How I Made A Social Media Calendar

At my job, managers regularly post on social media. They would post whenever they got a new product or because our store wasn’t as busy at that moment.

I knew that there must be a more organized and efficient way of creating and showcasing content. For the month of March, I dedicated myself to a project to learn how to make an organized and efficient system for connecting to a following. I made a social media calendar to advertise for my website which provides advice and encouragement for students competing in speech and debate.

Step 1: Make A Plan

I’m a big planner. Before I jump into anything I decide on how to do them. I researched tech tools that allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time and then post them automatically. There was an abundance of choices and picked Sprout Social based on my budget. Sprout Social was simple, straight forward, and had features such as social media activity tracking, the ability to add several social media accounts, and the ability to make drafts.

Click here for Sprout Social demonstration

I planned to post on Instagram every other day. The posts contained encouragement and advice alluding to my upcoming website.

Step 2: New Plan

On Sprout Social, you draft the post on their website instead of Instagram. You choose the date and then it automatically adds it to the queue of upcoming posts.

There was one problem with this plan. Drafting a calendar directly on the website was difficult for me to play around with ideas or edit. Even though it had draft settings it was such a finalized atmosphere. I felt it had to be perfect on the first try and the calendar drafting was taking a long time because of it. In light of that, I created my own social media calendar on google docs. I laid out what I wanted my Instagram posts to contain for each day. It took more than half the time to complete.

Step 3: Execute Plan

Then I began designing all of the images I wanted to post for the week and their captions.

I inputted those designs into the queue and voila my social media calendar is a thing. To design my posts I used Canva.

Click here for my Canva demonstration

After the first week of my calendar queue running, I checked to see if they posted and they did not. I learned that for it to post automatically I have to download the Sprout Social app and connect it to the Instagram app on a mobile device. I was working on a laptop. I tried that and it worked.