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Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

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Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

Read time 12 min read
Get the Most Out of Your 2020 Social Media Calendar

Test your website’s SEO and social media score in 60 seconds! Diib is one of the best SEO and social media monitoring tools in the world. Diib syncs to Facebook and Google Analytics and uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your social media traffic and SEO rankings.

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Easy-to-use automated social media + SEO tool

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Automated ideas to improve Social Media traffic + sales

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Keyword and backlink monitoring + ideas

Have you ever noticed that some businesses seem to manage social media marketing with ease? Anyone who has ever tried to run a business account knows that it can feel like you’re running in circles. 

The difference between the marketers who manage to post consistently with quality content that aligns with their brand, and those who struggle to figure out what or when to post, is all about organization. This is where a 2021 social media calendar can make a true difference. 

That may sound like an oversimplification, but once you learn how to get the most out of your social media calendar, you can see the difference it makes. 

What Is A Social Media Calendar 2021

Yes, we are discussing how to set up a 2021 social calendar, which means a calendar for an entire year, or however much is left of your year. 

This may sound too big, especially if you have a difficult time scheduling posts for an entire week right now, but we’ll get into the benefits of building a year long calendar down below. 

So what will your finished media calendar 2021 look like? It will include planned posts, complete with links, photos, videos, or other media. It will include the platform the post will be posted to and the date and time it will be posted. It may include ideas for posts that haven’t been created yet, as well as dates for when those posts should be created by. For example:

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

(Image Credit: Conversion Minded)

Think of your yearlong social media calendar as a tool that makes the marketing magic happen. 

Benefits Of Having A Yearlong Social Marketing Calendar

Every business owner today will be told they need to be on social media. This isn’t a secret. It is now a customer’s expectation that they’ll be able to find and message you on the major platforms. It counts as social proof for your business. 

Unfortunately, while it’s easy to start accounts, social media turns into a time suck for many early social marketers. 

A lot of marketers will sign up for the platforms and throw up some memes every once in a while, that’s not really taking advantage of the full benefits of what social can do for connecting with an audience and building a brand. 

To do social media marketing well requires a plan.

A calendar can improve efficiency and build better strategies for your campaigns–when done well. So what does doing well look like?

The benefits of a great social 2021 social calendar look like:

  • Saving time
  • Having content ready to go
  • Efficiency – in quality of posting and time spent creating content
  • Organization
  • Strategic posts with improved results over time
  • Gain and retain new followers
  • Build brand recognition
  • Consistency in posting builds trust
  • Better post quality
  • You’ll have a clear view of your social strategy across platforms

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What To Include In Your Calendar Social Media 2021

What do you include in your calendar? While this list will go over what is generally needed, do think about whether there is anything else you may uniquely need for how you run your accounts. The question to ask here is: “What will I need when it comes time to post?”

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For one thing, you will have needed to have created the post already. For this reason, you’ll want to put deadlines for content creation on your calendar. Do you need to gather pictures? Do you need to create video? Will you be releasing samples from your podcast? Do you need to do any research? All of this takes time. Sometimes, it takes more time than you think it will. For this reason, it is good to have posts already prepared at least a few days before posting, though many people find it valuable to prepare content a week or more in advance. Being a little ahead in content creation gives you room in case anything unexpected happens, which over the course of an entire year, things will happen. 

Other important content for your calendar includes:

  • Posting dates
  • Holidays
  • Special events in your industry
  • Special events for your business
  • Posting times for best results on the platform (The image below shows Diib’s social media tool that will help you figure out the best times to post)
  • Where you’ll be posting the content

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

Things To Be Careful Of With Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

While it may seem like one of the benefits for doing this may be that you can simply set your social posts up and then forget them, that would actually not be a good marketing strategy, especially with how customer expectations have evolved today. 

In recent years, it has been observed that brands increasingly were expected to be more timely. For example, a brand could have scheduled a post that went up automatically, at the same time that trending across the social networks was news of a major, tragic event. The brand’s scheduled post was a self-promo post, or a funny joke. 

There was a time when businesses were excused from this type of posting behavior, but over the years it has been increasingly seen as being in poor taste. 

In 2021, this has evolved to the next step. Not only is it bad taste for a previously scheduled post to go up during an inappropriate time, but brands are often expected to weigh in on current events. While every business will need to decide for themselves how to handle this growing customer expectation, it makes it all the more noticable if your brand posts something that is untimely because the post was previously scheduled. 

