10 Tips To Streamline Social Media Calendar Creation

A social media content calendar is the backbone of any social media strategy. When you have a digital calendar to map out your content planning, campaigns, and publish dates, it's so much easier to bring content efforts to life and build an actively engaged audience for a brand. This is important, because content marketing is a key success factor:

A social content calendar is important for every marketing team, but as an agency, a social media planning calendar for each client is non-negotiable. Without this source of truth, you risk failing to meet the goals you set with your clients or failing to demonstrate the value your agency provides them. 

Let's get into why a dedicated social media content calendar is an essential component of your social collaborations, and 10 tips to streamline the calendar creation process.

Why Your Clients Need a Social Media Calendar

When you're creating a social media strategy or managing social media accounts for a client, a well-planned social media content calendar is a must. A social media calendar helps you maintain a consistent posting schedule, but it also helps you make sense of overlapping marketing campaigns and stay organized across multiple social media platforms. Essentially, a social media calendar brings a method to the madness.

Not only that, but it gives you a fallback, letting you focus on engagement, customer interactions, and timely or trending opportunities for social posts. If your team is set up to post consistently for a client based on your predetermined social media scheduling, it gives you the bandwidth to pursue a stronger online presence for their brand.

These benefits apply to most social media managers, but having a social media content calendar for each client is especially important for agencies. That's because these tools create transparency and become a shared source of truth between your team and your client's team. Without an effective social media calendar in place, clients may begin to feel out of the loop or uncertain of the value your agency is providing for them.

By implementing social media calendars for clients, your agency will be able to:

• Maintain a consistent posting cadence with pre-scheduled posts.

• Create capacity for planning and posting timely, relevant content.

• Give clients visibility into scheduled posts and upcoming content ideas.

• Align each client's social media strategy with their broader objectives.

• Spot and minimize gaps in content planning based on client business goals.

• Simplify collaboration and speed up social media approval processes.

• Optimize your team's time to provide more value to more clients.

In an agency context, your marketing team will be managing multiple social media accounts and social media channels across clients, campaigns, and industries.

Giving each client a dedicated social media calendar is essential to empower their in-house marketing team, demonstrate the value you're bringing to their business, and ultimately, maintain your own team's sanity. It's one more way to future-proof for when you're measuring social media ROI for your client down the line.

What's the best way to go about setting up and building out high-quality content calendars for each of your valued clients? Keep reading for our expert tips!

10 Ways To Create Your Social Media Calendar in Half the Time

Creating a customized social media calendar for each and every one of your clients might sound like a labor-intensive, time-consuming process—but it doesn't have to be. With the right approach and a bit of prep work, you'll be well-equipped to get a new social media calendar up and running quickly for every new client you onboard.

We've rounded up our top 10 tips for better social media calendar management below. Let's jump into it:

1. Set Social Media Marketing Goals Upfront

Before you start spinning up a social media calendar, you need to set clear goals with your client. Understanding their broader marketing strategy and the role social media plays in it will guide your decisions, from which social media platforms to focus on to what types of content to post, posting frequency, and more. More to the point, the goals you set will tether all future discussions you have and decisions you make with your client about their social media efforts.

Start by getting a sense of your client's overall business context and strategy, then dig into the role marketing plays within that. How do their social media marketing efforts fit into that bigger picture? Tie this to tangible outcomes you'd like to see from social media, and use a goal-setting framework like MASTER so they're clearly articulated and you'll be able to measure them in the future.

2. Define Roles and Responsibilities

Defining roles and responsibilities is important for all social media teams, but when you're collaborating in a client-agency context, it's all the more essential. Social media management involves design, content, digital marketing, advertising, and more. Map out the roles both client-side and agency-side that go into bringing the social media content calendar to life. Beyond that, establish the key stakeholders for approvals and strategic direction, and ask your client if there are any other players you should be aware of.

Knowing who's responsible for what will make managing the content calendar much more straightforward, and will help keep expectations clear when it comes time to create content, schedule posts, and monitor social media accounts. 

Decide together who's going to be doing what and consider creating a RACI chart or documenting roles and responsibilities some other way, so you don't end up in a situation down the line where someone's saying "wait, but I thought you were going to do that…".

3. Determine a Posting Schedule for the Content Calendar

Depending on the roles and responsibilities you've defined with a client, coming up with a consistent posting schedule might be something your team does or something handled on their side. Either way, it's an important step to help create the social media content calendar. Knowing how frequently to schedule social posts lets you get ahead and make space for timely opportunities.

When determining a client's social media posting schedule, consider their goals as well as the resources they have available. If they have ambitious goals, you'll need to hit a cadence that will get them there. That said, consistent posting is a lot easier with a solid social media management tool and a dedicated social media manager. Find a balance that's realistic while still being impactful.

4. Research and Plan Social Media Content

No matter how well-planned your social media content calendar is, it won't move the needle if the content doesn't land with the target audience. Getting a feel for what social platforms, post formats, and even times of day will be the best to reach your client's social network helps you come up with better content ideas and craft winning marketing campaigns.

You might run a social media audit to get a sense of what's performed well (and not so well) in the past, or do some competitive analysis against other brands in your client's niche. 

Another great type of research to inform your social media content calendar? Talking to your client's customer base! Here's what David Tubbs, Director of Social and Community Marketing at AgencyAnalytics, had to say:

Data is naturally a powerful source of knowing what works and what doesn’t from the content perspective, so you know what to focus on. However, over the years I’ve found the number one source of content ideas is from your customers. Talking with them, their pain points, their stories, and digging into how your product meets their needs. You cannot and will not produce creative content that stands out while standing in an echo chamber of data.

