There are no hard and fast rules about what constitutes a good social media calendar. In my experience, what might work for one organization may not necessarily be as effective for another. Still, in my years doing content marketing, I have come across some specific benchmarks and best-practices that you can use to create the best social media calendar possible:

1. Map It Out on a Spreadsheet

Excel or Google Sheets are my go-to platforms for creating social media calendars. They are versatile programs that make planning over weeks and months easier and more organized. They’re customizable, which means you can start off using a basic template—check out ours below—and make it your own.

2. Cover Holidays and Special Events

Social media engagement means staying relevant to your followers. This is why it’s so important that you stay up to date with the latest holidays and events that might be of interest to your audience. Standard national holidays make for great content posting opportunities for social media calendars. Additionally, if your business operates in a niche industry, taking note of special events beyond holidays and adding them to your social media calendar can build you up as an invaluable resource of information.

3. Plan for Content Variety

It’s always good to have a mix of different types of content scheduled on your calendar to keep your social media pages engaging and interesting. Over 40% of the world’s population are active on social media. If you break that down, that’s 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers—and each generation is attracted to and engage in different types of content. For our company’s content marketing efforts, we make it a point to post articles, videos, images, infographics, and more. This helps us reach more diverse audiences who may prefer one form of content over another.

4. Plan for Original and Third-Party Content

The whole point of social media marketing is to drive a larger audience to your own, original content. That said, social media calendars should have a good ratio of branded content and third-party material. For us at Leadspanda, we follow a 2 to 1 ratio of external to internal content. We spend a lot of time researching relevant articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc. that are related to our subject matter and niche and make sure that for every two topics written by third-party sources, we post one blog post, infographic, or video that we’ve developed ourselves.

5. Keep Track of Your Social Media Platform’s Progress and Performance

A social media calendar is primarily designed to give you an at-a-glance view of your social media marketing efforts. You should be able to see what has been posted where and what the current status is of each platform. However, a great social media calendar should also allow you to see your progress across each platform. Tracking your engagement across each post on your social media calendars can help you determine which posts are doing well and which ones need to be improved.

And always remember—frequency is important, but quality and consistency are more important when it comes to maintaining your social media presence. If you have any questions, please feel free to shoot me a message here.