Author name: Jessica Perkins

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Maximizing the impact of your social media presence is all about creating compelling content and sharing it with your audience in a consistent, relatable way. If you’re already on top of concepts like how to schedule Tweets and how to add Facebook cover photos that enhance your business in the eyes of followers across the major social media brands, it’s possible to get complacent and assume you’re doing your best already. [playht_player width=”100%” height=”175″ voice=”Mark”] However, the reality is that sometimes there are more fundamental issues at play, determining whether your campaigns fly or fall short. A flawed content calendar is a great example of this; unless you know what to look out for and what pitfalls to avoid, you could be misled into thinking that other elements are to blame if your content doesn’t click with customers. So what are the most common compromises made with content calendars, and how can you remedy issues rather than allowing them to spiral? Dealing with disorder Image Source: Pexels The most obvious example of an imperfect content calendar is one which is put together without any thought going into the overarching structure. This can often come about if you sit down with your team and spitball different ideas, eventually settling on a list of content options which you think will gel well with your brand identity, and be relevant to your followers. Unless you then take the step of working out where the different proposed projects should sit on your schedule, you could succumb to the temptation of ordering them in a way that’s essentially random. Sure, you might get lucky and schedule Tweets on Twitter or Stories on Instagram in a way that works by chance. But it’s just as likely that a disordered, poorly planned content calendar will suffer low levels of engagement. The doubly damaging aspect of this is that randomness in scheduling makes it much harder to glean actionable metrics and insights from the content you post. You won’t know what elements are really impacting performance, and you could learn the wrong lessons. The answer is to reframe how you approach content topic choices in the first place. Don’t brainstorm ideas and try to smash these together with the products and services you want to promote; start from the other direction and use these core elements that make your business propositions unique to inform your content calendar. It might seem like a minor change, but it’s one with major implications, as it will give you more concrete goals, and steer you away from the allure of a scattergun approach to scheduling. Image Source: Pexels Rebalancing your priorities Another issue with content calendars that plenty of brands make is trying to set up different strategies and content streams for each and every platform they occupy. This makes a lot more work for your team, and also means that you aren’t extracting optimal value from the content you conjure up. The fault here is thinking of social media as the main priority in your content creation and scheduling. By doing that, you’ll end up in a never-ending cycle of chasing interactions and trying to achieve perfection, but never reaching it. Once again, all that’s required is a slight adjustment to your perceptions, in this instance relating to the role of social media as a whole. Treat it as a place to showcase your content, but make sure that the content has innate value which isn’t reliant on the particular platform that it’s shared on. You’ll notice that the pieces of content which do best and go viral are those that are impactful and engaging in their own right, regardless of where they appear. As such, your priority should be content quality, not platform-specific posts that are hamstrung by their quirks. Tools like the BeFunky poster generator can help here, of course. You’ll be able to make content that passes muster on all your social feeds, as well as being suitable for your blog and any other platform on which you choose to use it. Another upshot of rebalancing your priorities in this way is that your content calendar should be simplified. Paring back your output so that a smaller number of higher quality posts are pushed out across multiple platforms, rather than having unique offerings across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, will streamline your social efforts significantly. Unifying your marketing output If the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, then a well organized content calendar won’t help much. The problem comes from how modern audiences engage with their favorite brands, because it’s likely that they’ll connect with you through more than one site, service or solution. The people who follow you on social media will also probably be on your mailing list, particularly if they have previously made a purchase and are interested in what your brand has to offer going forward. Thus if you’ve got different team members, or even entirely different departments, dealing with separate aspects of your digital marketing, you have to ensure a degree of unity and coordination between them. For example, having your email marketing campaigns synchronized with your social media publishing schedule is crucial. You don’t want certain people to feel left out by not being kept in the loop on news, updates, product announcements and promotional offers. Likewise you don’t want your content strategy to seem fragmented to those who do engage with your brand in more than one context. Having a content marketing strategy that is based around communication and collaboration between colleagues, as well as a content calendar that is shared and consistent across the board, will save you from this scenario. Resisting the urge to chase trends If you’re able to publish content that’s both relevant to your audience and also taps into the broader zeitgeist, then obviously that’s a good move. However, if this is the lynchpin of your social strategy, then it will do more harm than good. The reason for this is