Having a successful social media presence isn’t all just about pretty pictures and cute captions. WHEN you post is just as critical as WHAT you post. Why? Well, you want your post to be seen, don’t you?
There are obvious dates that you should be posting, like holidays or important milestone days, and there are days and even specific times where your particular audience is most active and likely to see your content. To best target your audience, you can use the Insights feature on Facebook, or the Analytics feature on scheduling services like Later.com to hone in on what should be your optimal days and times to post.
Posting schedules can also be in the form of daily themes, which help you be more consistent about engaging with your audience just as much as it can help your audience anticipate things like “Trivia Tuesday” or “Feature Friday.” This will also help you avoid flooding your feed with too much similar content in a close range of time. Daily theme options can be trendy, like featuring a new taco for “Taco Tuesday” for a restaurant page, or they can be more behind the scenes themes like “What’s Happening? Wednesdays” where you share news relevant to your business. Think of it like “Marie Kondo-ing” your social feed!
In between those daily themes, be sure to incorporate current trends. In short, if you’ve seen it, try it. For example, when Instagram Story surveys burst onto your screens during the beginning of social-distancing and quarantine, that is a perfect situation to create one inspired by your product or service because of the interactive quality where the audience gets to share an opinion and the potential for great reach after it is reposted and more audience members are tagged. Staying active with trends like this one show your audience that there’s a human behind your platform, and breaks up the daily theme content that is designed to be the predictable aspect of your social media presence.
After you have had at least a full month of practice with your content calendar, our best advice is to take a few minutes to reflect back. What posts were most successful? What posts didn’t really make a splash? Once you’ve established your hits, what was it that made it a hit? Was it an interactive quality, an attention-grabbing photo, or a stimulating question? Take this information, and do it again!
We are asked many times about creating a gallery-quality Instagram grid. While this is a fun and yes – pretty - way to incorporate a content calendar, it also assumes people view your Instagram grid a lot more frequently than they probably do, so if you’re already a pro at dropping content like Lizzo drops beats, you go for that puzzle or rainbow layout! But, if you’re a beginner when it comes to the ‘Gram, establish your posting schedule and take your time coming up with a grid theme – for now, pretty pictures will do just fine!