Our Clients Get a Boost from Social Media Calendars

Kinetic has worked with companies large and small to boost their social media presence. We’ve encouraged many to introduce social media calendars to their marketing process to help ensure that time invested in social media is well planned, efficiently used and moves the dial on growing a customer base.

You control the message. You control the timing. You control the look and voice of your original posts and can leverage content that you share on a schedule that you can sustain. If you try to manage each account separately, it presents challenges that may leave your team disorganized and producing mediocre content. 

We recently worked with one Billings-based client to create a social calendar that will help the company up its social media presence and better connect with its growing number of customers across the U.S. It has a great story to tell about its role in the healthcare industry. Through its social media offerings, customers can learn about updates to services and understand larger trends in the industry that may affect them.

The social calendar helps them plan out their own content calendar months ahead of time. No surprises. No scrambling to write or find content. Minimal overlap. Lots of time saved. It’s hard to engage your audience with quality posts when you are rushed and ill-prepared. Set deadlines and hold the writers and designers accountable for hitting them. We refer to this sizable task as “eating the elephant one bite at a time.” It is a daunting challenge, but you can do it.

Of course, your social media calendar should be flexible. Consider it a framework for your content delivery. When there’s an immediate need for a timely, spontaneous reaction to good news or a crisis, by all means, compose and post and adjust your calendar accordingly.

Three quick tips:

• Batch post. Get all posts ready for a month, get them in the pipeline ready to post on the assigned day. If you can do a month’s worth, great! Too hard? Try a week at a time. Over the course of a year, you’ll save lots of time in this efficient process.
• Use a scheduling software, like Hootsuite, which features bulk scheduling, real-time analytics, and tagging and searching tools that make your batch posting efforts much easier. 
• Crowdsource your own team for content. They are your experts and can provide great perspectives and tips for your audience. Show off your team talent through the blogs they write.

What to post along with your blogs and company news items?

• Photos and illustrations that support your copy
• Short videos that engage
• Infographics that present info in a clever way
• Links to more information, such as full interviews and reports.

We know you don’t have unlimited resources, so be resourceful. Repurpose content to save you time and money. Review content you have already created in your company (reports, white papers, sales material, internal announcements) and retool it for social. Add new perspectives to it. For example, take a long white paper, boil it down to 10 key points, post the points and link to the full white paper.

Check out this free social media content calendar template via HubSpot. It may get you started on a productive journey to social media excellence!