Every B2B company that wishes to have a strong social media profile must create a content calendar. It allows you to centralize and coordinate social media campaigns and avoid mistakes.
Social media calendars can also help you with… You can use social media calendars to help you…
- Brainstorming ideas for content
- Note important milestones for your business
- Plan your company’s events
How do you create a social media calendar? Follow these steps.
Define your target audience and goals.
You need to identify your audience and goals before creating a calendar of social media posts. You want to make sure that the content reaches the right audience, and you publish each position for a specific reason.
You can do this by creating an audience persona, a fictional person that encompasses the basic features of your target audience. Create an audience persona – an imaginary person who contains your audience’s basic characteristics. Decide your persona’s pain points and preferred social media platforms.
Here is an example of B2B personas.
You can more precisely define your social media objectives once you have identified your target audience.
Your ultimate goal is to make money. You shouldn’t make all your posts about sales. Your B2B audience will be turned off.
You can instead set other goals for your social media content, such as increasing email signups or increasing the number of Facebook followers. These goals will still help you achieve your ultimate goal, which is to increase sales.
Decide on your content themes and formats.
After you have clearly defined your B2B content goals and the audience that you want to reach with social media, it is time to create themes that are aligned with these. These themes will guide your social media strategy.
If you are a brand catering to corporate marketers, and your goal is to increase Facebook shares and email signups, then your themes could include…
- Digital Marketing Trends
- Marketers’ Tools
- Digital Marketing Tips
Then, you can decide what content formats to create based on the themes.
Re-evaluate your audience persona. You might create infographics to summarize these trends if you discover that your B2B audience is frequenting LinkedIn and loves learning about digital trends.
You’ll want to decide the specific topics that you will cover using each content format as well as your overarching theme.
You don’t have to worry about topics if you create engaging blog posts. Choose the blog post that has the most engagement and create a post on social media around it.
The company’s post on global Instagram engagement trends attracted a lot of attention. As a result, it published a summary of its Facebook and Instagram pages. Because the B2B audience of these platforms is largely visual, the brand included key takeaways from the post as colorful slides.
It’s also important to include content relevant to company milestones and events. Cience is a B2B Lead Generation Services firm. This example was published the same day as the Inc. 5000 List, which included Science.
Final tip: The topic you select must also fit the format of the content. Instagram Reels and other social media videos are likely to be the best option for content that illustrates processes. Video is a great way to show your B2B audience how to use your email marketing tool.
Plan your publication schedule.
It would be best if you now had a general idea of what content you will publish during a certain period. All you need to do now is plot your publication calendar on a content schedule.
Use any digital calendar you like, including Google Calendar, social media templates, or scheduling apps that have advanced features such as Google Calendar Integration.
Decide on the frequency of postings after choosing your social media calendar. Consider the best practices for each platform if you are beginning your social media marketing. According to Hootsuite, these are the recommended post frequencies for each social network:
- Instagram: 3-5 times per week
- TikTok: 3-5 times per week
- Facebook: 1-2 times per day
- Twitter/X: 2 to 3 times per day
- LinkedIn: 1-2 times per day
- At least once a week, you should be on Pinterest
You can adjust your social media publishing schedule based on the data you collect about your B2B audience.
Assign different content types, formats, and themes to specific days or weeks. This will ensure a balance of content across the calendar. Avoid repetitive content. This will engage your audience and prevent monotony.
Include other members of your social media team in the creation of the content calendar. To improve your social media calendar, encourage feedback, suggestions, and collaborative input.
Promote your social accounts once you’ve finalized your schedule for social media posts.
You can, for example, create a Digital Business Card containing your social media links. Distribute it through your online marketing emails or offline networking events. This two-pronged approach helps you expand your social media audience. It is easy to use the QR code on your e-card to connect recipients with your social media accounts and content.