What are the best practices for creating and managing a social media calendar for SMO?

Most impt part of any social media strategy - You gotta know whom you're talking to! Their demographics, what they care about, pain points, communication style, and how they engage. There are multiple free and paid resources to get this. 1. Social media analytics for your pages/handles: Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, and LinkedIn Analytics. 2. Social listening tools: Some popular social listening tools are Hootsuite Insights, Brandwatch, Mention, and Awario. 3. Gaining Competitor Intelligence: You can use tools like SEMrush, Sprout Social, or Rival IQ to track your competitors' performance, content, and audience. 4. Audience personas: You can create audience personas to represent your ideal customers or followers.

Think about where your clients will be hanging out. If they are creative they may be on Instagram or Snapchat, but more professional business owners will be on LinkedIn. In fact, 85% of all decision-makers are on LinkedIn. But more importantly what platforms do you like? If you cannot get on with a specific platform then why waste time energy and stress trying to make it work. Surely it's better to be a master at one than a jack of all trades and do each platform poorly. Think about the old maxim, an inch wide and a mile deep. People buy from people who they know, like, and trust and the best platform for sharing everything will be LinkedIn because of the way that you have your profile.

The classic content framework of Hero, Hub, and Hygiene still works wonderfully well. 1. HERO: Big, high-impact, attention-grabbing content that dives significant impact. It could be a big campaign or a major event. Frequency - 2 to 3 times a year. 2. HUB: Regular, consistent content that appeals to a brand's core audience and keeps them engaged and coming back for more. Frequency - 2 to 3 times a month. 3. HYGIENE: Hygiene content is everyday content that is essential for maintaining your brand's presence and relevance on social media. Frequency - 2 to 3 times a week. Also, One good content concept can give you multiple pieces of content - Make sure to multiply one concept into various formats/tone/style and use it effectively.

Scheduling your content is a great way to make sure that you are getting your content in front of your audience. But, and this is a HUGE but, if you do choose to schedule your content you MUST be around to engage with your audience. If someone reacts or even better comments then you need to be there to reply. Remember the maxim: "Don't post and ghost" if you are not going to be around when you plan to schedule your content, they don't schedule it for that time. You don't now need to pay for a scheduling tool, many of the platforms now enable you to schedule for FREE - LinkedIn, Twitter and Meta all have scheduling options.

“You can't improve what you don't measure," and that's especially true on social media, where the metrics and feedback can be your roadmap to success. By tracking and analyzing your key metrics, creative assets and communication style, you can identify areas for improvement, refine your strategies and keep getting better. It’s always a good practice to have an A/B testing framework.

Agreeing with all of these statements; variation is key in terms of content itself as well as style of delivery. We need to mix things up to avoid our audience getting content fatigue. It’s important to surprise our audience now and again. Although be careful not to stray too far ‘off piste’ in order not to alienate our audience. A solid knowledge of who our audience is, their desires and needs should prevent this happening. One thing I would add is to repurpose content. Taking a long blog and splitting it into shorter thought leadership pieces is one way of doing this. People don’t always have time to read a long article so splitting one into smaller posts will help us reach a wider audience.