We all know social media marketing is the central pillar of every digital marketing campaign. Yet most businesses aren’t properly utilizing it. The most common complaint, especially from small companies, is that we just don’t have enough time.
If only there were more hours in the day for us to work on proper social media content.
Social media scheduling came as a breather for marketers and businesses, but creating a month’s worth of social media posts in one day seems overwhelming.
The main problem with small businesses is they start the day energetically with a lot in their mind, get stuck on one or two initial tasks, and end up wasting the entire day. The thought of creating 30-40 posts for different social media platforms and scheduling at the right time is not a motivator. Consequently, the social media post tasks go to the end of the to-do list.
What if you can easily plan content for the entire month within a few hours? You won’t believe me; I won’t believe myself as well if I hadn’t done it before. Yes, anyone can plan and create a month’s social media content before the lunch break.
Why do you need to plan social media posts?
Social media is a free platform for people to post about anything they want. If you have personal accounts— of course you have— you can post anything. It won’t matter that much. But if you are a business, there are a lot of variables in the play.
The most valuable entity of every business is the brand’s reputation. Social media plays a very crucial role in creating a persistent positive image of your brand with adequately planned and targeted marketing.
Maintaining an industry leader status requires detailed content planning, audience analysis, appropriate scheduling, and consistent monitoring.
So far we have established that we can plan social media posts and why we need to do so. It is time to unravel the secret of how businesses can achieve that.
How to plan a month’s content in one day?
The tips mentioned in this blog have been tested by many marketers and businesses, including myself. So, grab a cup of coffee, cozy in, and see how professionals get social media marketing done.
Put your planning hat on.
Getting in the proper mindset is the first and foremost part of social media planning. If you are not in the mood to create content, it will affect your productivity. Although you need to create content, instead of doing it half-heartedly, put it on hold.
You can get down to business once you are in the right mind. Start by listing what you think will work for your brand based on your knowledge and analysis. It doesn’t have to be correct, but you need something to start with; your ideas are the best motivator.
The primary reason for planning content is to minimize errors and create content that resonates with your audience. Doing forcefully without the intent can drastically affect your quality and overall performance.
Analyze and set goals.
This process has two completely different approaches to it. First, if you do it for the first time, start with competitor analysis. See what your competitors are posting and how people are reacting to it. If it’s good, how can you do the same without making it obvious? Contrary to that, what can you do that your competitors lack?
Another inspirational source is to check the influencer’s feed of your industry. If you are a lifestyle brand, look for social media influencers promoting relevant brands. Make a note of what they are posting and how much success they have from these posts.
The second approach is for businesses already invested in social media marketing but consistently fall short of their end goals. In this case, analyze your past social media progress first. It will give you an idea of what works for your audience and what needs to be eliminated.
Businesses can use social media schedulers like Adublisher for detailed insights.
Combine both of these processes, and you will comprehensively understand your current situation. Based on these premises, create a clear set of goals for your next marketing campaign. Start with basics, reach, and engagements, and then move on to the next step, conversions and ROI.
What social media platform is best for you?
The above-mentioned analysis will tell you what social media platform is best for your audience. You can create a lot of social media accounts, but you can’t manage them, at least you can’t properly manage them. So, the best way to make the most of your social media efforts is to create a balanced mix of social media platforms to schedule posts on with a social media scheduler like Adublisher.
Get a social media posting calendar.
There are three common approaches to social media calendars: analog, digital, and further paid social media calendar templates. If you are a “paper pencil” person, download a printed calendar; if you are tech-savvy, open a social calendar online.
Google Calendar is a free and easily shareable online calendar I will use to explain how to plan your content.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Log in with your Google account.
- Click the Google Apps button left to your profile icon in the new tab.
- Scroll down and click on the icon with “Calendar” under it.
A Google calendar will open for you. Click on the date, and a popup will appear. Add tasks or events in the calendar according to the following points.
How to fill a social media post calendar?
Festivities and Global Holidays.
This is where we unfold the mystery of how you can plan your social calendar within an hour. Starting with the holidays, we are taking the example of December, the most festive month of the year. Write down the festivities and holidays of the month and add them to your social calendar. In December, we have Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday, and then we have Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Eve.
Open your calendar and add these holidays in their respective dates and according to your audience’s most active time of the day. You have six days worth of content planned. You can add a few more posts leading up to these events. Since Hanukkah and Kwanzaa are long events, you can add one at the beginning and one at the end, reminding people about the last chance to avail of some discounts.
