New Year, New Habits - Building an Editorial Calendar

Are you new and just getting started with social media? Have you been using social platforms but feel like your engagement is suffering because you don’t have a solid strategy in place? Social media, like any other aspect of marketing, is more effective when a plan is established and followed. Success can be found by winging it but it’s not as likely, and not nearly as sustainable.

Building an editorial calendar is the essential first step when it comes to strategizing your social media efforts. A calendar is a tool that allows business owners to create and curate consistent content in a time efficient way. It breaks down content into platforms, number of posts per day/week, and scheduling for peak times.

Pick Your Platforms

Spend some time examining the diversity of the social media platforms to determine which sites will have the best impact for your business. Each of the platforms has different strengths and weaknesses and one-size fits all plans will fail in impact and efficiency. 

Then it’s time to figure out how often to post and that is also unique to the platform. Facebook posts should be no more than 3 – 10 each week, while Twitter needs at least 5 posts every day. On top of that, an examination of peak times of the day is necessary as well to ensure that posts are hitting at the most effective time.

Posting Times

If you have already been posting to social, the next step is to evaluate what you’ve been posting based on its rate of engagement. Certain posts will attract more attention than others. Start by scheduling and incorporating those types of content into your calendar and build from there.  Most of the social platforms offer some sort of analytics tool if it is not immediately obvious what is working and what is falling flat.

If social media is a new tool at your disposal, start thinking about what posts resonate with you the most when you are using various social media platforms. Check out some competition to see what type of engagement success they are having. Make some notes and use that as a starting point in developing your first editorial calendar.

Curating Content

Once you know where to post, when to post, and what types of content to post – it’s time to start curating content. The first priority should be original content. There should be some original content being created every week. The rest of it should be curated, which means finding content online that can be shared with your audience. When curating, it’s important to stay true to your targeted audience and your brand. Stay focused and on topic. Share information that would be interesting or beneficial to your readers.

To make this more streamlined, start compiling a list of resources. This would be websites, hashtags and other social media tools. There are many social tools available that will automatically offer suggestions based on recent content or a set of keywords.

January is the perfect time of year to begin implementing some #NewHabits, including developing an editorial calendar that can be used to make social media more impactful. If creation of the calendar is out of your wheelhouse or too time consuming, contact our Social Media Team for assistance. We’d love to help you #BeAwesome this year and really ROCK your social content!

~ Social Media is changing the way people do business.  Don't get left behind ~ 

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Hollie Clere, of The Social Media Advisor is a "#BeAwesome" Developer, Social Media Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+ , YouTube,Pinterest, Instagram  and the tools to manage them. 

Click here for her Social Media Workshops, Classes and Seminars.