Key Elements for Your Social Media Calendar

Content calendars are an important part of every social media strategy. Not only do they help you plan, but they’re crucial to organizing and batching upcoming content. Whether you’re using a spreadsheet, a content management system or simply writing it out, here are some key elements to include in your government agency’s social media content calendar.

Platform Details

Depending on your social media strategy plan, you may be working with multiple social media platforms (or all of them), so it’s important to make note on which social network the post will be published. This is especially helpful so you know the character count length of the post(s) and other details such as the use of hashtags and image sizes.

Important Days, Dates and Times

Make sure to include the exact date and time the post will go live, and add in other sections for important deadlines such as the creation due date, if it needs to be reviewed by another person, or a section for an expiration date to ensure the post doesn’t go live after it’s no longer relevant to your audience.

Pro tip: Add a section for important days! If you have days that tend to have better performance or higher metrics than others — or days you want to avoid posting — write it down. 

Goals

Your social media strategy goals should align with those of your overall government agency. Having a goals section can help you stay on track by reminding you about the value the post has for your community or agency. Examples of a goals category include:

• CTA (Call-to-action is a specific next step you want your audience to take after reading your post such as clicking on your website, signing up for a newsletter, or using the contact button)
• What you want the post to accomplish (i.e. more likes, shares, x amount of comments or feedback)
• Purpose of the post (for example, promote an event)

Bonus: Post Copy and Visual Content

This is where the most beneficial part of the social media calendar comes in; create the posts ahead of time. You can get as narrow or broad for this, but you’ll want to have a section for the post copy and another for the visual content so you can easily reference and plan posts. 

Uploading visual content when it’s not necessary isn’t the most efficient, however, having a section to help specify what piece of content goes with the post will help speed up the process when scheduling.

Pro tip: You can link to an image or video instead of uploading content directly to save you time.  

Once you've created your content, it’s easy to put into your scheduling platform, or if you don’t have one, you’ll already know what content to copy and paste and post natively in the social platform.

The use of a social media content calendar gives you the ability to look back, track performance and audit your social networks and content. This can help you make important decisions for the future, better communicate goals to your leadership and optimize your strategy from your best starting point — your social media content calendar.

Have fun creating your social media content calendar with these helpful tips!

Best communicate with the public you serve by becoming a part of the free Government Social Media network — only available to full/part-time employees of government or educational institutions. 

We support the largest network of government social media professionals in the U.S. by guiding government agencies through complex social media issues. Government Social Media helps you successfully communicate with the public you serve, protect your agency and keep public trust while finding your support community.