If you’re like me, you probably struggle heavily at keeping up with social media. You might post aggressively and consistently for one week followed by three weeks of silence and creative block. You might have your Instagram feed planned out for two months but lack the creative energy to write captions (this used to cripple me). You might have a dozen articles ready to publish on LinkedIn, but you don’t post them because you don’t want to run out of content.

 

From my experience, the inconsistency in your social media efforts is likely rooted in a lack of strategy rather than a lack of execution. A quick and easy way to strategize for social media is to create a Content Calendar.

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What your Content Calendar should do for you:

 

Your content calendar should simplify and streamline your entire social media process. It should be a clipboard for you to copy and paste pre-packaged posts for every platform. Done right, it will also be a great way to schedule new content creation.

 

What you will do for your Content Calendar:

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In reality, creating and managing a content calendar is quite simple. Here are the steps you need to take:

 

   1. Which platforms do you want to post to?​​​​

        - Example: I post to Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn consistently.

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   2. Which days of the week do you want to post?​

        - Example: I post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week.

 

   3. Assign individual content (i.e. photos, video, etc.) to its respective platform​

        - Example: I post stories to Instagram, articles to LinkedIn & FB, etc.

 

   4. Write captions (it’s a lot less frustrating if you do them all at once)

 

How I update my Content Calendar:

 

I plan all of my posts out two weeks at a time. So on June 1st, I will have all of my content planned up until June 14th. This means no more stressful caption writing. No more worrying about when to post. No more frustration about lowered engagement or questioning the importance of your social media posts.

 

Feel free to try out the Content Calendar that I use (from Hootsuite), you can download it here!