David Tubbs, Director of Social and Community Marketing, AgencyAnalytics

5. Establish a Social Media Content Review Process

This goes back to the point about roles and responsibilities, but it's also worth noting in its own right. Clarify your workflows for content creation, review, and approval with clients. Determine who will be involved when, who is responsible for what, and who needs to sign-off before publishing. Having these systems in place makes it easier to plan upcoming social media posts and know when you're ready to pick a publish date.

Especially as an external partner, you want to be sure you're dotting your i's and crossing your t's. The last thing you need is a client coming to your team asking for answers about how a post got published and why they weren't consulted. It's better to ask for permission than forgiveness in this scenario, and doing so will help you build trusting long-term partnerships with your clients.

6. Gain Client Approval Early (For Everything)

This tip applies to multiple factors in your social media content calendar. Getting client buy-in and approval early on is key to building a fruitful partnership with less friction and time wasted on both sides. Seek client approval when it comes to the posting schedule you set, the social media calendar tool you want to use, your team's creative assets, which social media networks you'll target, and the social media campaigns you plan to run.

The more work that your team puts into these things before getting it approved by the client, the more you'll have to go back and redo if they veto your choices. Of course, you can't show up empty handed and expect them to make a decision out of thin air, but make sure you're working quickly and iteratively, and bringing in your client for input at regular intervals.

7. Create Social Media Content in Bulk

Social media content creation is the fun part, but your team needs strong systems in place from brainstorming through to quality assurance to keep it efficient. 

Start by setting quotas for different content types, topics you want to cover, and goals that social posts should contribute to. This helps your team stay focused in brainstorming sessions and develop strong concepts that cover all the bases for upcoming posts to slot into your client's social media content calendar. 

Once you have your calendar structure in place based on content type, channel, CTA, and frequency, you can speed up the process by doing bulk content ideation sessions throughout the month. Have you and your team contribute once or twice a month to a running content idea bank that can then be slotted in to fill key needs. These sessions are great to schedule following client meetings.

David Tubbs, Director of Social and Community Marketing, AgencyAnalytics

When it comes time to actually build the creative assets, it's also usually efficient to do that in bulk. Getting ahead by crafting several upcoming posts in one shot saves time in the long run, because your team won't be context switching or squeezing in creating social media posts between other tasks. The same goes for conducting QA and sending them out to your client for approval—a batch is always more efficient than one-offs.

8. Optimize Social Media Content for Each Platform

Your clients will likely be active on multiple social media platforms, and it's important to create content that's tailored to the specific social media channel it's intended for. Every social platform has its own algorithm, best posting times, and the best way to get content performing across multiple social networks is by fine-tuning each post to meet the best practices of that network.

This is another instance where repurposing content is a great content creation method. Optimizing for each platform doesn't have to mean crafting a unique social media post for each and every one—it's about curating the same content across multiple channels. When you're consistently turning one piece of content into several, filling up a social media content calendar is a breeze.

9. Schedule the Content Calendar in Advance

The biggest benefit of having a social media content calendar for your client is that it allows you to schedule posts well in advance. Typically, this is done with the help of a social media management platform, but many platforms also have native scheduling tools built in. Whatever the case, the more lead time your team is able to gain by scheduling ahead, the better.

Scheduling posts not only helps you maintain your social media posting schedule, it also creates that bandwidth for clients to jump on trends, share timely news, and interact with their target audience. Social media presence is so much more than sharing a link every week or two, and when you set as much as possible on autopilot with your content calendar, it opens up opportunities to create a brand that really stands out on social media.

10. Track Social Media Metrics Consistently

As you get a social media calendar up and running for your client, you'll also want to plan ahead for how you'll track it. Monitoring the performance of your social media content calendar is crucial not only to demonstrate the business impact of your client's social media presence, but also the ROI of their engagement with your agency. This means selecting key social media metrics to measure and setting up the tooling you'll need to track them effectively.

While each social media platform offers its own native tracking tools, a reporting platform with a social media reporting tool like AgencyAnalytics goes far beyond their capabilities. The system pulls data from multiple accounts, channels, and clients into a single space. Your team creates an interactive dashboard for each client to track their data in real-time. The customizable social media dashboard displays metrics from Linkedin, YouTube, Facebook, and more.

In addition to the dashboards, automated reporting with a customizable social media report template speeds up your team's process and ensures clients receive regular updates on their social media performance. The tool provides a ton of value to your clients, but also to your team. These insights are a goldmine for improving your client's social media calendar, and a great way to show them that you're serious about data-driven decision making.

Even better? Use the AI features to rapidly surface insights on trends and results. Simply Ask AI or generate an AI summary to speed up your social media reporting process even further.

Want to see how AgencyAnalytics can improve your social media reporting? Try it free for 14 days!

Make Every Social Media Calendar a Success

Social media content calendars are a big help when you're managing campaigns and strategies across social channels. For agencies striving for social media success for several clients, they're a must. 

While it might feel like a big effort to get a new social media content planner up and running, a little bit of foresight goes a long way. One additional tip to consider is to use a social media calendar template to streamline future calendar creation. Building a flexible template that's customizable to the needs of each client will save your team a ton of time in the long run. Whether you build it via a calendar view, or chronologically within a Google sheet, having a reusable social media calendar template is a massive time saver.

Ready to start reporting on your agency’s social media campaign results in as little as 11 seconds? Check out the suite of social media reporting tools available with AgencyAnalytics.