Planning relevant and enticing social media content for a travel agency business can be an overwhelming task. From creating engaging posts to highly captivating images and updates, it gets challenging for businesses to stay organized. And this is where a social media calendar for travel agencies comes in!
It allows you to stay organized by offering a centralized location for all your social media content ideas, schedules, and deadlines to ensure consistent branding across social channels.
Besides, it also saves you a lot of time and effort by having a calendar in place that you can customize to fit your business’s specific needs.
What is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar refers to a detailed and strategic plan that outlines the upcoming social media posts for various social platforms of your travel business, organized as per their published date and time.
Apart from the publish date and time for posts, a social media calendar for travel agencies can also have elements such as tags, links, mentions, copy, and various media elements such as videos, GIFs, and images.
Here, you can also use AI-based applications, such as Predis.ai, that can help you generate tailored images and videos and also let you directly link your social media account to Predis.ai and schedule content.
Apart from this, a social media content calendar also serves as a strategic tool to keep your social media presence much more organized, thus ensuring a regular and effective posting schedule.
Basics of Making a Social Media Calendar
To create a social calendar for the travel business, here are the steps you need to follow:
1. Perform A Social Media Audit
Conducting a social media audit enables you to evaluate your accounts, social media presence, accounts, and engagement for your travel business. This then lets you see things that are working and not working and where to make improvements.
2. Choose the Social Media Channels and Content
Once you are done with your audit, identify the channels that are best for your audience and what kind of content will help you attract them. The next step is to match your top content types and budget with the social media platform that’s the best fit for your needs.
3. Plan the Content You Wish to Create for Each Channel
As soon as you have identified the social media platforms, it’s time to plan your content. The first step to begin the planning process is to review your team and budget. This will offer you a realistic sense of how much high-quality content you can produce.
4. Decide What A Social Media Calendar for Travel Agencies Should Include
This is the step where you need to plan your social media content by strategy, season, or campaign.
For instance, if you are creating an Instagram calendar for travel, the basic rule is to keep things organized to decide what content you want to include in your calendar for the desired results.
Advantages of Creating a Social Media Calendar for Travel Agencies
There are several advantages to using a social media calendar for travel agencies. Among these are:
1. Helps You Maintain A Regular Schedule
While there is no fixed rule for how much you should post on your social media accounts, it’s important to post frequently to maintain an active presence among your target audience.
A well-planned social media content calendar allows your travel business to both prioritize quality and build higher consistency in terms of brand voice and style.
2. Saves Time and Resources
Having a well-planned social media calendar for your travel business helps you save a great deal of time by staying organized.
If your calendar is prepared well in advance, it also saves you from the hassle of hunting for trending topics and stories every day, looking for fresh ideas, thus giving you more time to focus on creating high-quality content.
3. Quality Assurance
A social media calendar and proactive scheduling of content allow travel teams to keep a watch on their work and ensure proper quality assurance.
This is simply because it is easier to catch a mistake or type a mistake or control a potential public relations crisis when you have enough time to follow a workflow approval process.
Best Practices and Things to Remember While Creating a Social Media Calendar
Here are some of the best practices and things to remember while creating a social media calendar for your travel agency business:
1. Pick the Post Types and Formats Wisely
The best practice here is to include a content mix such as videos, images, gifs, articles, reposts, and formats such as reels, polls, carousel posts, stories, live videos, and more.
For best results, you can start by filling your social media calendar with recurring events such as holidays, sales, company news, Q&A, and more.
2. Define Your Posting Frequency
The next important thing to remember here is to establish your posting frequency. Ideally, your publishing schedule should be based on factors such as business goals, resources available, and audience engagement patterns.
3. Choose the Relevant Platforms
Depending on your business goals, target audience, and resources, choose the most relevant social media platforms to post on. If you are not sure which ones to start with, pick the three most popular ones, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
4. Schedule, Track, and Monitor Your Posts
Scheduling, tracking, and monitoring your posts gives you and your team enough time to edit and fact-check the information. Planning with a detailed social media calendar also means that you have other stakeholders approve the content to ensure that it is in line with the brand guidelines.
Top Content Pillars to Use in Social Media Calendar for Travel Businesses
Content pillars are essentially the core topics or themes that guide your social media strategy for business. These content pillars serve as the foundation for your social media content creation, thus allowing you to consistently deliver relevant, valuable, and engaging material to your target audience.
Once you’ve established your content pillars, it is best to create your social media content calendar accordingly in a way that outlines when and how you’ll address each of the identified pillars.
Here are a few examples of content pillars for travel agencies that you can include in your social media strategy:
1. Top Lists of Travel-Specific Posts
This content pillar is largely about travel-related guides, such as:
- The Best Places to Visit During the Winters
- The Top Adventure Activities in India
- Breathtaking Places for Paragliding
- The Top Places to Celebrate Unique Festivals
2. Destination-Specific Traveling Guides
These types of content pillars focus specifically on particular destinations. The idea here is to share or mention information such as the best places to visit, local food markets, and things to look out for.
It is recommended to choose the most popular destination places here that are relevant to your target audience and accordingly come up with content that is valuable as well as interesting for them.
Another important thing to take care of here is to enhance the readability of the content by adding a lot of images to gain readers’ attention.
3. Cover the Latest News and Events
Regardless of the type of social media content you are creating, it’s best to offer a mixture of timely and popular material. For instance:
- Upcoming festivals and other celebrations, including film and music festivals, holiday events, carnivals, etc.
- The latest transportation deals.
- Microtrends impacting a destination or neighborhood, such as a type of food, music scene, etc.
- Travel photography and stories.
- Tips for budget travel and solo adventurers.
Sample Weekly Social Media Calendar for Travel Businesses
Here’s a sample of a weekly social media calendar for travel agencies to help you manage your tasks so that the amount of work required to listen, interact, engage with the audience, articulate, and demonstrate is better distributed throughout the week.
A sample social media calendar for a travel business might look like this:
1. Monday
Engaging: Take enough time to check out and reply to mentions on various social media accounts or blogs that you heard on previous days.
2. Tuesday
Articulating: If you are writing a blog post or other similar type of content, make sure to use this day to publish your article.
Tuesdays are the ideal time to send newsletters to customers or post an article, as typically users are too busy clearing their mailboxes on Monday. Here, you can also continue to listen and respond to your brand mentions, if any.
3. Wednesday
Articulating-Demonstrating: This is the day of the week when you need to post images or videos to various social media pages, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more.
4. Thursday
Engaging-Demonstrating: After the demonstration, you need to review your social networking pages and accordingly respond to comments or mentions. Also, do not forget to thank your customers when they post comments on your social pages.
5. Friday
Listening-Engaging: When the weekend starts, you again need to focus on listening and engaging with the audience by responding to mentions, tweets, and more.
6. Saturday
Active listening: Treat this as a break day, but keep listening to what the audience has to say. The best way to do this is to check Google Alerts and look for any mentions that sound worth considering.
7. Sunday
Keep this day only for listening. If there is no urgency to respond, it is best to wait until Monday.
Wrapping it up
Creating a well-planned social media content calendar for your travel agencies helps you streamline as well as strategize your content marketing strategy across social channels in advance. This helps you maximize your social media presence, engage your audience effectively, and achieve your desired outcomes.
If you are looking to up the marketing game for your travel agency business by creating social media calendars, look no further than Predis.ai.
Predis.ai is an AI-based social media content generation and management tool that can help you make posts from just a simple text input. The tool is also equipped to generate and schedule a variety of social media content types, including videos, reels, memes, captions, and hashtags.
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