Your social feed for your business is no longer treated as something that stands on its own to represent your brand. It is now seen as part of the community on these platforms. Instead of considering your post as a billboard, think of your post as something you’re saying when you enter a room where conversations are already happening. 

What does this mean for your calendar social media 2021 plans? It means that you need to keep an eye on what is trending and happening on social media on a day to day basis. You will schedule your posts on your calendar so you always have content ready to go and as part of your overall strategy. However, once you see what is happening on social media that day, you will need to make a decision at that moment on whether your content still feels appropriate as part of the conversation. If not, that’s okay! You can save the content you created for another day. 

Your calendar is going to create brand consistency, posting consistency, save you time, and keep you organized. But it is not set in stone, and it would be a mistake to treat it that way. You can always make adjustments as the year progresses to what seems most useful for your overall marketing goals.

How To Determine What Type Of Content To Post

This is a major part of creating your calendar. If you feel lost about what to post, you are not alone. Trust that you can figure it out. 

  • Brand: The first thing to keep in mind is your brand. What type of tone does your brand set? What do you offer your customers? Your social media content should live up to those same values. 
  • Analytics: From here, it’s time to look at your analytics. Your analytics will prove to be a valuable tool in deciding what to post and how to optimize for the best results. This is where you will learn what your audience really likes to hear from you. You can use the analytics that are built into your social network or consult a social media tool for more data. For example:

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

  • What has worked?: What has your audience engaged with? It can be useful to separate out what content has been your best performing pieces and what has been your worst. 

Now, when looking at your best and worst performers, keep in mind that it may not always be the content itself. You need to look closer to see what you can learn from this information. 

  • Demographics: For example, were your best posts all scheduled on similar days and times? Were your worst posts text posts? Do you get your best engagement on certain topics? Does asking questions help? Does your audience love when you play games in the comment section? Did you use certain hashtags on those posts?
  • Look to past success: You want to post more content that rings the same bells for your audience as your previous top performing content has done. To really do that, you’ll need to make sure you’re clear on the patterns for what it was about those posts that resonated with your audience. 

Keep in mind that you’ll want to do this separately for each social network you’re on. Your audience on Twitter will likely resonate with different content than Facebook. It may make sense for your account on Twitter to share brief facts or ask silly questions, while your Facebook audience wants to see videos in the five to ten minute range. Find what resonates with your audience on each network and then give them more of that.

Choosing When To Schedule Posts On Your Media Calendar 2021 

One part of deciding when to post will be checking your analytics and reviewing your best days and times for each platform. This may be a range and may also require you to do some experimentation. It’s best not to assume you know when will work best for your audience, especially since this can vary from industry to industry. 

It’s also worth noting that as more people begin working remotely, their daily schedules will change. This means that their normal times for checking social media have been adjusted. If you look at suggestions for 2019 posting times, even for your industry per platform, that data may be outdated. Experimenting, and keeping up with your analytics, will help you optimize for the best results. 

Do not treat every platform the same. The recommended posting frequency on Facebook is very different from Twitter. Pinterest in particular gets very different results, as many top accounts may pin more than twenty times a day there to great results. If you posted on Facebook twenty times a day, your audience would likely unfollow you. 

Once you have a general idea of days of the week and posting times that do well with your audience, it’s time to move on to looking at the year:

  • Holiday Content: add big traditional holidays to your calendar with posting ideas. For an audience based in the United States, this may include holidays like Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July, when people are home from work. There are also holidays most people celebrate, like Halloween. There are also a lot of other holidays that people often use as hashtags. The image below shows just how many there can be in one month:

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

(Image Credit: Crowd Control HQ)

  • Themed Industry Dates: Then look at themed days for your industry, which are great for engagement. In this same area, look at themed days for favorite foods or other fun ideas. There are a lot of industries that take advantage of the engagement they can get on International Pizza Day. 
  • Consider Seasonal Content: When you’re creating a May social media calendar, for an audience based in the United States, you can add in content appropriate for your brand and the spring. It may also be the case that the season does not define the post, but you add timing appropriate tone to your content. 

