Social media has become a sine qua non for eCommerce brands. To get ahead in the game of social media, you need a strategic approach. And creating a social media calendar will help you plan out & schedule the posting of high-quality content for multiple weeks in advance.
Creating a social media calendar will save a lot of time wasted in worrying about what to post next. Also, it will help you to create a strong presence on various social media platforms through your content. Planning out content for the rest of the month in advance will give you a better understanding of what you are posting and is it making sense for your audience.
Be thorough while preparing social media calendar and spend a couple of hours beforehand to plan it out every month. Still, many are confused about how to create social media calendar for your eCommerce store. So, with this article, we are providing a guide for those starting off with their social media content planning.
Create Social Media Calendar for Your Ecommerce Store
Through this article, we are going to walk you through all the ins and outs of the social media calendar. Once you get the hang of it, it’ll be the simplest of the tasks for you. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
1. Creating Template for Calendar:
First things first, you’ll need a template where you can fill out your thoughts. To keep it simple yet effective, we can use Google Sheet. It’s simple to use and the best thing is it’s free for all. The only thing you need is a Google account to access the Sheets.
In only less than 15 minutes, you can create an efficient template on Google Sheets for your social media postings. Also, the best thing about it is you will have all the creative control to customize the template to suit different channels of social media.
If somehow, you don’t like to work on Google Sheets, then there are tons of other tools available at your fingertips to create a template. Trello is another free and simple to use tool if you need more flexibility with creating content for social media. It best suits those who need more of a visual layout and doesn’t like working on a spreadsheet.
2. Planning Context of Content to Post:
What to post on social media is more important than when to post it. For this, eCommerce brands must always be consistent with their tone of messaging while posting anything online. Consistency in regular posting is always great but make no mistake, posting out of content messaging on social media won’t get you anywhere.
Also read: Top Instagram Mistakes that eCommerce Owners Should Avoid
Depending on your audience and niche of the industry, the context of your content must resonate with them. Different audiences have different tastes when it comes to consuming content available online. So, brands have to put in some time to understand their audience and decide what type of content can best resonate with them.
The best way to get started with that is to do a competitor analysis. Find some of your competitors who you think have mastered the social media game. Note down things you find useful and then create ideas of your own based on that research. They have already done a ton of research to find out the best content type that resonates with their audience.
And you’ll be leveraging their techniques to nose ahead. But remember, it is a trial and error process. So, don’t worry if you don’t get it right in the beginning but you’ll surely learn what to post next.
3. Coming Up with Quality Content:
Not all content is good content. Once you have decided what works best with your audience, you must come up with engaging and quality content. Otherwise, your audience will get bored and move elsewhere and stop following your channels.
Also read: Social Listening, Interaction & Selling Set Social Revenue for your Social Commerce
For creating high-quality content, you can either create it yourself or outsource it to media houses. If you think, you can handle the content creation part, then you are better off as a solo. But if you are just starting off, then we suggest getting help from experts for social media content creation is your best bet.
You can also use tools like Feedly and Quuu for content creation and curation across various social media handles of your brand. After you complete this step, the only thing that remains now is to schedule your posts.
4. Scheduling the Content Created:
Scheduling the content you have created is also as important as any other part of social media calendar creation. Now, the only thing you have to do is to deliver the quality content you have created to your audience. But the question is how you will deliver all such content worth multiple weeks? Doing so manually is going to be a pain in the back especially when you have other tasks on hand.
Also read: How to Ecommerce Social Media Plan for the Holidays
So, what you can do here is pre-schedule your content with free to use social media posting tools. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer are great that allows you to add all your social media handles and schedule the content in one go. Such tools take away your headache to post timely and regular content. Also, you’ll have insights into how your content is performing on those social media handles. They’ll let you know your most successful posts, the best time to post to get high engagement, and many more other insights.
Thus, spend a bit of time once you have completed your social media calendar on scheduling it so you can focus on running your eCommerce brand.
Wrapping Up
All in all, creating social media calendar is not a hard thing. Also, you can use tools mentioned through-out this blog that will provide ease from content creation to posting it on social handles. However, eCommerce brands must remember that social media does not guarantee success instantly and it is all about the experimentation of what works and whatnot. All you need is some patience and consistency in coming up & posting content.
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