Jared Lamoreaux – Lava Surf

Creating an Effective Content Calendar

Your heart is beating, your palms are sweaty, and the clock on your desk seems to be ticking louder than normal. You need to produce an engaging social media post for your company today but your busload of ideas stalled during your lunch break.

Nothing is more stressful than not being ready for an approaching deadline. What can save you from the glaring eyes of your boss?

An effective content calendar will help alleviate this stress from your life. Having a plan long before the deadline is something that we all strive to do but have difficulty keeping up on.

Facebook recently came out with a new Facebook Blueprints course to help social media marketers create and manage a content calendar. So, just what should you do to create a content calendar that will allow you to avoid the piercing stare of your boss?

Know your audience

You should do some research to understand a few questions about the audience and intended audience of your social media accounts including:

Who your audience is and what they are interested in
When your audience is engaging with social media posts and on which platforms
How often your audience likes to see posts from businesses
What types of posts they tend to engage with

The answers to these questions vary depending on your business and the kind of people you want to target. Since no two businesses are the same, it is up to each business individually to research and experiment with these questions.

Your social media posts should focus on the intersection of the type of content your customers enjoy and the topics that are related and relevant to your business. Experiment with your posts to find that sweet spot.

Organize your ideas

When you understand your audience better, you can now start constructing a content calendar. You can use programs like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, or any other program that can create a table with rows and columns. Facebook offers a downloadable template that can help you get started.

Facebook suggests that there are 6 pieces of information that is needed in an effective content calendar. They are:

Date
Theme
Caption
Visual Description
Format
Platform

In deciding what content to use, it is recommended that you use a healthy mixture of content including curated, original and promotional content. Your audience will not like it if you talk about yourself all of the time. Put yourself in their shoes and be someone they can trust.

Remember that this is only a suggestion. Feel free to customize your content calendar by adding or taking away information so that your company can get exactly what it needs. The idea is to put down as much information as you need to make the creating and scheduling portion of your job easier.

Impress your boss

When you organize your ideas in a content calendar, you will have a great guide that you can lean on through the content creation process. It will give you enough time to efficiently create your engaging posts that will impress your superiors and your target audience.

You should have at least one month worth of content planned out the month before. That means that if it is June, you should have your content for July planned out on your content calendar. This does not mean that your ideas are complete and solid. Don’t be afraid to change your ideas if it doesn’t turn out to be what you want. Thinking a month ahead will give you enough time to get your best ideas out there.

An effective content calendar will ensure that your content goes out on time and will get rid of the stress of your boss breathing down your neck as the deadline approaches.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a whole month planned out right away. Start small and work little by little until you get to the point where you are able to regularly update your content calendar.

When you share engaging and interesting content consistently, people are more likely to have you in mind when they are in need of the services you provide. An effective, well-managed content calendar is one of the first steps in establishing these brand-to-consumer relationships that lead to business success.

Social media monitoring: the systematic process for understanding, analyzing, and reporting insights and conversations on reputation, brand position, community health, and opinion of key audience members virtually. It is looking to the past, gathering information, focusing on details and measuring success. Monitoring is goal-centered, using the insights learned to achieve business and communication goals. It is essential for your business’ social media success.

Why is Social Media Marketing Important?

As social media is becoming more and more popular in the world, the need to be actively engaged on social media becomes more and more essential. Your influence through social media, whether positive or negative, is expanded because of social media.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com said, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

Shares, retweets, reposts and the like make it so that anything said on social media spreads like wildfire. People follow business pages and use review sites to gauge where they want to spend their money. In fact, the Consumerist says that 70% of consumers rely on online reviews before making a purc hase and the younger the consumer, the more they rely on reviews. Businesses need to know what their customers are saying on the internet in order to survive in this world of social media.

How can Social Media Monitoring Help Your Business?

Clearly social media monitoring is vitally important to maintaining your business’ brand image and reputation. Let’s dive into more ways that monitoring can help your business.

1) Monitoring helps you identify the overall responses audience members give you for your content.

You can learn when they are active, what type of content they are sharing, how they are mentioning you during specific times and on which platforms, and how this compares to competing accounts. These measurements are fluid, meaning that as the audience grows or shifts, these measurements have to constantly be reevaluated.

2) Monitoring helps you understand your audiences and what they are responding to the most. It can help you change your strategies to fit what the customers want in a timely manner.

A few years ago, Barclays, a financial services company, launched a mobile banking application called PingIt which allowed Barclays account holders to transfer money to other accounts. Through social media monitoring they were able to see that there were many users that showed negative sentiment towards the app.

Many were unhappy that the app didn’t work for customers under 18 years of age. Barclays quickly saw that this was a trend and were able to make changes to allow younger account holders to have access to the app. After the change, sentiment analysis showed that feedback towards the app improved quickly. This is a good example of how social media monitoring can save businesses from making decisions that could hurt them.

3) Monitoring helps you turn unhappy customers into loyal customers through proactive monitoring, interactions and relationship management practices.

This might be the most important aspect of social media monitoring because it involves direct and timely communication with individuals in your target audience. As Jeff Bezos said in the quote above, it is crucial to make this interaction with unhappy customers a positive one because the influence of a positive experience can reach thousands of people.

Quick response times, personalized messages and genuine concern for customer’s well-being is the most important thing when dealing with unhappy customers on social media. Social media monitoring is how you can be proactive in addressing their concerns.

Here is a great guide in how to handle customer complaints on social media.

How Lava Surf Helps You Monitor Your Social Media Platforms

Monitoring gets especially difficult if your brand has multiple locations and social media accounts. Lava Surf’s unique multi-location platform provides multi-unit brands tools to monitor, track and organize all of its social media needs from a central location. Lava Surf’s platform makes it easy for your internal team to manage any number of pages across multiple social platforms saving you time and money.

Not only do you have to monitor what people are saying to you, you have to monitor what people are saying about you, even without a specific mention. In fact, about 30% of all tweets mentioning your company does not include your Twitter handle. This is where Lava Surf can help you monitor efficiently by giving you a platform where you can track any kind of mention your company gets, which in turn helps you answer these customer’s concerns, complaints or compliments. Social media monitoring tools like Lava Surf is essential to your business’ social media success.

Author: Jared Lamoreaux

Why Your Business Needs to Monitor Social Media

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