Creating a Content Calendar

Ok, you’re looking at getting organized on your social media presence but have no idea where to start. The biggest piece of advice I like to give is to create a content calendar. Today, we’re going to walk through what a content calendar is and how to set one up to help you succeed!

What is a content calendar

A content calendar is a detailed list of what you’re going to post. It includes everything from what you’ll be saying, when it’s being posted and to where, and any other information you may need to make it happen. Think of your content calendar as your rough guideline of your posting schedule. You don’t have to stick to it 100% but it will help keep you on track, organized, and accountable to your social media strategy. 

Getting started with your content calendar is easy. First, look at what time frame you want to include. I would recommend a month at a time but you can go out as far as you’d like. Together, let’s make a content calendar for March for 4/4 Solutions so you can see the process. I like to start by getting a rough topic of what to post about on a given day.

Step 1 - The Rough Idea

Let’s start with the calendar view page of your content calendar. This page is simply meant to be a rough idea. You don’t need to know all the fine details of what to post. The idea is to get your idea on paper and visualize when and where you are going to have a post go out. With a blank page in front of me, I like to start out by looking for things like holidays and events. Everything else can fall into place around those dates.

Holidays

I like to start by looking at holidays for that month. I’m looking for national holidays and then specific holidays that can be applied to your industry. In March, there’s Saint Patrick’s Day. You can also utilize unique, obscure holidays. For example, March 7th is National Dress in Blue Day. Blue is a big color for 4/4 Solutions so maybe there’s something I could do there.

Your Events

Next look at your upcoming events. Are you doing anything on a particular day that would work for content. This can provide a few different things- one, posting information leading up to the event, during, then recap it after. You can even look ahead to future months for different events and promote them now. So for example if you are doing a sale in April, you could start promoting it in March.

Other ideas

From there, you can fill in to match your preferred frequency with content ideas like testimonials, spotlights, tips/tricks, or whatever other content ideas you have. Here’s where your analytics start to come in handy. You can see what kind of content is performing well and even identify what your posting frequency is.

Step 2 - The Detailed View

Once you have your rough topics, lets move onto the detailed view. List out each day you have content going out. In the next column, list what time it should go out. In another, what platforms. In another, what is the post going to say. Keep going and provide as much detail as you possibly can. Are you using hashtags? What ones? Links? Images or videos? What will they look like? The more information that you provide here, the easier you are making it for yourself later when it’s time to create.

Step 3 - Create and Post

Now that you have your content calendar filled out, what’s next? You start creating your content of course! And once you have it created, make your posts.

So what if you can’t post in the moment? Let’s say you're a restaurant owner and the time your followers are online is in the middle of lunch rush. You don’t want to take the time to post to social media while you’re busy. Here’s where scheduling comes in handy. You can schedule each post to go out exactly when you want. There are a variety of tools out there you can use to do this- some free and some paid- such as Facebook Business Suite, Hootsuite, Loomly, Sendible, or Sprout Social. At 4/4 Solutions, we use one called Metricool.

I prefer to schedule all my posts for that week on Mondays. Then I don’t have to worry about it during the rest of the week and can focus on my clients the rest of the week. Creating your content calendar doesn’t have to take hours and hours. 30 minutes should be all you need to rough out your ideas. And since it serves as a rough guide, it lets you stay flexible to change it if you need to.

With your content calendar finished and posts scheduled, you can now focus on running your business! That is, until the next month comes around and you need to make the next content calendar.