One of the biggest challenges that companies have with social media marketing is maintaining a consistent presence. They will go through periods where they post daily and work to engage with other accounts, only to go dark for a month or longer. Because social media is a top-funnel marketing tactic, it is rarely attributed to direct sales. This means it is often one of the first things to get cut from the budget or from your team’s to-do list. 

Burnout is also a real issue for social media managers. Coming up with creative content day-in and day-out can exhaust anyone, causing marketing managers to post fewer updates and skip days here or there. 

Fewer social media updates mean lower engagement rates. Social media algorithms use the snowball effect to promote brands. I’ve worked with clients where their posts received unprecedented engagement rates on an average post just because an image or video shared a few days prior went viral. Brands with high engagement rates will continue to get the exposure they want while inconsistent brands will start back at the beginning every time they take a break.

Fortunately, you don’t have to constantly fight burnout and dedicate several hours per week to social media content creation. With a clear editorial calendar, you can quickly fill up your work and ensure that you have content even during the busiest times in your office.

This guide will walk you through the editorial calendar creation process and provide tips for easier management and delegation.

1. Find an Editorial Calendar that Works for You

There are dozens of companies that are dying to give you an editorial calendar template. You can download these for free and use them at face value, or you can modify the templates for your own needs. You can find two popular editorial calendar tools at HubSpot and CoSchedule. 

Decide what kind of template works for your brand. Some people will embrace a clean spreadsheet while others will want a more traditional calendar view. A calendar view will also give you visual cues to make sure that your content isn’t too cluttered together or certain themes aren’t posted too far apart. Personally, I prefer a hybrid. I am a visual learner, so I prefer to have a calendar that I can glance at to see what content is going live and when. However, I also use a spreadsheet to reduce clutter, make it easy to grab information and allow multiple people to collaborate at once. 

Below is the calendar view that we will work with throughout this article, using September 2019 as the sample month:

2. Look for Major Holidays and Events

Once you have an editorial calendar, start with the easy days. Block out Christmas, Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, or whatever major holidays fall on that month. What posts will you need for these days – both before and during the holiday? Will the office be closed? Would you like to honor the holiday?

Below is an example of a content note for Labor Day, which falls on the first Monday of September.

Outside of national holidays (where banks and schools are closed), there are also lesser holidays that many companies celebrate on social media. IHOP promotes Pancake Day while Dunkin lures customers in on National Donut Day. Even if your company doesn’t offer a special deal based on a holiday, you can still use these minor events to create quick, image-heavy social media content. Below are a few holiday examples for September.

You can take these holidays as lightly or as seriously as you want. For a cheeky post, you can encourage employees to leave the office and take a long lunch on National Cheeseburger Day, or you can use an event like Business Women’s Day to highlight unequal pay in the workplace.

3. Promote Your Blog Content

As a copywriter, I am always begging my clients to promote their blog content on social media. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website and share the content that your team worked so hard to create. Plus, if you create blog content consistently, then you should always have something to share on social media. 

As you can see, our editorial calendar example is updated to share blog content that is published twice per month.

You have two options when reposting blog content on social media. First, you can post your top posts. These pages have a history of success and will likely generate higher engagement rates. However, you can also repost content that wasn’t as successful when it went live. This can give it fresh life and drive new people to read it. You work hard to create your blog content – don’t waste it.

If you focus on evergreen blog post ideas, then you can continue to share blog content several months after it goes live.

4. Schedule Throwback Days

There’s a reason why #ThrowbackThursday has more than 49 million tags on Instagram. Looking back on where you came from compared to where you are now is exciting – in both your personal life and as a brand. You can apply the principles of Throwback Thursday to your social media calendar – even if you’re not posting on a Thursday. 

This option is particularly popular for brands with a long history that can share old photos or companies that have grown significantly in the past few years.

5. Develop a Content Series

As you can see, your editorial calendar is starting to fill up. Even before you create a social media post, a third of your days already have content planned out.

Your next step is to come up with a series that fits the month to develop content around. 

For example, September is Self Improvement Month, which several brands can create social media posts around. A local gym could post health tips or an office could create content focused around growing professionally. 

A few common series that brands rely on to fill their social media editorial calendars include:

• Employee spotlights
• Customer profiles or testimonials
• Top tips or hacks
• Countdowns to certain events
• Definitions of industry jargon
• Behind the scenes peeks

You can create a series that lasts a few weeks (like a five-day countdown), or one that lasts several months. You can also create content for the series all at once and then schedule out the posts, helping you save time over the course of the month or year.

6. Leave Space for Breaking News

There will be a few spaces on your calendar that you can save for last-minute posts and emergencies. There are also times when your brand shouldn’t post. As Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Bahamas in September, brands like Royal Caribbean needed to clear their social media channels so they weren’t offering cheap deals to the affected areas. They also needed to use the space to talk about their part in the relief efforts.

Leave two or three days where you can pause your content (or move it to a different day) to post relevant information as needed. You never know when a throwback post will get replaced with breaking news.

Try to make your “free days” on less popular social days for your brand. I used the weekend as an example of when your company can afford to go dark if nothing comes up during the month.

7. Create a Spreadsheet for Industry Content

Just by following this process you can fill up the vast majority of your editorial calendar before the month even starts. From here, you only have a week or two that you need to come up with content for. Instead of using your creative energy to create 30 days of content, you only need to fill in 10 days. 

I recommend keeping a spreadsheet or Google doc with interesting content, links, images, videos, memes, or anything else that would be interesting for your brand. You can also share this document with others in your marketing team (or company as a whole) to add to. Then, you can pull from this list to create engaging content.

How to Use a List-Based Editorial Calendar

At the start of the article, I mentioned how you might use a spreadsheet to create content instead of a calendar. For the sake of example, here is what a list format would look like, using the first few days of September.    

Once you know what the post is going to be, you can write in the copy, start pulling relevant images, and collect necessary links to go with the post. 

Pro Tip: you can also use this list to report on the success of your social content. Create tabs listing the impressions, likes, comments, and shares for each post, which you can fill in after the content goes live. Then you can see what content your audience loves and what content they hate. This way you can always keep improving.

Create Content and Schedule it Ahead

Social media is (and always will be) a daily activity for your marketing team. However, you can plan ahead to limit the amount of work it takes each day. 

Following this process, you can draft 30 social media posts for the month in just a few hours. You can save the content and post it as needed, or use tools like Buffer to schedule the content out. If you choose this option, continue to monitor your posts. Check the content when it is supposed to go live, respond to comments or questions, and stay engaged on your channels. 

Just because you can create dozens of social media posts in just a few hours doesn’t mean your social media management is reduced to a monthly activity. 

An editorial calendar is meant to help you take control of your social media channels to prevent burnout and maintain consistency. When used well, it will provide you with a clear plan where you always have something in your queue to keep your audience engaged. 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay