LinkedIn is an incredible resource for professional networking and content marketing.
Well, if it’s used correctly.
As you might guess, sharing content on LinkedIn is not a one-off strategy, it’s something you must do frequently to see results. But coming up with ideas, graphics, and content on a regular basis is no easy feat.
If you rely solely on inspiration, you set your brand up for failure.
Research from the Content Marketing Institute found that marketers with a plan are 60% more likely to be effective, which is why you need a LinkedIn content calendar. Whether you are a big agency, entrepreneur, or small business owner, a LinkedIn content calendar will help you with your social selling strategy.
Let’s break down the key benefits of a LinkedIn content marketing calendar.
Social Media Visibility
You could share the best, most informative, inspiring content on LinkedIn, but it won’t help you as a professional unless you can get it in front of the audience that matters. On social media, the only way to be seen is with consistent, quality posts. LinkedIn itself recommends an ideal posting frequency of 20 times per month, which pans out to once per business day.
A content calendar sets you up for success when it comes to consistent, quality posts. Instead of scrambling each day to find something to share and ending up with subpar content, you can take your time to plan out different content and ensure it’s all quality. In the long run, you’ll see greater results with far less stress.
Engage Your Audience
People on social media see A LOT of posts and many about similar topics. In the long term, you’ll want to plan ahead. If you keep rehashing the same content without adding new value, your audience will get bored and stop interacting. A content calendar will help you see what you’ve already posted about, so you can be sure to vary the subject matter and keep your audience engaged.
Post Unique Content
Without a content calendar, you may find yourself relying on inspiration. Instead of coming up with your own ideas, you may fall back on sharing content from others or posting very similar things. While this is still great to do once in a while, it’s best to vary the content you post and include many of your own creative ideas. Having a content calendar allows you to spread out inspired content and ensure there’s a good mix of unique content. You’ll be able to take a little more time upfront to generate interesting ideas without depending on inspiration from others.
Relevant Posts
National Small Business Week may not be a huge deal to everyone, but it’s definitely something you’ll want to enter the conversation about as a small business. Not to mention, you want to share timely, relevant posts that coincide with other special dates and industry events. Without a content calendar, these relevant events are easy to overlook.
Instead, you can plan ahead for special dates. When you consider the holidays, special events, etc ahead of time, then you can dedicate the time and effort you need to create unique, relevant content. This ensures that the quality of your content stays high, but it also helps you enter relevant conversations on the platform. You can leverage hashtags and the hype around the event itself to draw more attention to your page and offerings.
Streamline Collaboration
A documented content calendar provides visibility to all departments in your company. Everyone can see what’s coming up and what their role is. This keeps all your teams on the same page and makes collaboration much easier. No responsibilities will take someone by surprise, and it will be much clearer when to ask questions. The transparency that a content calendar provides makes collaboration within your marketing team and the entire company much easier.
Measure and Adjust
Building your content strategy requires you to understand what works well and why. A content calendar makes it easier to see what content you’ve already created and how it’s performed. You can use the calendar as a starting point for tracking how different posts do. Because of this, your content calendar provides you with key insights into what content got the best results. You can then look for patterns like word count, images, videos, subject matter, etc to adjust and optimize future content.
Save Time
Initially, a LinkedIn content calendar seems like a lot of work, and it is. However, the time you put into a content calendar will save you much more time and headache in the future. You can plan ahead by whatever amount is reasonable for your business and schedule (one week, one month, one quarter, one year, etc), but you’ll generally find that the more time you spend upfront the more you save down the line. You can pre-create and schedule the content, saving time each day that you can dedicate to other tasks.
Reduce Stress
Trying to generate new content on the fly is not only time consuming, but it’s also stressful. You have many other key business operations to worry about, and the last thing you want is to stress out over LinkedIn content. Creating your content calendar takes a lot of stress out of posting on LinkedIn. You’ll no longer be scrambling for something to post and using LinkedIn in a reactive way. Instead, you’ll already know what’s going up when and proactively approach your LinkedIn content marketing.
Flexibility
Content calendars may seem set in stone, but they actually allow for more flexibility. For example, you could leave one day open a week to share user-generated content, a relevant story, or some other timely piece you couldn’t predict ahead of time. You can also adjust your calendar if some major event changes. When you do so, you may still be able to use the planned content at a later date. Additionally, by planning ahead you give yourself a bit more time to react to unexpected events or topics that you want to post about.
Conclusion
A LinkedIn content calendar will greatly help you organize and streamline your content production ahead of time. You’ll be able to be more visible on social media, measure and optimize your posts, and keep your audience engaged all while saving time on your content strategy. Start building yours today!
