How to plan your social media calendar months in advance?

Creating your social media calendar months in advance and scheduling your posts ahead of time can be an overwhelming task. This article will give you some hands-on tips and tricks and make you a pro in planning and strategizing your calendar to deliver the best results for your organization!

Being efficient, effective, and consistent is the key to ace your planning process and avoid utter chaos. We help you with the spot-on strategy!

5 Quick Tips for Making a Successful Calendar:

1. Do the necessary research and take the smartest approach!

First, conduct a social media audit before planning your content to stay focused. Know your target audience and the social media platforms on which they are active. Identify the platform that has maximum growth and the type of content that will attract your audience. For example, if you are targeting a feminine audience and your content is more visual than textual, you should be focusing on Pinterest and Instagram rather than Twitter and Facebook. More than 70% of users are female and, according to Business Pinterest Data, 85% of women use Pinterest “to plan small or big life moments”.

Second, find out from where are the traffic and engagement coming by looking at your previous posts. If you already have social media accounts, you can easily find this key information in your audience insights: check the number of accounts reached and their positive engagements such as comments and shares.

2. Stay relevant and trendy!

Take out a day in a week and prepare for content for the coming weeks, avoiding hindrance to your daily chores. Track upcoming important dates and events to make sure that your content is always trendy and relevant. For example, if your social media is about food, plan your international and national food days. If your goal is to develop awareness on social, economic, and environmental topics, check these international days currently observed by the United Nations. The trick is to stay consistent and strike a balance at all times!

Once you feel fully comfortable managing your calendar, you will be able to manage your content by quarters (Winter Q1, Spring Q2, Summer Q3, and Fall Q4). If you manage ads, those campaigns have to be planned months in advance. Don't spend your money if your ads are irrelevant, not well executed and planned carefully.

3. Set your achievable goals and decide the type of assets.

Now is the time. Make a decision now until it’s too late. Set realistic goals to make your calendar manageable. For example, ask yourself if you will be able to manage the x amount of assets for your accounts. It’s not the same if you plan 15 assets rather than 30 or 60 in the month.

Furthermore, plan on the different types of posts, including videos, blogs, or Instagram stories to be shared on each of the social media channels. Don’t forget that creating those takes time. So ask yourself how many people are involved in the process. If you are working alone on your business, would you be able to manage all these assets? If not, you will be frustrated to have had planned a calendar for nothing. So be realistic and set achievable goals with the human resources you have.

But we have good news for you! If you are a solopreneur, there are tons of templates that you can use easily just by adding your copy and your pictures, such as Etsy Instagram templates and this amazing design studio that we tested for you: Lu Amaral Studio. You can also use free tools such canva and other apps with preset filters. For Instagram stories, RIPL can be useful to create your stories faster!

4. Download your social media calendar template and start filling it with your copy to save time!

You can begin with drive spreadsheets and later use calendar templates to be more organized and efficient, such as Later. Start with a broad calendar that has core topics laid out for the next few months and then fill in the details about the channels—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Tik Tok, etc.—and the type of content you want to create (Stories, Feed content, Instagram Reels, large IGTV, etc.). You can alter the content seeing the reaction of your audience.

We advise editing your copy at that stage. Your copy has to be engaging and adapted to your audience. We plan a future blog on that specific topic.

5. Manage and schedule your social media content to be on time!

Posting content daily and being on duty at all times can be taxing. You have to schedule your content to be way ahead of time. Find out the right day, time, and platform to post the content to maximize its impact on your audiences. For example, are you targeting people in the US East Coast, Europe, India? In general, the best moments are commute hours in the morning and after 3 pm. Again, stay relevant to your country audiences...in France, no one commutes at 3 pm. According to Hubspot, the best day to post on Instagram is Thursday at 3 pm, but also at 5 am, 11 am and 4 pm. Lastly, Hootsuite and Later are great social media planners that help you schedule your posts and get you going!

Contributors:

Simran Sodhi (press@agh-pr.com) & Alexandra Gantier-Hochart

For more information and social media services, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Picture Credits:

Media Wix, Unsplash, Lu Amaral Studio Shop