Urgency in your posts lures consumers into making purchase decisions quickly. You can add one post each about Christmas and New Year’s Eve. This takes the total number of posts to 8. In the case of Instagram, regularly add stories about these events— a couple of stories daily.
National Holidays.
As a grumpy old guy, I was not a big fan of so many national holidays; I mean, there is one almost every week for crying out loud. But from a marketing point of view, these holidays are a great help, especially when you schedule social media posts with a social media scheduler, Adublisher.
It’s time to add national holiday posts to your calendar, starting with Rosa Parks’s Day being celebrated across the US on the 1st of December. Then we have National App Day, National Free Shipping Day, Boxing Day, and most importantly Human Rights Day on the 10th of December.
These are tertiary concern posts; one post each is enough. For Twitter, however, you can add a couple of posts. The total number of posts is 13 so far.
Promotional content.
After the public posts, it’s time to add some branded posts. You can add some posts about your brand explaining the services and benefits you provide to your customers. I always advise brands to focus on customers’ issues and daily life struggles and then tell them how you can help.
The best way to achieve that is by creating content focused on the pain points mixed with a strong message about your solutions. The second set of branded posts can be about some product launch. For example, you have an e-book or a lipstick shade coming soon in the market. You can highlight some of its benefits if you have already launched one.
You can add a couple of posts leading up to the launch, one on the launch day and one after a few days after it. Note: publish promotional posts a day before some upcoming holiday like Christmas or Free Shipping Day. These days have the most sales. We have planned content for 18 days, with only 12 more. 
UGC.
User-generated content is a powerful motivator and driver of sales. People prefer the word of a friend or family member over any influencer and celebrity worldwide— regardless of how famous they are. The reason is that paid content is biased, and what a friend, a colleague, or an ordinary citizen like yourself says is considered better authentic.
If you recently launched a product, ask your customers to give feedback on social media and tag you in the post. You can share these posts on your account. Another form of UGC is testimonials; you can use Canva or some other editing tool to add testimonials in a catchy template and post on social media. 
Blog Posts.
If you have a business, you definitely have a blog site or a blog section on your parent site. Blogs are a very potent and reliable source of ranking your business in search engines. High-ranked websites have higher conversion rates and a higher ROI. If you don’t have a blog, you are missing a lot.
Marketers schedule blogs on social media for higher traffic. Social media schedulers like Adublisher offer RSS Feed options to marketing teams. With RSS Feed, you can schedule your blog on social media without juggling between tabs.
You should share a couple of blogs every month on your social media platforms, especially Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If your blog has graphics or infographics, Pinterest must be on your schedule list. With two blog posts and UGC, you have only five posts left to create.
Share content.
The good news for marketers is that you don’t have to create all of the content yourself. Besides your competitors, there are a lot of creators and brands online that may align with your common end goals. If you see a post that is good or about some social cause or something you agree with, share it on your accounts with your thoughts.
Similarly, if you think a blog by some writer highlights your audience’s concerns but doesn’t point to any competitor products, you can share it on your profile.
Curate content.
So far, we have 26 day’s worth of posts in our calendar. All that’s left is to curate content for only five days. Think about some educational topics for the audience and write five posts. To ease the process, you can write three original posts and repurpose two from the old ones.
Repurposing quality evergreen content is a guaranteed way of getting engagements. Scroll through your old posts and blogs and find the ones with optimal results. Recreate content according to these posts and publish across your social accounts.
Popular posts like Monday motivation, thoughts of the day, fun Friday, etc., can also be added as curated content. In addition to that, you can add behind-the-scenes posts about your employees or your personal life. These posts show the human side of your brand and create a stronger bond with the audience.
Create posts for publishing.
Congratulations, your social calendar is filled with post ideas. It’s time to write captions and copy for your posts. Writing a copy is the most time-consuming and crucial part of the process. Having the idea of what to write makes things a lot easier. If you have a writer, you can share the calendar with them, and they will be able to write and add content to the calendar.
The second process is to add graphics. With clear ideas of what the posts are about content copy, the designer or even you should have no problem generating attractive graphics for posts.
Use a social media scheduler like Adublisher to schedule posts.
The last step of the process is to schedule posts on social media with Adublisher. You might be thinking, why not use the native scheduler? Built-in schedulers lack many options, like scheduling content across multiple accounts and pages simultaneously, consuming a copious amount of time. 
Contrary to that, Adublisher is a user-friendly, reliable social media scheduler capable of scheduling posts across all leading social media platforms. Moreover, you can schedule your blog posts with the RSS Feed tool, saving time and effort.
