Create an editorial calendar for your social media

We show you how to get the most out of your social media networking.

By Francois Muscat

As a business owner, you’ve probably realised the necessity of publishing blogs and online content. Regardless of whether you’re already blogging or whether you are planning to embark on your digital marketing journey in the New Year, one thing soon becomes clear - you need a plan.

Creating an editorial calendar for your social media is vital to the success of your digital marketing campaign.

• It keeps the momentum going: Coming up with the first four blog post ideas is easy; coming up with a year’s worth of ideas is challenging, especially if you don’t have a plan.
• It forces you to commit to a schedule: Posting the link to your new blog post across all your social media channels should only take a few minutes, so you may not need a full-time social media manager, but remembering to stick to the plan and post the updates is almost impossible without a clear schedule and goals.
• It keeps it interesting: As a business owner you may have interesting industry updates and developments to share, but compiling a blog or article takes time. As a result, and in order to get the job done quickly, many people resort to recycling old content. With an editorial calendar you can plan your themes and topics in advance, helping you to keep things interesting for your readers.
• It aligns goals: Your digital marketing goals can only be reached if your social media, content marketing and other online marketing goals are aligned. Creating a calendar that allows you to view the ‘big picture’ will help you achieve your goals.

Planning an extensive editorial calendar will help you maintain your social media and blogging momentum and to do so you have to start thinking like a publisher.

Think like a publisher and plan your editorial calendar 

Just because you are publishing your blog posts and other social media online, does not mean you shouldn’t think like a traditional ‘publisher’. One of the best tools a magazine editor has is their editorial calendar. This simple and effective tool plans out all activity over a few months or up to a year in advance.

The best place to start when developing an editorial calendar is by compiling a list of all your blog posts published to date. In so doing you will be able to identify any ‘holes’ that may have occurred and how the content was received.

Use this information to look ahead and think about any seasonal activities or themes you could cover in the coming year. If you have never written a blog post, check out your competitor’s publishing activities to see what they’re doing, where they are falling short and how you could do it better.

Looking back and ahead, a good editorial calendar should include:

• All blog posts and guest post titles
• SEO keywords used
• Social engagement (how many re-tweets, likes or comments each received)
• When press releases were sent out
• Seasonal events to blog about

Things to remember

Even if you feel your digital marketing plan isn’t cast in stone, it does not mean you can’t/shouldn’t compile an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar is your game plan; it allows you to plan ahead, set goals, anticipate trends and measure success and it can help you to guide your social media marketing across your business. Organizing your social media efforts may require a little effort, but once you are clear about where you’re heading, achieving your social media and PR goals is much easier. With a calendar your goals are always visible and your direction clear.

However, plans also change, so think of your editorial calendar as a living, breathing tool that can/should be adapted to reflect your change of plans.

Setting practical goals

How many items of content would you like to produce? If your aim is say three blogs per week, with five tweets per blog and along with two Google+ and two Facebook updates for each post adds up to 81 pieces of content per week. That is 324 posts per month and would require quite a lot of time and effort on your part. Rather start with small, practical goals – one blog post per week, five Twitter updates, two Facebook, two LinkedIn and two Google+ posts.

There are many tools that allow you to schedule all of these posts in one go and automatically update your various social media channels on the days and times you chose. I usually recommend HootSuite because it’s cheap and easy to use.

These are examples of long-term goals:

• Listen and learn about your customers. Set up Google and Twitter alerts for mentions of your company. Knowing what your customers are saying can help you improve your offering and engage better.
• Grow your community to 5,000 people. Develop targeted campaigns to encourage the sharing of content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Pinterest.
• Website integration. Integrate your social and website properties.
• Reach new markets. Grow your LinkedIn group to 250+ members.
• Become a resource authority. Build up your website and company’s authority and trust, both on- and off-site.

Break it down

Start with a quarterly calendar and then break it down into monthly, weekly and daily tasks. This way you can easily identify seasonal trends or tie it in with marketing campaigns or sales drives.

If your business sales usually increase during the winter, or if you normally have specials during the holiday season or attend a specific trade show each year, plan your content around these events and create a hype that will help you achieve your business goals.

