Social media is key for an effective marketing strategy, but creating social media content daily can be time-consuming. Social media calendars are a great way to create monthly social media content for your establishments while offering additional benefits.
Whether you are creating your own or downloading a free social media calendar temple, make sure it is well-organized. This includes being color coded, having which social media accounts you’ll be using, the date and time the posts will go live, what the posts will say (including hashtags), and what links, images, or videos go with each post.
Your calendar template can be a digital calendar or spreadsheet that are easily searchable and customizable online like Google Drive and Google Sheets. Social calendar Tools like Hubspot, Sprout Social and Hootsuite are great digital calendars that can also be used to schedule, publish, and measure your content performance. If your business is only using Facebook, you can even use Facebook's Meta Business Suite to schedule your posts and stories.
Using a social calendar allows your establishment to better organize your social media by planning out your quality content in advance and, depending on the calendar tool you choose, even scheduling it! Creating posts in advance saves you the trouble of creating and posting on the same day, which gives you time to look for any mistakes and fix them as needed before the post goes live. This doesn’t mean you still can’t create posts the day of, but with a calendar you can strategically choose which individual posts need the most attention.
By staying organized and planning out a month’s social media posts, your team will be able to devote their time to other activities. Creating content so far in advance lets your team be aware of what’s to come, giving them time to prepare for days that may be busier than others such as co-op promotions with Accel, AE Prize Patrol events, or discounts your establishment may be promoting on social.
Social calendars will get your establishment in the habit of posting regularly, which is necessary to achieve results. Calendars will also help you develop a pattern of when you should be posting. Knowing these patterns will help you as you continue creating next month’s calendar. By posting regularly you can measure the effectiveness of everything you post on your social platforms and evaluate what is and isn’t working. From there you will have a template to use for each month and can begin trying new posts to replace the ones that didn’t work.
Before you begin creating your first social calendar, is recommended that you conduct a social media audit to evaluate your establishment’s current online presence. If you have never conducted a social media audit before, the marketing experts at Accel Entertainment are available to conduct the audit for you and assist in creating the best strategy for your social media calendar.
For more information on using social media calendars for your gaming establishment, email Accel at hello@accelentertainment.com.