Love Digital Marketing and Social Media? Make a Content Calendar

Use a Social Media Content Calendar To Build a Brand for Your Business

Marketing involves a number of components; one of them is branding, and another is implementing social media. Figuring out how these two diverse areas intersect is difficult, especially when you throw a social media calendar into the mix. In fact, you may feel so overwhelmed by the process of mixing these three elements together that you just leave the idea behind. However, ignoring this mixture can prove detrimental for your business, so let's break it down.

How Branding and Social Media Connect

Branding is the act of setting your business apart from the competition. Perhaps you sell customized t-shirts. Plenty of other companies do as well. Branding is the way that you differentiate yourself from those other companies. Many businesses brand by developing a unique logo, design, slogan or company name that helps to identify the business. Once you have created that branding image or display, you need to promulgate it to the public. That is where social media comes in. As the owner of a business or a member of the marketing or advertising team, you likely already know how important it is to integrate social media into your campaign. Social media helps bring the word out to other people, and when you combine it with branding, it helps to identify your business. 

What a Social Media Calendar Is

Now that you understand the connection between branding and social media, you can learn more about what a social media content calendar is. Essentially, it is a calendar of all the content that is going up on your social media site. You should get a large calendar that is broken down into both months and days. At first, you will likely start by deciding what your main goals are for the month. Then, you can break those goals down into weeks and days. If you have just one content creator, then you don't need to assign labels. However, most companies have a team of people who put together content. You should write the name of the creator next to the project. Do not make the calendar more complicated than it needs to be. Write pertinent information next to the content listing; don't create a key that lists the details elsewhere. Now, you can use this content calendar to keep track of who creates which branding efforts.

Tracking Monthly Trends

One of the benefits of a content calendar is that it will allow you to see how your branding efforts are doing from month to month. For example, in September, you may decide that you want to increase sales by a certain percentage by the time the first of January arrives. The content calendar will let you go back to see if your branding efforts on social media were directly relate to an increase in sales. That way, you know what techniques to use when you want to further increase sales. On top of that, you can see if certain branding efforts had a greater effect during certain months. For example, you may discover that during the summer months, branding efforts related to fall or winter concepts plummeted. You may also note that efforts dropped in general because many of your target audience members were on vacation.

Tracking Daily and Hourly Trends

The content that you publish in order to increase your branding efforts need to be sold, and it must capture the attention of your audience members. However, if you are publishing the content at the wrong time, then you are likely to fail in those missions by missing the main trends. When you notice that a particular branding effort hasn't worked as well as you had hoped, go back to the calendar to see when it was put up on social media. You may wish to include hours in the calendar as well. Doing so is useful for tracking purposes here. Let's say that your target audience members are primarily people who work 9-5 jobs. You have an excellent branding effort, but you cannot figure out why it isn't working. You go back to the calendar, and you realize that it's getting posted at 10 a.m. each day. At this time of the day, your target audience members are likely fully engaged at work. The calendar can help you to see that your timing is off. Essentially, the social media content calendar is a way of keeping track of your branding efforts. It does not simply help you to see the strategies that you have used, but also when you have used them. As a result, you may discover that a particular strategy has a great deal of potential, but that it isn't posted at the right time of the day. On the other hand, you may go back and find out that a certain strategy has consistently failed throughout the months and that the time has come to eliminate it.

Erika Kauffman is the General Manager at New York based PR Company 5W Public Relations. 5WPR has offices in Denver and Los Angeles.