts – only to spread ourselves way too thin. It’s like trying to be the jack of all trades, but the master of nothing.
Think about your social media goals and target audience and use your social media content calendar where there’s the most opportunity for your business. If you’re not sure where that is, ask your virtual assistant to do competitor research to see what your competitors are doing to give you an idea of your best social media mix.
3. You don’t have to post every single day
Just because there is a slot available in the content calendar, doesn’t mean you HAVE to fill it up with content. It’s better to just optimize your content creation process, focus on the days your followers are most online and make those your “MUST UPLOAD” days, give your calendar optional days.
Again, your social media virtual assistant can easily dive into your analytics or conduct industry research to figure out your best times and days to post so that you can assess your resources and come up with an appropriate posting schedule.
KEY LEARNING 2: INCLUDE VERTICAL VIDEOS IN YOUR CONTENT MIX
Now in the past, social media was pretty straightforward because the focus was on image-based content. So you could just source images or design your own on Canva or Photoshop, schedule it with the right hashtags and that was that.
But since the introduction of TikTok and now Instagram and Facebook Reels, the landscape has changed MASSIVELY. Internally, we did a lot of testing ourselves before we realised that our golden ratio on Instagram and Facebook involved sharing at least two vertical videos per week. Since implementing this, our reach went from 3,000 per month to 50,000 per month.
KEY LEARNING 3: HOP ON TRENDS
In order to figure out what types of videos to share, we relied a lot on TikTok trends. Even though TikTok wasn’t a core focus for our business, TikTok was where the trends started and that would later trickle out to Instagram and Facebook – two channels that ARE important to our business. This is an opportunity we didn’t want to miss.
So our Social Media Virtual Assistant will dedicate weekly research time to looking for TikTok trends which we could film and make our own.
Or if you’re already producing longer-form content like YouTube videos, your social media virtual assistant could go through these videos and choose snippets to turn into Instagram or Facebook Reels using trending audio to increase your reach.
I hope these tips have been helpful. Remember to download our free Social Media Calendar Template for 2023!