Hi my name is Jayne Corso and I am the Community Manager for AEA.
Planning your social media calendar in advance can keep you from scrabbling to find rich content to share. That’s why I recommend a social media content calendar! Through a social media content calendar, you can schedule posts days, weeks, and months in advance.
Hot Tip: Identify content that resonates with your followers
Before you go too far down the path of creating a social media content calendar, first identify the type of posts that receive the most engagement from your followers. You can do this by looking at past posts and seeing what topics received the most comments, shares, and likes. You can also look back to see if your followers engaged more with links, photos, or videos. This will help you define your content.
Hot Tip: Decide how often you want to post
How active are you going to be on your social media platforms? Do you have the bandwidth to post multiple times a day, or will multiple times a week make more sense? When choosing this timeframe, be realistic with your available time and the amount of content you have to share. Here is a listing of the minimum posting schedules for social media platforms from Constant Contact.
Facebook: 3x per week
Twitter: 5x per week
LinkedIn: 2x per week
Hot Tip: Map out important dates
If you know you have events coming up or important deadlines, place these dates on your calendar. This will help remind you that a webinar, conference, or submission deadline is approaching and more communication efforts need to be made for this topic. You can also place fun reminders on your calendar such as holidays or anniversaries.
Hot Tip: Find outside content to share
It’s great to share your own content, but that’s not very social. Using social media should be a social experience where users are sharing content. Identify blogs, website, or other social media pages that have content relevant to your followers. Set aside days on your social calendar to share postings from these sites. I find BetterEvaluation, @WashEval, and conversations using #DataViz to be great resources for content.
Now you can create your own social media content calendar. I use a simple excel spreadsheet, but there are many ways you can create your calendar, including online platforms such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Get busy posting!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
Hello Jayne,
In a world that is becoming ruled by social media, having a social media presence is basically the only way to get information across to the public. Your idea of having an organized social media calendar is an excellent idea and would likely save many business owners from having anxiety about what their next post should include. I also agree that interacting with other evaluators through social media is an excellent way to get more followers and get more content for a page. You gave excellent advice for making a social media presence!