How To Create Social Media Marketing Calendar

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I want to start showing you how I'm going to fill out my social media calendar this video is brought to you by Appy Pie’s Academy now for you I'm gonna give you a template a totally blank template that you can use in Google Docs so that you can fill it out for your own business for you it will look like this it will be named social media marketing calendar for students I'm gonna say share and I'm going to give this link that you can view I'm gonna copy this link and you're gonna find this link in the resources of this video so you can go to this link this is Google Docs everybody who has Gmail has access to Google Docs in case you're not sure how to get here you basically go to Google you go to these little boxes here and go to drive this is where your Google Docs will be and then after that you will have all your items right once you're logged in here you can just paste this URL into your browser and you'll be set you'll have that template open for you once this template is open for you here's what you do you go file and then you make a copy make your own copy don't use this one because I'm gonna make this one not editable so that other students can reference it but you make your own copy and then you fill out that copy and that copy you use for your social media calendar planning now that you know how to get there and how to get it for yourself how to get a blank template let's walk through what I did here so you understand what's going on first of all you see on top of the first row Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday okay it's every week and then you have the second row is the first week third row is the second week fourth row is the fourth third week and then you have so on and so on we're gonna do this for four weeks so it's a really a 28-day calendar what do you do with the other couple of days in a month you can treat it as a Monday Tuesday Wednesday.

It doesn't matter then the other question is well what happens if you don't start the month on a Monday there's always that weirdness with calendars it got weird overlaps so that's why I would just I dear to this and state two-month stay with Monday Tuesday Wednesday because for most businesses during most months other than like end-of-the-year or major holidays for most businesses for most months its the weekly calendar that's the most important because everything happens kind of in a week right like maybe for example the weekend days are slow for most businesses but like Monday Tuesday Wednesday are the busiest Friday is kind of like where you get things you know kind of wrapped up so there's like a weekly cadence to a lot of business and how they work and the weeks accumulated into a month so I would recommend actually for being more organized I would recommend doing it out of like a 28-day pace so now we understand the date and if you really it's confusing you can like label at like the first okay so that way you know the second you don't have to do it that way but if it's helpful for you but then certainly do that this way it would be a little cleaner looking so like instead of here I would say instead of Monday obviously I would say it would be the eighth and so on and so on this is just a formality and formal detail doesn't particularly matter what does matter how do you spread your social postings throughout the day let's take a look at my Monday so I've got I write 30 minutes of content I maybe tweet and instead of tweet I would actually maybe change this to create photo post that means it's something you can post on Instagram on Facebook and on Twitter you can create it in the morning like you see here I start early because I don't want the social media to interfere with my main work that day so I started a little early which is actually not a bad thing at all start early maybe write a little bit that takes 30 minutes create your social media post not necessarily post it but just create the content because you don't want to post that post in the morning because everybody who's your audience is sleeping so you don't want to post it there and in my case I allocated a lot of time for iOS app development so this is something I do on Mondays it's not a high priority for me but I give it a couple hours a week and then writing 30 minutes of content might not equate to a full blog post so I'm not gonna necessarily post that here but I am going to use this and during my breaks throughout the day I'm going to post it and obviously the best times to post usually are around the afternoon if your audience is local that makes things easy for you because you're just posting during the afternoon maybe 2 p.m. or something like that but if your audience is global then you want to post at a time where most of your audience is awake like I'm on us Eastern Time and I know that if I post something in the afternoon my time then people on the west coast for them it's 9 a.m. so a little early but they are awake in Europe it's 6 p.m. and in a place like India it's midnight so I'm still catching the people in India and Asia so they're still kind of going to sleep some of them are still awake but I am capturing all of Europe all of United States all of South America you see so at least I know they're gonna be awake at that time so you kind of do the math according to where you are and what time allows you to capture most of your audience and so what I would say is here is instead of like 6:00 a.m. I would post but then what I would do is like maybe make the post at noon or 1:00 p.m. or really any time not in a strict manner but like any time around that time when I need a little distraction I need a little break.

