To be an effective marketer, you need to be a storyteller, a strategist, a researcher, and a data analyst all in one. With so much to do and so much on your plate, it can be hard to keep things together. As social media becomes a more powerful tool for reaching the public, there is another layer altogether of what a marketer must master and understand to be successful. That is why learning how to master a social media marketing calendar, especially for your Twitter marketing, becomes so important.
With older, traditional marketing platforms like print, television, and radio, keeping to a schedule was simpler. You created the advertisement, and you had a certain deadline for it to air or print on a certain day. Your ad sets were limited, since you couldn’t create an entire radio ad for every single day, for example.
With social media sites like Twitter, marketing and brand awareness is happening every day, and potentially reaching millions of people. That means being constantly on your game and understanding what people are talking about, and leveraging what is happening now to get your voice heard.
How do you keep it all together without getting left behind or lost in the daily churn of the internet?
A social media marketing calendar for Twitter might be just what you need to keep yourself on track to putting out quality content on a daily, or almost daily basis. You are probably familiar with what a social media marketing calendar is, but how can it specifically make your Twitter marketing more effective? Glad you asked.
Social Media Marketing Calendar 101
The name pretty much gives it away. A social media marketing calendar is a calendar that tracks all of the relevant events in a year for your social media marketing campaigns. It is the manifestation of your social media marketing strategy laid out as a timeline for everyone on your team to see. You can log important dates, deadlines, and other important information to keep you on task all year-round.
Before creating your calendar, you will need to strategize and come up with your priorities for the year. How often are you going to create content? When are you going to ramp up marketing efforts? What types of campaigns or content do you want to run? Answers to these questions help to guide your efforts during the year and keep you on task and focused.
Twitter Marketing
As mentioned, Twitter marketing is a different beast than traditional marketing and is unique within the realm of social media marketing. It requires daily effort and attention to raise awareness and grow your brand. Twitter is only effective as a marketing tool if you are posting regularly because if you aren’t, you will lose followers, or at least not gain any in significant enough numbers.
You need to have your voice out there. To do this successfully, you need to have an idea of not just what people are talking about at the moment, but what they will be talking about in the year to come. You don’t want to always be reactive to what’s happening in the Twitter universe. You want to predict what the conversations will be so that you can plan what your contribution is going to be. That means having content prepared for certain events and days that will make a mark with the buying public.
How do you do this? How do you predict what people will be talking about? You use a social media marketing calendar, of course.
Every year, Twitter releases its own calendar of events that outlines what will be happening in the coming year. These events can range from movie release dates to sporting events, to certain special days of the year, such as National Best Friends Day, or Pepperoni Pizza Day. Twitter knows how much users generally talk about those subjects and interact with related tweets, so they can give you a general idea of how much traction you can get by tailoring your content to those special events.
Here is how you can get the most out of your social media marketing calendar for Twitter.
Be Consistent
In order to grow a following, the first step is going to be consistent effort. Period.
Next, you’ll want to focus on quality.
If your Twitter content is stale, you will not provide an engaging experience for potential customers.
There is also an aspect of training your followers. If they know to expect some sort of content from you every day or at least on a consistent basis, then they will be more likely to engage and trust that content.
With a social media marketing calendar, you can schedule tweets in advance so that you will not miss opportunities throughout the year. Plus, if a day gets hectic and you lose track of things, you will have something ready to go that will post no matter what your situation is.
Mix Things Up
Creating an engaging and interesting experience for your followers means you can’t be boring. If you are only posting your promotions and sales, then you are not just boring but also probably annoying, too. Users don’t just want to see posts asking them to buy things, even if it’s a great deal.
Following the 80/20 rule can help with this. In this context, the guideline refers to making 80% of your posts interesting or fun. This can be pictures, infographics, or even articles relating to your industry. The other 20% can be posts about sales and promotions. The reason for this is that the 80% of posts that are of interest to your followers will not just engage them, but they will build trust as well.
By building trust, they will then be more likely to click when you ask them to “buy now” or “join our mailing list.” Using a social media marketing calendar will allow you to better manage your post mix to make sure that you are following the 80/20 rule or whatever ratio works best for you. This is harder to do when you are being reactive in your scheduling, rather than being proactive.
Stick To Deadlines
It’s one thing to know that you need to deliver a certain campaign or campaign piece by a certain date, but all campaigns, whether Twitter or otherwise, are created in parts that make a whole. If you haven’t scheduled when you need to complete those parts, there’s a good chance you’ll end up rushing at the end, which will make things unbalanced.
For example, if you want to send a series of tweets leading up to a sales pitch, you may want to spread them out. If you are stuck rushing near the end, then you’ll end up cramming those tweets together in close succession, which could dampen their effectiveness. With a social media marketing calendar, you can look at the time you have well before the deadline to make sure that you have an appropriate schedule for your tweets relating to that campaign.
Collaborate
You may be a small shop, or you may be part of a large business with a hundred or more employees. In either case, you probably want to share what you’re doing.
In a small business, there can be a tendency for jack-of-all-trades people to do everything themselves and work in isolation. However, even if you generally work on your own, you can still take advantage of collaboration, especially when it comes to creative endeavors, like putting together a campaign that involves Twitter.
With a social media marketing calendar, you can share it with others who can provide feedback. This might be with a formal partner, like consultants, or creative partnerships, or even with your spouse for a fresh set of eyes. Collaboration through the cloud makes it so much easier to work with others since it doesn’t involve emailing back and forth or even having a meeting in-person during busy workdays.
Track Your Results
With any campaign, you are looking for return on investment (ROI). A social media marketing calendar will have a record of when you posted everything that’s been put on your account. You can easily track which posts, whether sales or otherwise, drew visitors to your site.
Did you notice that your sales went up during a certain month?
You can cross-reference to see what kind of posts you put up during that period of time and whether those posts may have had an impact. It can be hard and time-consuming to search back through your Twitter feed to find certain posts, but a calendar will make it less daunting.
Customization
The fact is, a calendar is only useful if you actually use it. That’s why it’s important to make it work for you and your business.
If you download or purchase a social media marketing calendar, make sure that you can customize it so that you find it easy to use and intuitive for how you work. It could be small things, such as the view options from which you can choose, or it could be larger things, like the structure of your campaigns and how easy it is to search through them. Do not try to alter your preferences to meet your calendar. Alter the calendar so that it meets your preferences.
Conclusion: A Social Media Marketing Calendar is Critical for Your Twitter Success
As much as you need creativity, intuition, and an ability to adapt to be an effective marketer, you also need structure and strategy to make sure things work well. If you are not organized, then your campaigns could end up being scattershot and ultimately not effective.
Use a social media marketing calendar to help with your Twitter marketing efforts to be as successful as possible and take advantage of the massive marketing opportunities the platform can offer.