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A social media content calendar is a way to organise and plan your business's upcoming social media posts. Planning out your posts allows you to hit important dates, think about when you want to post about certain topics (to coincide with a major news story), and save time.

The best social media content calendars include the post title, the post caption, any accompanying images, the relevant keywords, the posting date, and any hashtags you want to use.

Using a social media content calendar ensures you never miss a post and allows you to think more carefully about the topics or products you're highlighting in your posts.

Yes! There are two optimal strategies to reach customers that aren't following you: hashtags and keywords. Using brand-relevant keywords allows you to rank for search terms your audience will likely use. For example, if you're a local plumber, including the term plumber and your region's name will target relevant customers – in fact, on Instagram, posts with locations generate 79% more engagement.

However, not all social media platforms benefit substantially from a keyword strategy. LinkedIn, for instance, is configured in such a way that keywords don't always resonate as effectively. Nonetheless, using keywords will always produce a greater result than ignoring them.

Audiences change depending on the platforms. With these different demographics, the ideal length of a social media post also changes. Here is a breakdown of the ideal social media post length by platform:

• Facebook: Based on an analysis of 800 million posts, having less than 80 characters was considered optimal.

• Twitter: The optimal length is 71 to 100 characters and a hashtag length of 6 characters.

• LinkedIn: Posts will be cut off at the 140-character mark; the rest of the post will be replaced with the "See More" button. As such, we recommend sticking to 25 words or less. Articles, however, should average between 1,900 and 2,000 words.

• Instagram: The best Instagram post captions are between 138 and 150 characters in length.

A hashtag is a word or keyword phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#). It codes the word or phrase, allowing people searching for related terms to discover your post.

Given the character restrictions on Twitter, there's a limit to how many hashtags you can include. We find the best posts naturally integrate the hashtags into the text. Don't overdo it; no one wants to read a paragraph of hashtags. Adding one or two will suffice.

We recommend restricting your post to between one and three hashtags on Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't allow clickable hashtags in articles, so you'll need to add them to your post. Overdoing hashtags comes across as annoying and unprofessional – less is more.

Instagram is somewhat different. The platform allows up to 30 hashtags, as they're the primary way to drive engagement. According to the data, 30 Instagram hashtags per post results in the most likes and comments.

Some state that users should only use between 3 to 5 hashtags, but the data simply does not bear this out. In fact, as a rule, the more hashtags you include, the more engagement increases. That makes sense; after all, hashtags don't ruin the flow of a post – so add as many relevant hashtags as possible.

Posting on social media takes a lot of time – especially if you're aiming for high-quality posts. For some, it's a little overwhelming (which is where we come in)!

While you don't want to overwhelm your followers with a barrage of posts – spamming their feeds is annoying – you want to stay relevant. That's why we recommend these posting schedules:

• On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 Tweets a day.

• On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week.

• On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a day.

• On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day.

Never post for the sake of it, however. Poor-quality posts will damage your brand image, potentially reducing your followers and conversions. If you're struggling to meet the demands of social media, hire a professional like us.