Why a Social Media Calendar is so Important in Marketing

The UGA Alumni Association has a social presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that we post on daily. This will come to no surprise to anyone who has ever worked in social media, but it can be really hard to keep all your posts in order when you are making multiple posts a day across different platforms.

To keep up with our social media posting schedule, DARCOMM uses Airtable, a spreadsheet-database hybrid, with the features of a database but applied to a spreadsheet. Basically, it is a very fancy spreadsheet that you can use for a variety of organizational needs. DARCOMM specifically uses it for social media planning. Here are 4 reasons we have a social media calendar:

1. Planning Ahead

To say it would be stressful to be a social media manager without a social calendar would be an understatement. It would not be very fun to show up to work every day and wonder what I am going to post. That’s why we use Airtable to plan our calendar ahead of time. Every month I am looking ahead to the next month and organizing our calendar, that way we don’t get to a new month and have a blank page.

Although our social calendar is not set in stone and I sometimes have to change things around last minute if something important pops up, we rely heavily on our social media calendar. DARCOMM is planning strategically about what we’re posting, when we’re posting it, and where on social media we’re posting.

2. Collaboration

Airtable makes it really easy for DARCOMM to collaborate on our social media calendar. For example, if a unit asks one of the communication coordinators for a post on Instagram, they can login and add all the information I’ll need to make the post.

3. Keeping Our Priorities Top of Mind 

DAR is a large division with a lot of different priorities and goals, a lot of which we support on social media. Our social calendar is color-coded with different priorities labeled with a different color, that way when our calendar has a lot of color variety in it, I know we are highlighting all of our marketing priorities.

For example, if we are lacking light orange in our calendar view, I know to schedule in posts about our alumni chapters and affinity groups.

4. Thinking About Our Channels as Connected

Another great feature of Airtable is that it lets us label exactly what platform we are going to make a post on. This reminds us to think about our different channels as connected and complimentary to each other, but also helps us recognize that not all posts need to be shared everywhere. It helps us be strategic about where our posts go and how we can increase our engagement and reach by making posts that suit the platform they’re shared on.