How To Create A Social Media Calendar For Your Food Truck

So you’re revving up your food truck’s social media marketing, you’ve figured out your objectives, defined your goals, and determined the metrics you’ll use to measure success. The only thing missing? A way to track and share your social marketing plan throughout your food truck organization. If you’re serious about using social media for marketing your food truck you should use a social media calendar.

But how do you decide when to publish, what to publish and how often to publish to give the best experience to your followers? If you understand when to engage with your customers, you’re two steps ahead of most food truck vendors. As we’ve discussed in the past, one of the fastest ways to build a successful food truck business is to setup internal systems. This means taking the things you do on a regular basis and creating a system that allows you to do them, efficiently and easily.

At first it may be a pain to sit down and create a social media calendar so you know what to blog about, and when to post and how to use your social media to drive traffic to your website, but it’s worth it. You’re better off spending a few hours setting up a social media calendar than running around at the last minute. So how do you do it?

If your food truck is new to the idea of setting up a social media calendar, here’s a four steps for instituting and maintaining an efficient social media calendar for your food truck.

How To Create A Social Media Calendar For Your Food Truck

Determine What Content Resonates

Outside of your daily parking location posts, what do your customers spend time reading from your social media feeds? Are they posts about your menu? Stories about your staff members or your take on current events? Here are some ideas to get the ball rolling:

Upcoming events
Holidays
Topics such as Follow Fridays or Throwback Thursdays
Posting other people’s content
Repurposing existing content
Product launches
Special promotions

Decide On How Often To Post

How often you should post has been a favorite topic of research. Here is a quick summary of posting frequency and times for each of the major social networks.

Twitter is the social network where food trucks seem to post most frequently. Frequency: Three to 30 times a day
Facebook is where you’ll keep followers abreast of what’s taking place in your food truck business. Don’t overwhelm your followers with constant updates, or you risk losing them. Frequency: No more than ten posts a week
Pinterest is a bit like Twitter, with updates occurring on a near-constant basis. Posting on Pinterest does not have to be as aggressive as Twitter, however. Frequency: At least five times a day
Instagram, like Pinterest, is for people interested in visual content. Frequency: No more than two to three updates per day

Create or Source Great Content to Share

Something else to keep in mind — make certain the content is balanced. One suggestion is to use the 5-3-2 rule. Out of ten social media updates:

Five should be content from others
Three should be about your food truck
Two should be personal status updates

The updates can consist of different types and include links, images, quotes, retweets, and text only updates.

Fill Up Your Social Media Editorial Calendar

Excel is a common way to create a content calendar but, luckily, you do not have to start from scratch. A number of free templates are available that can help. Our favorites come from Hubspot and Hootsuite, the best part…they’re free.

It can take the most tech savvy businesses time to set up an effective workflow for creating and posting social media content. The key is to plan far enough ahead and give yourself time to work everything out so that each post is thought out and strategically aligned with your brand.

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The Bottom Line

Do you have a social media calendar for your food truck? Do you have any additional tips for food truck vendors looking to set up their own? Share your thoughts in the comment section below or on social media. Facebook | Twitter