When you decide to get serious about your social media presence, one of the most important things you can start using is a content calendar. These can range in both style and form, but the goal is always the same. You need to be able to know what information is going, when is it going out and where is it going?
Content Calendars can range from full-blown web apps to basic excel sheets. When you combine a content calendar with scheduling tools such as Hootsuite and Latergramme, you can quickly and efficiently post to the specified social platforms.
So what type of information should you consider when creating a content calendar? These are the columns that I like to use:
Time
What time do I plan on posting the content at on a platform? When you research and study your analytics, you can find out what times yield the best results. In my situation, I know that posting content on Facebook at 1:00 pm leads to more people seeing it.
Services such as Hootsuite provide auto scheduling for your content. It’ll look at the best times to post content while taking into consideration any other content you want to post. It structures your day and picks the times that will yield the best results.
Platform
This column is pretty straight forward. Where do you plan on posting this content? I like to give each platform it is own row even if the content is the same. So a post about Periscope, for example, that is going out on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter would result in three new rows. This lets me see how much content is going out in the day quickly for each platform.
Content
What do you plan on saying with your post? Whatever my message is I put it here. I like to use Grammarly to ensure that my posts make sense when I get approval the content goes on my calendar. I also include any hashtags I plan on using, that way it is easy to copy and paste into Hootsuite when the time comes.
Link
Again, this is very straight forward. Where do I want my post to link? If you are promoting a blog, service or product, it is here that you would add your link.
Media
The final column in my content calendar. If you plan on including any imagery or video in your post, this is where you would include the link. I like to keep any imagery being sourced from my machine in the same folder as my calendar; this makes finding imagery quick.
All in all, content calendars are pretty simple to use. There isn’t much to making a post on a social platform but when you take an hour to organize your content, you put yourself in a better position to execute successfully.