How to Streamline your Social Media with an Editorial Calendar

By Diana Cordova, Social Media and Content Marketing Consultant

Editorial calendars are often used in different facets of marketing, and social media is no exception.

Once you’ve identified your goals (make sales, attract new customers, build relationships, gain visibility, attract volunteers etc.), your target audience and overall strategy, you can build an editorial calendar that will take you through the entire year of posts and blog articles.

You’ll find that it takes a bit of extra time and effort upfront, but throughout the year it will save you hours and give you a more cohesive plan with consistent messaging to build out your social media.

The editorial calendar can be as simple or extensive as you need it to be.  Here are the basic steps to building a good one:

1. Map out a monthly and weekly calendar that reflects important events such as holidays you want to reference, dates/milestones that are important to your business and your customers e.g.: big sales, offers, anniversary, conferences, special events you’re hosting, scheduled interviews etc.
2. Determine if there are special topics or themes you want to focus on for particular months or weeks e.g. if you’re a nutritionist January is the month to focus on starting a New Year’s eating plan, March is a great month for liver cleanses, November is a good time to share tips for managing diet during the holidays etc.
3. Come up with blog article topics for each month for as many articles as you plan on writing e.g. 4 articles per month. Based the articles on important dates/events and overall monthly or weekly themes.
4. Curate general social media posts based on each months’ theme and special events.  You can find quotes that support the theme, create special event posts based what you currently know (e.g. save the date…), and use your expertise to build a library of tips/comments based on the theme and events you’ve already determined.

Now that you have a solid foundation to ensure you remember to post important happenings and you have basic posts to support your goals each month, all you have to do is create the posts in each platform manually or using a tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.  Then just add timely, relevant posts to supplement throughout the weeks and months to come.

Do you use an editorial calendar?  How has it helped you and what tips do you have to share?