How to Create a Social Media Editorial Calendar

Save your sanity and create a social media editorial calendar today. Building a business takes more than flying by the seat of your pants or meeting last minute self-imposed deadlines. Developing a social media editorial calendar means more efficient output and will give you less stress.

If it feels impossible to get ahead of the social media posting game, I want to tell you it is not. I want to tell you the value it will add to the flow of your online business will be priceless. Setting up a social media editorial calendar ahead of time will free you up to focusing on marketing your business and delivering a good product for lasting clients.

Sharing good quality content across all your social media channels is one of the most important things you can do to grow your business, both from engagement and to build on your existing audience. Knowing this key to a successful business should be enough to make you stop and take the time to create a social media editorial calendar now.

You can schedule out your content months in advance with quality posts that you know your audience needs. This will inevitably save you tons of time during your daily schedule.

There are a few things that you may have to do before starting your editorial calendar to give you a baseline of where to start. Something you can do to properly start a social media editorial calendar is to conduct a simple social media audit. You can do this yourself or outsource it for a very low price.

An audit simply requires you to determine what social media channels you currently have active and evaluate how effective each channel is to your audience. By effective I mean, which social media platform is experiencing the most growth and where is your traffic engagement the highest in.

You can place your highest ranking platform with the most engagement and then figure out what is being engaged with the most (i.e. images, videos, texts, links etc.).

*If you post on various platforms you may want to use in-app analytics for each channel to look for spikes in engagement and traffic. Here is how to find some social media platform analytics within the apps themselves:

• On Facebook, go to > Insights > Posts
• On Twitter, go to your profile picture, click the drop-down menu and select Analytics > Tweets
• On Instagram, go to your business profile, select the bar graph in the top right-hand corner and select Posts
• For LinkedIn, go to Manage Page > Analytics > Updates
• For Pinterest, go to Analytics > Profile > Top Pin Impressions

How to Create a Social Media Editorial Calendar

Now that you have gathered your needed information for your social media editorial calendar like which platform is bringing in the most traffic and what types of posts generate the most engagement, you can now start building it. Here’s how:

1. Frequency

Determine how many times a week or how often to post on each social media platform. Your highest traffic and engaging platform would need more posts.

For instance, if your highest engagement is on Instagram then you know that you have to work on links back to your website, images that are appealing, and graphics that will either ask questions or enlist some reactions.

Do you need to post 5 times a week? More? Less? Set a number and try it for a month. Then re-evaluate.

You are also able to schedule your posts during optimal times of the day increasing the odds they’ll get seen by most people. Your analytics can clearly show you what times more of your audience are online, this provides you a set time when you should be posting. Last minute posting does not allow you the luxury to maximize opportunities like this.

2. Theme

An easy way to develop content is to develop a theme based on your audience’s needs. You can even post a survey to your audience on your platforms asking them what they would like to see more of. You can go through your social media platforms and look at what questions your audience has had in the past.

You can look through other similar social media groups and glean from questions that the community is asking or what topics they are buzzing about. There is nothing wrong with doing this. Your goal is to be a source of knowledge for your audience.

When cosidering a theme for your online content think about upcoming seasons or special occassions in your niche. Some niche like marketing are evergreen while food or homeschooling have seasons and events throughout the year that you may want to highlight.

3. Content creation

Once you have written down some themes and topics that you know your audience will want to learn about or be a part of, you can now start creating or outsourcing content to share with your audiences.

You can outline all your social media content through Trello, then share with your team to create content based around your themes.

One of my favorite features in Trello is the ability to upload attachments like documents and images right into your “card” or category. Once you are finished or your team is finished creating content they can mark that portion as complete.

Trello even provides you with reminders when your due date is coming. Trello allows you to have all your content ready to post in one place and on time.

Trello is a project management tool that is excellent for keeping track of your content ideas. It even has a calendar add-on that you can use to get a monthly view of your social media and website’s editorial content. The Premier Executive Media team utilizes Trello to organize all of our content in an editorial calendar.

I am sure you can and probably may have been spitting out posts quickly, but businesses who want to be strategic about their goals should take a more proactive and strategic approach. Lay down the groundwork to maximize the most opportunity out of each post.

Social media editorial calendars provide a means of harmonizing what could be a chaotic and inefficient posting style to one that is methodical, keeps a team producing for optimal engagement times, and helps you make the most of your time.

In days where content is saturating the internet, it becomes more and more important for companies to produce consistent, quality, organized, and organic content to stand apart from the rest. Disorganized, random or erratic content just doesn’t fly anymore.

Developing and maintaining a social media editorial calendar can help you take control of how people view your business. To be considered an expert where others fall short, you must be intentional and strategic.

What is the main social media platform for your business? Have you been consistent with your posting?  If not, start implementing a social media editorial calendar today! Let us know how it is helping you! We want to rejoice with you.