For example, a food blogger may post about their favorite drink recipes that include mint. Because it’s the spring, when they are filling out their May social media Calendar, their posts will include things about how great it is to be able to start sitting outside and enjoy a fresh minty drink after those long winter months. This is a small detail, but it makes the content more timely to the audience and appeals to what they are interested in at the moment of posting. It also suggests directly to the audience why they should care about this content in the moment. For instance, food posts around the holidays should be about holiday foods:

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

(Image Credit: Tasty Facebook)

This is one of the tricks of having a calendar for the year. It helps you strategize to make your content more timely. 

  • Your Business Promotion Dates: This will include things like product reveals, launches, and events. You want to lead up to these moments for your business and build hype. Also add in anniversary dates for your business, so you can plan to post about how well your product launch has done over the previous year, or how many years you’ve been in business. These anniversary posts help tell the story of your brand. 

Do you want to promote your blog posts? What days do you post? Do you want to give a monthly reminder to sign up for your newsletter? Add these to the calendar. 

Varying Your Content: Self Promo vs Content Marketing

When creating your calendar, consider how much self promo versus how much content you’re offering. The calendar will make this easier to visualize. You’ll need to find the magic ratio for your audience, but you always want to be giving more than you ask. 

We hope that you found this article useful.

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The Tools For Your Calendar

You want to use the right tools for you, so this may vary. There will be people who find that a paper calendar is the only true method that works for them. Most will find that this is too much work, especially since you need to organize your links, pictures, and video content to go along with the posts. However, everyone works differently. Use the methods that are most efficient for your business so that you can get the most out of your social media calendar. 

One way to handle this is to use Google Calendar. This can get a bit unwieldy, but with some practice, it can be an easy way to share what you’re doing. This works best for people who are only posting on one or two networks. Here is a look at Google Calendar’s layout:

Get the Most Out of Your 2021 Social Media Calendar

(Image Credit: GCFlearnfree)

Spreadsheets can be one of the simplest ways to build your social media calendar 2021. If you do this on a platform for Google Docs, you’ll be able to share your spreadsheet with your team. 

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up the spreadsheet so you have some established norms that make sense to you. You will definitely want to color code your calendar, no matter what tools you’re using to create it. This will make it easy to see things like the types of posts (content type), the social network it is being posted to, and the times for posting. Create a new tab in your spreadsheet for every month of the year. 

If you’re going to use a scheduler, like HootSuite or Buffer, make a note of that in your calendar. 

How To Use Your Calendar

Once you’ve planned all your posts, come up with a system for marking them once you have them scheduled to post. This may be something as simple as italicizing the note in your calendar once you’re done. 

At the end of every month, look at your analytics and your calendar to perform reviews of how the social media marketing went that month. Use this information to review your planned posts for the following month and see if you have any new information you can use to better optimize your planned posts. 

As the year goes on, you’ll have twelve full months of continually improving your content. 

Diib®: We Monitor Your 2021 Social Media Calendar!

Social media calendars are a lot of upfront work that pays off throughout the year. The best way to know your time is proving most effective is to watch your results through your analytics and use that information to plan ahead. Diib Digital offers a comprehensive social analytics tool that can help you easily see your demographics and plan your calendar accordingly. Here are some of the features we’re sure you’ll love:

  • Social media integration and performance
  • Platform specific audience demographics
  • Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
  • User experience and mobile speed optimization
  • Technical SEO monitoring

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FAQ’s

This is someone you hire that is responsible for any digital media you want to use on your social media account. This can be blog posts, newsletters and facebook posts/videos.

This is a breakdown of everything you want to accomplish on social media and your plan to accomplish it. This allows you to analyze your success and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Social media is excellent for building brand awareness and quickly getting your product/service in front of as many people as possible. Even when people aren’t thinking about your product/service, they’ll be seeing it.

The most popular platform for marketing and brand development is Facebook. However, if your marketing includes more photos or image development, Instagram may be the best platform for you. In short, it depends on your goals and marketing strategy which platform is best.

Even though there are some up and coming social media platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, Facebook continues to grow. Case in point, 2.45 billion people still log on to Facebook every month.

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Daniel Urmann

Author Bio:

Daniel Urmann is the co-founder of Diib.com. Over the past 17 years Daniel has helped thousands of business grow online through SEO, social media, and paid advertising. Today, Diib helps over 150,000 business globally grow online with their SaaS offerings. Daniel’s interest include SMB analytics, big data, predictive analytics, enterprise and SMB search engine optimization (SEO), CRO optimization, social media advertising, A/B testing, programatic and geo-targeting, PPC, and e-commerce. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) focused in Finance and E-commerce from Cornell University – S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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