That's good if you wanted it what you don't want to do is have that posting interrupt something important you're doing like a meeting like an intense focus session like an intense work session that's where you really don't want to have that interrupted and you don't want the social posting to be the focal point of your workday you want to just seamlessly do it at a break so it doesn't really kill any of your time so you're pretty much done you wrote some content you created a post on Twitter and you can consider yourself done if you have a little bit more time you can devote to it like here you can maybe record a video or plan a video it doesn't matter now Tuesday so on Tuesday it's kind of similar right like start at 6:00 a.m. work on YouTube and this is basically related to these these two are related to YouTube notice there's nothing that is talking about writing a post and then you would eventually post this on social platforms and in my case this is just specific to me I have 79 I work on Android app C Monday do iOS apps Tuesday I do Android apps that doesn't have to apply in your case now Wednesday something else Wednesday I might do a live session and notice Wednesday is that really simple the live session is all I'm doing because they can be a little longer they can be a more time consuming you can think of live sessions as an opportunity to sell an opportunity to engage because you're there in person it's the easiest way to sell it's kind of like a webinar format in some sense it's not a strict webinar but this is where you get your audience to engage much further then on Thursday maybe you do some more writing you see I don't have the apps development work so I touch them a little bit more free and then maybe you can devote a little less time to social media and Friday you might use Friday to like learn right so for example here Friday for me it's the 4th and then what I'm gonna do on Friday is I might just say ok all I'm doing in Friday is I'm playing around with tick-tock so why am i giving myself a whole hour to play around with Tic Tac precisely because I'm not comfortable using it right now ok and what that may be whatever you're not comfortable if you're not comfortable making videos you're not comfortable creating photos ok you can give yourself instead of six to seven six to eight okay or you can do this on the weekend weekend is actually good to do things that you don't have pressure to do on Saturday I got okay I'm gonna prepare posts for next week but maybe I can slow down on my post and instead of that I can say okay just make a to-do list for myself play around with tic toc and you see if I do this a few weeks in a row like that so you see I have a fifteenth 1219 every basically and I can do this both weekend days I just don't have to write that but I could so I could actually duplicate that.

Basically what it's gonna happen at the end of this month yes what I'm gonna be quite good with tic toc because you know what at the end of the day none of these tic tacs or instagrams they're not complicated or sophisticated it's an issue of feeling kind of self-conscious feeling silly using them feeling like everybody else knows how to do it except you so it's a low confidence issue how do you fight low confidence issues just do it get help from others get advice watch tutorials okay that's why we're allocating time you see here I a located two hours because if you allocate a short time to it because you think oh people do it quickly and it doesn't take a lot of time yeah like once they're good and they're proficient with it but since you're not proficient with it you just need to give yourself time so you're comfortable if you hurt yourself you will just get stressed out it would be a miserable experience you'll get angry and you're not gonna come back to it because you hate tick tock but you should not tie tick tock because all it is is just a mismatch of the amount of time you gave it a mismatch of expectation to reality but this way you'll be able to tackle it no problem and in a month or so you'll be quite good at it and if you really struggle just get somebody on line or somebody you know to spend 30 minutes for you to show you how to do it to help you with a few original post you can even pay them a little bit because that's gonna get you going and it's gonna make you very proficient with it otherwise you're gonna spend months and months and sometimes years people do that wondering hmm well I really should have and I tried before but again I know I gave it a half effort and now I'm I tried it again and I gave it a half effort again but sticking to a schedule and allocating enough time will help you overcome that hurdle once and for all and then you'll think like oh my god it's so silly it's so easy and it's like that now with Tic Tac 10 years ago it was like that with Twitter it's always like that with something new but it doesn't have to be and then what you would do is plan out all your days and they're actually gonna be quite similar that's the ironic thing right like you do this Monday on the 8th you do a lot of things extremely similarly and you just get into a groove a pattern you wake up early you bang out your social media post he posted a little later you were done and guess what happens it becomes enjoyable once you become good at it and once you become good at it it's enjoyable you're going to be able to add flair to your social postings you're gonna be able to use better images more fun things add more humor be more educational everything use better hashtag is everything everything everything don't think you're gonna be great at it in the beginning in the beginning if this is your first month make the goal just to post regularly if you still have like only two followers it's okay cuz this was a learning month next month you posting comfortable eating that not then you're learning okay then you make the goal I'm posting comfortably how do I grow and you really just grow with the quality of the content that you're posting so then you focus on okay I need to post better content I need to make it more shareable I need to find a way to funnel an initial set of people into my social accounts so that they can be the ones to share retweet and give me that social proof so that others can join and so on and so on but that's the next step don't worry about that now if you are just starting out so that's essentially how to think through your social media marketing calendar so that it's not a big headache it's not a big distraction and you're regularly posting quite prolifically actually right this is a really good place to be.