Your social media marketing goals have a key point in common with many of the other goals in your day planner: they take effort and attention every single day. Not just when you’re feeling inspired (or at 11PM when everything else is taken care of).

Be organized. Maintaining a social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your work, avoid multitasking, and note down all your creative brainwaves for later. Basically it’s the best way to make sure you’ll never find yourself desperately scrolling through generic inspirational quotes hoping to find something to post ever again. And even though you’ll be posting every day, maybe multiple times a day, that doesn’t mean you need to be babysitting your feeds constantly. Certain social media calendar tools allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time, if possible.

Post consistently. Regularly showing up in your audience’s feed is the key to engaging them on social. Impressive engagement increases your organic reach via the platform’s algorithm, so your posts get shown to new eyes, and new people start following your brand. And making genuine connections with a growing audience is the one true path to lifting your conversions. Populating your social media content calendar with posts ahead of time allows you to post consistently whether it’s a slow news week. Planning your posts ahead of time means Copy-editing the text, fact-checking information ahead.

Thoughts for an effective social media calendar:

1. Audit your social networks and content, what is attracting the most attention?
2. Choose your social channels you want to concentrate on
3. Start crafting your posts
4. Review, gather feedback and improve
5. Start publishing/scheduling

Be SMART. Set social media marketing goals that align to business objectives. The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success. Success often includes engagement on your social channels, and driving traffic to your company website. The standard goals are S.M.A.R.T.:

• Specific: Be clear. Does “increase engagement” mean you want 100 new followers or 1,000? Making your social media goals specific helps you track progress and measure success.
• Measurable: Every goal needs some kind of metric,
• Attainable: Your social media goals should absolutely require to outreach , but they should be within reach if you put in the required work.  Suggest goal be add another 400 followers, more product follows
• Relevant: This is the piece that ties your goal-setting back to larger business objectives., understand how that will benefit the business.
• Timely: Deadlines. Include a timeframe for completion of posts. How many posts do you do a week? Static? Live?

Last but not least, get personal and be authentic in everything you do – on social and otherwise.