• Here are two free editorial calendar templates you can use:
http://scrapsofmygeeklife.com/online-life/blogging/editorial-calendar-template-free/
http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content-editorial-calendar-template/

Once you have created an entry and publishing date for each project, fill in the important details:

• Name the project: Give it a title and description so that the theme and message of the post is clear to everyone.
• Status: State whether the project has been produced and published, produced but not published or whether it still needs to be assigned and produced.
• Type of content: Identify the project as a blog post, article, white paper, infographic, video, graphic or other type of content.
• Editor: Who is responsible for approving the content for publishing?
• Distribution channels: Include the details of the social media and other website properties (blogs or websites) where the content is to be distributed.
• Secondary distribution channels: Will others be sharing your content on their personal social media accounts? If you wrote a guest post, be sure to ask the guest blogger to also promote the content on their personal profiles.
• Metrics: How will you be measuring the success of the project? HootSuite has an easy to use analytics tool that can show you how many times your content was shared on social media.
• Notes: This includes the specific dates and times or other ad-hoc instructions.

Get people involved

A social media editorial calendar should be a collaboration tool. Communicate it to your marketing staff, management, PR and sales teams to obtain their input. It could also spark online conversations, as your staff is now aware of where and how you will be communicating.

Many employees have their own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and maybe even blogs. Embrace these tools rather than trying to shut it down or ban it at the office. If your staff are truly engaged and involved in your social media goals, they could share your content with their own followers and friends, giving you instant access to even more people.

How an editorial calendar helps you measure your goals and progress

Having a calendar in place helps you to reflect on and learn from past social media efforts and campaigns. Measuring performance to determine areas for improvement and benchmarking success is pivotal to any social media strategy. Your editorial calendar should enhance your social media marketing by helping you reach your content marketing goals.

Things you should measure:

• How many people read your blog
• How many people clicked through to your website after reading a blog post. This is easily tracked with Google Analytics, so it’s important to include hyperlinks to your website throughout your blog content.
• How many people ‘Liked’ your posts on Facebook
• How many people re-tweeted your posts on Twitter
• How many people gave a +1 to your post on Google+

By measuring these responses you will gain a better understanding of what your target audience wants to read, what they like to share and when you should be posting content. Even if you have the best editorial calendar and are active on all the right social media channels, it all boils down to writing and distributing the right content.

Why do we need content marketing? 

Sales are declining and some marketing initiatives, like cold calling, no longer work, making it necessary to apply more inbound marketing tactics.

Content marketing is about understanding what customers want/need to know about your products and services. Establish your position as an expert in your field by providing relevant and educational content.

Why do you need quality content?

• It develops trust,
• drives traffic to your website, and
• it educates and informs.

The Google Panda update focused on ensuring that sites which are given high Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) are actually relevant. Sites with poor quality content, and which are typically used to farm back links, are penalised. It is the quality, rather than the quantity of links that are important. What you need is good quality content and natural links.

If you are not active on social media and you don’t have social share buttons on your website, you are not giving your content the opportunity to be shared and distributed online. You don’t have to use all of the social media channels right from the get-go, but your long-term plan should include sharing your content through the following channels:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Pinterest

When you are creating content for distribution via your social media channels, remember that there are different phases to the content funnel. You might be speaking to somebody who has never heard of your franchise, a loyal client or somebody who is simply considering you as an option. It’s important that you cater to all these readers and speak to them in the tone of voice that appeals to them and takes them further down the funnel.

The content funnel

Awareness

Increase the awareness, knowledge and understanding of your company by creating and sharing the following types of content:

• Blog posts
• Social media updates
• Infographics
• Press releases

Consideration

Raise awareness of your products and services with the following types of content:

• eBooks
• White papers
• Webinars
• How to’s
• Presentations

Decision

Create confidence, purpose and conclusion around your brand with:

• Case studies
• Products
• Brochure
• Buy now
• Services
• Free demos
• Loyalty schemes, packages and methodology

You have to start somewhere, so even if you don’t have an entire year’s content planned, start by planning an editorial calendar for a business quarter or even a month. Get in the game sooner rather than later in order to start building your online community.

WSI
www.wsioms.co.za
francois@wsioms.co.za
+27 11 468 3138