Creating a Monthly Content Calendar
We hear from a lot of small business owners who understand the value and importance of social media but don’t know how to keep up with it. How many times have you gone to a business page to see that sure, it’s been created but the last post was published over a year ago? We hate to be dramatic but honestly, from a marketer’s perspective, it’s the worst! It can look lazy, unpolished, and simply-put, unprofessional – especially if there are comments/questions that have gone unanswered.
Creating a social media presence isn’t hard; it’s maintaining and growing that presence that can be time-consuming and tricky. But we’re here to save the day (or try to!) and share some of our favorite tips with you 🙂 Let’s get to it…
- Organize a Daily Topic List – Determine which days you will be posting on and designate certain topics for those days. For instance every Monday, being an online marketing company, we might decide to share our favorite marketing quote, and every Tuesday, link to an interesting marketing related article. Determining topics for posting days will make creating content much easier for you and take less time.
- Create an Editorial Calendar – At the end of every month set aside some time and create an editorial calendar for the following month. One of the hardest things to do is find time every day to post, it’s often put on the back-burner and never returned to. Which is why creating all the month’s content ahead of time is VERY helpful. You can simply setup a word doc and organize it by dates.
- Schedule Content Out Ahead of Time – Even if the content is already done it can still be difficult to find time to schedule it out, so we suggest you do it all at once. Using a third party app like, Hootsuite, or if it’s just Facebook you’re managing you can schedule it out using their scheduler. *Note: If you’re using an app like Hootsuite, pay close attention to how you tag pages – the tag does not always carry through properly to social channels.
- Turn On Notifications – Now that your content is being automatically published it can be easy to forget about the pages and what sort of activity might be happening on them. Neglecting to respond to comments and questions by your audience is a big no-no in the social media sphere so we suggest you adjust your page settings to ensure that whenever someone comments or engages with the page you get notified of it.
- Keep your Website in Mind – Lastly, if you ever find yourself having a hard time coming up with unique or interesting content take a look at your website – it’s a great place to gather information!
OH and just because you have content scheduled out does not mean you can’t or shouldn’t post real-time content. Sometimes this is the content, the spur of the moment posts that are the most engaging. Now go master that online presence!