Megan Ingram
November 25, 2020
Planning your content calendar for 2021 can feel like an impossible task. So where do you start? Read my toolkit for how you can start your FY21 planning and still be flexible when uncontrollable factors like COVID and the political environment impact your social calendar:
As you start planning for FY21, take an audit of what was successful in FY20 and what content resonated the best with your audience. In contrast, where did you miss the mark and receive lower engagement? The end of the year is a great time to take inventory of your success and failures. Things to look out for when you review your FY20 content:
• Top and bottom engaging posts
• Content themes that best resonated with followers
• High and low engagement content types (text, link, image, video, stories)
• Brand, influencer, and partner mentions that drove high engagement
• Channels that grew the most
Goal identification is critical when developing any quarterly calendar. What are you trying to achieve? Is it different from the prior year and quarter? Make sure your social goals tie into your business and sales objectives. Objectives you should consider before you start building a content calendar:
• Awareness: We want to make people more aware of our brand
• Engagement: We want to build a community of new and existing audiences
• Nurture: We want to build a relationship with people who already know who we are
• Conversions + Leads: We want to acquire and convert users into leads
• Thought Leadership: We want to show our audience why we are knowledgeable and authoritative on a subject
• Brand Reputation: We want consumers and businesses to trust us
Identify which virtual conferences and events and national months/weeks/days where you'd like to participate quarterly and annually. It’s important to consider relevant events that can help grow your audience no matter which goals you’ve decided upon. Here’s a social media calendar from Socialbakers and a detailed marketing calendar template from Search Engine Journal that can help flex your creative muscles. Build social media ‘events’ into your content planning. Decide which events you want to focus activations and campaigns upon. Also, pre-planning for virtual events will help you get the desired lift you want.
Using relevant hashtags is important to reach your desired audience. This is an exercise you should be doing at least every 6 months to make sure you are using the right hashtags in your social content. Again, the end of the year is a great time to survey your audience and see what hashtags are working the best and what new ones you can add into the mix. Hashtags can be very trendy, and top terms can change often. You’ll want to make sure you continue to use the best mix of high-performing hashtags to improve the chances of your desired audience seeing your post.
Now you can start building out your 2021 content calendar. In this environment, I’d recommend doing this quarterly and typically 6 weeks before the start of the quarter, which is why now is a great time to be thinking about your Q1 2021 content calendar. You’ll want to decide on the right tools. Here is a list of common social media tools that are used to help plan and schedule your social media calendar. My personal favorite is Airtable, but pick a tool that works best for you. When planning your content, there a few different questions to keep in mind:
• What are our content themes? (identify 3-5 key content categories to consistently post)
• Which channels do we want to post? (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn)
• How often do we want to post? (2-3x week, daily, 3-5x per day)
• What type of content should we post? (video, image, stories, reels)
• What does our creative production look like? (loop in designers, producers, and copywriters)
Hint: Twitter’s a month of tweet ideas can help jumpstart your creative brainstorm and you might find some new content types you hadn’t thought about yet.
Find me on social for more about digital, freelance, and work from anywhere: @thedataoutlier.
November 25, 2020
