How to use social media calendar template
Your goal is to deliver high-quality, relevant content that will engage your audience, establish brand trust and drive business—but how can you tailor your social content to break through all of the noise, provide value to your audience and ultimately impact your bottom line?
A social media plan is a comprehensive blueprint for your social marketing strategy that will help you do just that. It includes:
- Setting realistic social marketing goals to align with your overall business goals
- Determining how you will measure the success of your social marketing efforts
- Integrating emerging trends and best practices into your strategy and content development
This 30-day social media plan template is designed to help you re-invent your social media management strategy so that what you share aligns with the interests of your community and contributes to overall business value.
You will learn how to:
- Create an effective social strategy that aligns with audience interest
- Diversify your content and build a robust content calendar
- Determine business value driven by social
Use the social media plan template below to track your progress as you work through the plan. By completing just one task each day for the next 30 days, you can fully transform your social marketing strategy.
How to use social media calendar template
Week 1
Establish your goals and define your metrics
Day 1: Establish goals for social
Establishing clear social media goals is the first step toward transforming your strategy. Determine exactly what you want social to achieve. Here are several examples of goals you might consider:
- Drive website traffic
- Raise brand awareness
- Boost brand engagement
- Generate new leads
- Nurture leads
- Build a community around your business
- Establish authority and industry expertise
- Improve customer support
- Shift brand sentiment
The objective here is to give purpose to your social efforts. Once you’ve established your social goals, the content you produce and share should continually support those goals.
There are several methods to help you write out specific social media goals, including the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method.
The OKR method asks you to set a broad objective statement and list out key results that describe what successfully achieving that objective looks like. Here’s an example of a broad objective statement supported by clear, result metrics that define meeting the objective.
According to this example, if your objective is to boost brand engagement, you must increase the number of likes, shares, mentions and comments by 20% by the end of the fourth quarter.
Day 2: Define your success metrics
How are you going to define the success of your social efforts? Decide which metrics will provide the right data to determine whether or not social is supporting your business goals.
As you identify your success metrics (e.g. organic mentions, share of voice or conversions), set clear standards for your social campaigns so that you know when you achieve success. If you are tracking audience engagement, what exactly do you consider successful engagement rates for your social content?
Depending on the type of content you produce, where you share and the goals you set for your social marketing efforts, the metrics you track will change.
If you’re at a loss for the goals your team should set, use the Social Media Metrics Map to assess options for owned, earned and paid social.
Day 3: List out your challenges
The task is simple: Make a list of the challenges you face when it comes to social media marketing. Think of any barriers that are keeping your social content from making its biggest impact.
As you list out your challenges, write out simple explanations of how these barriers are impacting your marketing efforts or overall business success. Here are a couple of examples to help you get started.
Challenge 1:
Although we consistently post on social, we are not achieving ideal engagement levels.
Challenge 2:
We have seen a dramatic drop in our social content’s organic reach.
Day 4: Brainstorm solutions
Round up your marketing team and brainstorm possible solutions to the challenges you previously listed.
Be sure to provide evidence to justify effective solutions so that you’re prepared when the time comes to gather resources and advocate for your budget.
Solution to Challenge 1:
We can use creators to engage with our social content and drive the conversation.
Justification: In 2022, most marketers (74%) plan to spend at least a quarter of their social media budget on partnering with a content creator. With loyal followings, creators can boost engagement and keep relevant conversations going on social.
Solution to Challenge 2:
We can invest in paid social media advertising to run highly targeted campaigns and reach the right people.
Justification: Almost half of consumers report they “find the perfect products” by seeing targeted ads. By 2025, social shopping is set to become a $1.2 trillion channel.
Day 5: Analyze the competition
If you’re running out of ideas, try running a competitive analysis. Be careful not to mimic your competitors’ content, but use your analysis to determine your brand’s unique positioning instead.
Your brand and its competitors have similar ideal customer personas, so focus on the type of content that is resonating, both within your own social efforts and those of the competition.
Here are a few questions to consider as you analyze your competitor’s social marketing efforts:
- Which marketing channels are my competitors using and are they successful in those channels?
- What are my competitors talking about and are those topics generating high audience engagement?
- Are there areas within our social strategy where we are outperforming our competitors?
