Create an effective Social Media Calendar for 2023 with a free Social Media Calendar Template

If you’re a social media manager or you’re looking for a social media virtual assistant, it’s time for you to stay on top of social media and download our free Social Media Calendar Template for 2023.

This calendar includes things such as:

What is a social media content calendar?

In the simplest terms, a social media content calendar is a calendar that contains your plans for upcoming posts which includes details such as:

If you want to be smart and strategic about social media, you’ll need to have a social media calendar that you can refer to in order to plan your upcoming content. This should be something that is easy to update and understand because you’ll want to assign the management of your social media calendar to your social media manager or social media virtual assistant. 

However, simply having a social media calendar isn’t going to solve all your problems. Here are the key learnings that we recommend you take into consideration before you start using the social media calendar template.

Key learning 1: Quality over quantity

A lot of people think that the more content you can pump out, the better… but this is not the case with social media content. You really need to focus on the quality of content over the quantity.

This means that you need to have:

1. Clarity over your content pillars

Identify at least 3 to 5 key content pillars that your social media manager or social media virtual assistant should focus on.

To give you a bit of guidance, they should roughly cover these 5 goals:

For Outsourcing Angel, an example of the types of content our Social Media Virtual Assistant creates for each of these categories includes:

2. You don’t need to be on EVERY social media platform

We used to think that EVERY social media platform was important and put in the same amount of time and resources into Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Podcasts – only to spread ourselves way too thin. It’s like trying to be the jack of all trades, but the master of nothing.

Think about your social media goals and target audience and have use your social media content calendar where there’s the most opportunity for your business. If you’re not sure where that is, ask your virtual assistant to do competitor research to see what your competitors are doing to give you an idea of your best social media mix.

3. You don’t have to post every single day

Just because there is a slot available in the content calendar, doesn’t mean you HAVE to fill it up with content. It’s better to just optimise your content creation process, focus on the days your followers are most online and make those your “MUST UPLOAD” days, give your calendar optional days.

Again, your social media virtual assistant can easily dive into your analytics or conduct industry research to figure out your best times and days to post so that you can assess your resources and come up with an appropriate posting schedule.

Key learning 2: Include vertical videos in your content mix

Now in the past, social media was pretty straightforward because the focus was on image based content. So you could just source images or design your own on Canva or Photoshop, schedule it with the right hashtags and that was that.

But since the introduction of TikTok and now Instagram and Facebook Reels, the landscape has changed MASSIVELY.

Internally, we did a lot of testing ourselves before we realised that our golden ratio on Instagram and Facebook involved sharing at least two vertical videos per week. Since implementing this, our reach went from 3,000 per month to 50,000 per month.

“Posting two Instagram and Facebook reels per week, in order to improve our content distribution and reach results on these platforms.”

Key learning 3: Hop on trends

In order to figure out what types of videos to share, we relied a lot on TikTok trends. Even though TikTok wasn’t a core focus for our business, TikTok was where the trends started and that would later trickle out to Instagram and Facebook – two channels which ARE important to our business. This is an opportunity we didn’t want to miss.

So our Social Media Virtual Assistant will dedicate weekly research time looking for TikTok trends which we could film and make it our own.

Or if you’re already producing longer form content like YouTube videos, your social media virtual assistant could go through these videos and choose snippets to turn into Instagram or Facebook Reels using a trending audio to increase your reach.

Key learning 4: Have a social media content production line

So for a lot of business owners that have been running their own business and doing a lot of things themselves, a lot of your processes and the intricacies of how you operate might all be stored in your head. 

This makes it very difficult for you to be able to have an effective social media content production process that you could easily pass over to a new employee or virtual assistant.

This was the case for one of our clients, Jenny Dinh, she’s the owner of the Social Media Agency Co.Lab Space and a lot of the things that she did involved a lot of manual work, sifting through emails back and forth and her processes were all in her head.

She came to us looking for a social media virtual assistant but we knew that she actually needed to go through our Systemise & Scale Up Program first. Within 4 weeks of completing our Systemise & Scale Up Program, our team did the following things for Jenny’s business: 

How we systemised Jenny’s social media agency:

Jenny’s social media content production line now includes:

We then trained her social media virtual assistant, gave her all the logins and access on how to use the different platforms and assigned them a Virtual Office Manager to oversee their work and communication with Jenny.

And Jenny can now focus on lead generation and strategic marketing plans to grow her business, how awesome is that!

With all of that in mind, I wish you all the best of luck with your social media calendar in 2023 and I’ll see you again soon!