Building a social media calendar can mean the difference between feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of posting and feeling reassured you are on the right track to building and sharing your subject matter expertise. Here’s how to get started:
Identify Your Goal
Ask yourself what you’re hoping to achieve by posting to LinkedIn. Is it to build your reputation as a subject matter expert in your space? Or are you advancing to become the voice of an industry after years of establishing your expertise across social?
Before you ever start writing captions, write down the target audience you are writing for, and the actions you would like them to take. For instance, your goals could include having them comment on or share your post, or even to get in touch to learn more about your services. As you start to draft content, you can then reflect back on these goals to ensure that everything you’re sharing is focused — and that you aren’t just producing filler to meet a weekly quota.
Create a Sustainable Cadence
Build a cadence that feels manageable for the long-term. To start, aim to post three times per week. Outside of this, you can focus your time on engaging with others by liking or commenting on their posts.
The 10/4/2 Strategy shows us that balancing our time between content production and content engagement can go a long way toward building meaningful relationships online. When it comes time to post your own content, test the following tactics:
- Unwind the headlines by sharing topical news stories and providing your own commentary on how this impacts hiring trends in your industry in the caption.
- Share personal anecdotes or mic drop moments from phone calls or interactions you have throughout the day, that you think are especially interesting.
- Build out your secondary swim lane, by commenting on a topic related to talent access that’s of personal interest — whether that’s hiring trends, culture and diversity best practices, or leadership advice.
Track Your Performance
Monitor monthly reach and engagement to gain a sense of which topics, post formats, and times of day receive the greatest engagement. You may want to start with a simple spreadsheet, or utilize a tool like Shield that provides in-depth metrics on your LinkedIn posts. Regardless of your approach, the act of tracking performance can help you identify trends and adjust your content accordingly to ensure you’re getting the most out of your efforts.
Of course, you’ll need a real calendar to keep track of all the activities you’ve planned. We’ve made it easy for you to get started with a downloadable calendar template that you can use to build out your content strategy.
Click to Download Your Free Social Media Calendar
Remember that social media is all about giving something of value to the people you want to engage. Developing your unique social media calendar will help you build greater consistency in terms of your content and brand voice and cement your reputation as a subject matter expert.