Chaotic might be how you describe your shop in the weeks leading up to the holidays — but it should not describe your social media approach. If you’re posting sporadically and haphazardly, you may not be leveraging your social presence to its full potential. In order to ensure that you keep your followers engaged and attract new ones, you need to plan — and a social media calendar can help.

Reap the Benefits of a Social Calendar

Social media calendars provide a way to stay organized, especially during the holiday season when your shop is buzzing with activity and it’s easy to neglect social media posts.

“A social media calendar not only keeps us organized, but it also gives us time and creative freedom to execute a campaign,” says Mercedes Castro of InBloom Florist in Orlando, Florida. “We can stay ahead of busy holidays by having our content done before the busy season starts. This is especially beneficial in the floral world because once we are within the holiday season, the marketing department is pulled into sales or design to help.”

Also, keeping a calendar can help you reach multiple goals, explains Melanie Spilbeler, managing partner at FreshPath Marketing.

“Having a regularly maintained social media calendar allows you to make sure your social posts align with your goals on social media and the overall goals for the business,” she says. “When planning your social calendar, you should have goals in mind: Is your goal to grow follower count and build brand awareness? Is the goal to drive in store traffic? Or are you trying to grow your wedding and event business through social media posts? Each post should have either a call to action, or, more specifically, a goal in mind of what you want the viewer to take away from the post.”

Use Management Tools

If you need tools to help you manage social media content, you can find free apps and programs that will make the process easier. For example, to create a calendar, you can use Google Drive Sheets, which can easily be duplicated to create subsequent calendars. Then, use the Later app to schedule the posts. Other useful tools to schedule posts, manage profiles, gather analytics and more include Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, and SocialPilot.

Get Inspired

If you are looking for holiday-specific social content calendar ideas, the Society of American Florists has you covered. SAF’s social media calendar for the December holidays includes a week-by-week calendar with suggested images, text and hashtags to engage with customers and drum up holiday sales.

Looking for more inspiration? Here are some fun ideas that will keep your followers interested and engaged with your content.

• Behind-the-scenes looks at your day to day business operations
• A behind-the-scenes look at wedding work and how final arrangements or installments turn out
• Design competitions where team members create a design and social media followers vote on their favorites
• A weekly look inside the cooler
• Time-lapse videos that show a floral design from start to finish, or to show how a room is set up from beginning to end
• Customer testimonial videos to help boost the credibility of your brand
• Flower and plant care tips to help customers care for your products

Kenya McCullum is a contributing writer for the Society of American Florists.