Here's How Retailers Can Make Time To Use Social Media Efficiently

Social media can be fast and chaotic for any
business owner, making it crucial not to dive in without a plan. Each month
retailers are presented with a unique challenge to promote products, events and
sales on limited resources and tight deadlines. Taking the time to develop a social
media content calendar is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to avoid major
headaches and streamline efficiency for their marketing team.

Everything starts with the strategy

Social media strategy provides clear goals and target audiences, making it a
perfect document to reverence while making a calendar. The targeted messages
and conversations that you want to have during the month must originate
directly from your business. If you are introducing a new product next week,
it’s time to hype it up and generate some buzz around it with a contest,
product reviews, photos, videos or any of the other ways connect the product
with the customers online. You don’t have to plan each individual tweet or
Facebook posts, but the calendar should create an overall framework on how to
engage with your customers.

Important elements to have
Your social media calendar should give you a bird’s eye view of the month
as well as actionable steps to take each week and day. The basic break out of
content is by topic, time and platform you will be posting it on. If you are
not the only person running the social channels, make sure there is a clear
distribution of roles.

Don’t forget to engage

This level of planning and strategy may seem very counter-intuitive to
spontaneous conversation style of social media, but it will help you keep
focused. Remember that an important part of any conversation is listening. When
you are scheduled to talk about a certain topic or a theme, you must actively
listen to the conversation going around the topic and participate whenever
possible.

Retail social media marketers are increasingly bombarded with new information,
stress and challenges. Taking the time to update and maintain a social media
calendar will help you and your team focus on important business tasks while
translating them into actionable social media steps.

Dmitri Pivtorak – crossing this blog post off my social media content calendar