How to Plan Your Social Media Content Calendar

Content Creation

Jul 5

How to Plan Your Social Media Content Calendar.

Creating content daily is extremely overwhelming which is why I always like to create in bulk. Batch creating content is going to save you so much time and make you feel much more organized. Basically what you do is block out some time to create a month’s worth of content all at once so you have an idea of what your month is going to look like and you can schedule it out from there. This post I’ll outline how to plan your social media content calendar in one go, as this method has helped me tremendously over the past few years.

Look at the Month as a Whole

You’re going to start off looking at the month as a whole. What are your goals for social media this month? Are you pushing a certain product? Is there a theme to your content this month ( ex. Supporting local, outdoor activities )?

Next, to get the ball rolling check to see if there’s anything special happening this month that could align with your brand and your messaging. For example, days like International Women’s Day, or different holidays, or national donut day… you get the idea.

Create Your Content Buckets

In the next section we’re going to define our content buckets. Ideally this would be the same every month as you don’t want to stray from your niche too much. The content buckets are like the sub-categories of your niche. Just as an example, say your niche is Wellness then your content buckets could be things like:

Mental Health
Healthy Recipes
Beginners Yoga
Motivational Quotes

When you have your buckets set up, then you can decide how many posts you want to create for the month. I always think around 10-15 is a good place to start. This also gives you room for creating content in real time throughout the month if things come up spontaneously.

Let’s say we have decided on 15 posts for the month, then we can break that down into 4 posts per category with one category having 3 posts.

Create Your Content

Now we can move into actually creating the content for our posts. In this interactive PDF I’ve created you can get all your ideas out on paper, and brainstorm any imagery you’ll need to shoot or create. For example if we’re doing the Healthy Recipes bucket we can plan out the 4 healthy recipes we’re sharing this month and what image we need to shoot along with it. This is a great space to write out your caption, your hashtags, and solidify the imagery you’ll need.

The Creation

After you have your plan you can get to creating. I always find it easier to start with your messaging and then create the visuals rather than just creating imagery and then trying to think of something to say. You can create a little list for yourself for the images you need to shoot and what makes sense to create when.

Schedule Out Your Content

Once everything is created you can schedule out your content on whatever tool you like to use. I find it helps to mix up your content buckets when scheduling them out, so post a healthy recipe, then something on mental health, then maybe a quote so you’re getting a nice variety throughout the month.

E xx

Erin Elizabeth