Top reasons to use a social media content calendar

In this article we are going to look at the benefits of using a social media content calendar. Why you should use one to manage multiple social media clients for your agency. Reading through this article will give you a good understanding of the benefits, and the best way to use it for you agency.

Why do you need a social media content calendar?

Instead of manually struggling to figure out how to document everything on your content calendar, I hope this article shows you the benefits, so that you begin using one for your agency.

Helps with scaling: If you are growing your social media agency and have multiple clients, and more than 2-3 employees you really should get a system in place before you do any more expanding.

Avoid repetitive tasks: Most of your clients will require social media posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram - and you will save a lot of time avoiding repetitive tasks, and copying over the same tasks for each client, for each calendar.

Professional: Using a good social media calendar shows your client that you are a professional, and that you have proper systems in place.

One-place for your client assets: While working with clients, you need a central place for employees to be able to access the client's assets and data. You could use email, but it quickly becomes impossible to manage when you have multiple clients.

Content strategy: Before creating social media posts for your clients, you need to know the tone, style for each client. What hashtags to use. What captions to use. How many posts you need to publish every month. On what platforms. Is the client more focussed on LinkedIn, rather than Facebook. What topics are important. What tags to include. What is the most efficient way to manage this? For each client, how do you quickly go from planning -> creating -> scheduling? Where does all this live? All this can be simplified when you use a content calendar.

Track client approvals: You can use the calendar to not only plan your content strategy, but to also get approvals for content from clients. Clients can comment on content pieces directly, so that everyone is aware when something is approved.

Sharing draft/approval posts: A content calendar gives you the ability to quickly share the ideas with clients. Multiple people can comment and access it easily.

Tracking work: A content calendar quickly gives you a birds eye view of the campaigns running on any day/week/month. As a small business owner, you can use emails + dropbox - but it will quickly become hard to manage. How do you know what content is planned for the entire month? Can you and your clients quickly see all this?

If you are just starting out, and doing the social media only for your business - maybe you do not need to over optimize right away. You can just create posts, and keep them in LinkedIn schedule drafts. For a single brand, I personally wouldn’t over optimize. I would just create my posts, and keep them in drafts, and then publish when ready. But as you grow, a content calendar is great for keeping everything in one place. It keeps you and your team out of emails all day. You content strategy is not all over the place.

In the next article we will look at how you can create your own social media content calendar template for your agency.