A social media calendar makes it easy to plan posts, track tasks and assignments, and collaborate with team members so everyone’s working toward the same goals.
To give you a headstart, we created a really simple TeamGantt template you can use to get your social media plan off the ground. Get started for free with this social media schedule template!
A social media schedule is simply a documented plan for when and where you’re going to post content across various social media channels. This helps ensure social media posts don’t get bumped by other marketing priorities or lost in the mix of daily to-dos.
With a social media calendar in place, you can push strategies forward, keep up with each day’s posting schedule, and loop your team in on your plan more easily.
A solid social media marketing plan involves much more than writing and scheduling social posts. Follow these simple steps to make sure your posts are most effective.
Don’t worry: You don’t have to be everywhere all at once to move the needle. Figure out where your audience hangs out, and build your social media calendar around the top channels they actively engage with.
Success can look different across social media channels. So establish goals for each network, and determine which metrics will help you measure and track success.
For example, if Twitter’s your go-to for increasing brand awareness and blog traffic, you might track impressions, clicks, and retweets. Want to grow influence and community on LinkedIn? Comments and shares may be your metrics for success.
Time of day and posting frequency are essential to the success of your overall social media marketing plan. Research popular times to post to each channel, and experiment to see which ones perform best with your audience. If you get awesome engagement at 9:00 am on Facebook, be sure to take advantage of those extra eyeballs when slotting future posts!
Give each channel some love frequently, but don’t overdo it. A rule of thumb for an effective social media plan is that each channel should feature 1-2 posts per day.
If Twitter’s an important channel in your social media strategy, you’ll need to up the frequency a bit. Shoot for a maximum of 15 tweets a day, with about half of those being retweets.
Think about where your expertise intersects with your audience, and build a content plan that’s aimed at easing their biggest pain points. Creating a repository of evergreen content will ensure you always have something valuable to share as your audience grows.
Start with types of content that have performed well in the past, but be sure to experiment until you find the right mix for your audience. Remember, social media’s super-visual, so include image and video resources in your content plan too.
You’re finally ready to build out the nitty-gritty details of your social media calendar and get to posting!
Now that you generally know what you want to post and where, drop each post into your schedule. We recommend doing this a month at a time to account for shifting priorities.
Consider a social media management platform for auto-publishing your posts to each channel. That way you can schedule posts in advance without stressing about being available to publish every single post on the spot.
Once you get your social media schedule off the ground, your job’s not done. Come back to your social media plan every so often, and take an honest look at the state of your accounts.
Here are a few questions to consider as you evaluate your social media performance:
Regularly auditing your social media marketing will enable you to determine when and how you should adjust your plan to continue growing and engaging your audience.
Now that we’ve talked about how to create and maintain your social media schedule, let’s look at two examples we built in TeamGantt.
In this example, social media posts are broken down by day of the week and channel. We used TeamGantt’s checklist feature to capture the details of what’s being promoted when for each social media post on the schedule.
Here’s an example of how you might organize social media posts by time of day and content type. In this example, we used checklists to keep up with social media channels for each post.
With TeamGantt’s free social media schedule template, you can save time building, updating, and communicating your marketing plan and see what’s done—and what’s to come—at a glance.
There’s no right or wrong way to set up your social media calendar in TeamGantt. It’s flexible enough to roll with the punches!
Here’s how to customize a social media marketing plan that works for you.
Break posts down by day of the week or social media channel—whatever floats your boat. Converting tasks into subgroups is only a right-click away!
Simply hover over the taskbar in your gantt chart, and click the color block icon that appears to the right of the taskbar to select a new color. Presto change-o! 💫
Got a rhythm to your posting schedule? Set up your first week’s social media plan, then right-click on the task group name and select Duplicate from the drop-down menu. No need to reinvent the wheel!
Once you’ve duplicated a task group, rearranging your social media schedule is as easy as dragging and dropping tasks into their new rightful place.
TeamGantt’s checklist feature enables you to streamline your plan by adding to-dos within a task. That way you don’t have to create multiple versions of the same post in your calendar just to cover your social media bases.
TeamGantt isn’t just for gantt charts. Transform your well-crafted social media schedule into a calendar instantly with our Calendar view. It’s perfect for tracking and managing your social media plan on a day-to-day basis!
Viewing and updating your social media marketing calendar is easy! Simply go to the Calendar tab at the top of your gantt chart, and click on any post in your social media schedule to open the Edit window.
From there, you can:
Ready to build a social media calendar of your own? We’ve created a free social media schedule template for you in TeamGantt so you can jump right in!
Customizing the template is quick and easy, thanks to TeamGantt’s drag and drop simplicity. And since everything’s online, your whole team can collaborate on social media posts in real time.
Sign up for a free TeamGantt account today, and save time on project setup with this free social media schedule template!
