Your Step-by-Step Guide to Social Media Strategy and Content Calendars

If you want to be a legitimate brand, especially with younger consumer age groups, having active social media accounts is a must. Social media can help with growing brand awareness, building brand loyalty, and driving traffic to your website.  

Like anything, it’s important to do it right. Social media is much more involved than throwing a post up whenever the mood strikes you. To really make an impact, you need a game plan. This is where a social media content calendar and strategy come into play. 

A social media strategy is the foundation for your social media success. It guides who your audience is, what kind of content to create, and what messaging you want to share. Meanwhile, a social media content calendar acts as your roadmap, outlining when and where to share that content. Together, they help brands streamline efforts, maximize engagement, and achieve marketing goals.

How to Create a Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy covers several areas, including:

• Audience research: Understanding who your target audience is, their preferences, and their online behavior.
• Goal-setting: Digging into what you want to achieve with your content, whether it's increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or boosting engagement.
• Content types: Identifying the types of content that resonate with your audience, such as videos, infographics, articles, or stories.
• Content pillars: Pinpointing what 3-5 main categories, or “pillars,” you will focus on when posting. 
• Platforms: Deciding which platforms you will be posting on, the purpose of each platform, and any specific guidelines.

Below are a few pages from our own social media strategy to give you an example. Notice how we break down our content pillars into four sections: culture, education, client work, and community. We also outlined our goals for the year and specific metrics to measure our success. 

This stage involves a ton of research, but it’s so important to make sure you’re being effective on social media — from talking to the right people, to sharing the right type of content, to achieving the goals that matter most to you. 

Typically, we suggest giving your social media strategy a refresh once a year to keep it in sync with your business goals and what’s happening in the market. But don’t stop there! It’s important to tweak it a bit throughout the year, especially when you have new product launches or exciting lines of service to promote. This way, you can stay relevant and connect with your audience in a way that feels fresh and engaging.

Once you have a social media strategy in place, you can move on to creating a social media content calendar!

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

Benefits of a Social Media Content Calendar

A social media content calendar has so many benefits, but here’s some top ways it will help you out: 

• Organization and planning. A content calendar provides structure to your social media efforts. It helps you plan and schedule posts in advance, so you can avoid the stress of scrambling at the last minute. It also makes sure you plan out content that follows your social strategy, including touching on your different content pillars. 
• Consistency and frequency. You hear it all the time in the marketing world, and social media is no different — consistency is key for keeping your audience engaged! A content calendar gives you a regular posting schedule so your audience knows when to expect new content. This frequency helps keep your brand top-of-mind for followers.
• Aligning with marketing goals. By plotting out your content on a calendar, you can make sure your social media efforts are in sync with your larger marketing campaigns and goals. It’s a great way to organize campaign themes and timely posts for what’s happening in the world or within your brand.
• Measuring success. A content calendar also makes it easier to track performance and engagement metrics. By looking at how your posts perform over time, you can see what’s hitting the mark and what’s not. Then you can tweak your strategy based on real data as you go along. 

Steps for Building a Social Media Content Calendar

Here’s the steps we recommend when working to create a social media content calendar: 

1. Use a social media calendar template. Start by choosing a template that works for you. You can create your own or leverage tools like Sprout Social, Asana, or Google Calendar to build it out. A well-organized template will help you visualize your content and streamline your planning process.
2. Select your social media channels and content types. Based on your social media strategy, decide which channels you'll focus on (like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn) and the types of content you'll create (such as images, videos, or stories). It’s good to mix up your different types of content for engagement and test what performs best. Depending on your goals, some platforms you may post more video content, while you share primarily image posts on another.  
3. Define a social media calendar posting schedule. Establish a posting schedule that reflects your social strategy. Determine how often you want to post on each platform and test to see what times are best for reaching your audience. Remember consistency is key, so make sure your schedule is realistic and manageable.
4. Track and analyze your social media content calendar. Once your calendar is in place, it’s time to monitor and make adjustments. Regularly track key performance metrics to see which posts are resonating with your audience. Use this data to refine your strategy and make changes to your content calendar as needed for optimal results. 

Below is a social media content calendar example, courtesy of the team here at Tuuti. As you can see, it outlines post dates, content pillars, content concepts, captions, edited content, and platforms. This content calendar format you can replicate for your own brand. In the long-run, you will want to build out your calendar at least 90 days in advance. 

Final Thoughts

To make an impact on consumers today, your social media accounts need to be on point. Overall, this means being more intentional about when you post, where you post, what type of content, how frequently, and so on. Whether your brand is new to social media, or you’ve been around for years, it’s never too late to dig deep into your social media strategy and calendar. Embrace the process and stay flexible, and you will be amazed to see what happens next! 

Want help developing your social media strategy and calendar? For smaller marketing teams, it can be hard to prioritize the time for a strategy and content calendar when social media often comes as an afterthought. That’s where Tuuti comes in! We create tailored social media strategies and detailed content calendars that your team can easily follow and execute, saving you time while making sure your brand stays consistent and visible on all platforms. Reach out to us to learn more!