by By: Cody Koenig
What exactly is a social editorial calendar? According to Digital Journalist, Olsy Sorokina, a social media editorial calendar is an effective way to organize and create content for social media platforms, as well as efficient way help develop your editorial strategy.
Throughout this term, we’ve talked about editorial calendars several times. But what purpose do they serve?
Internet Marketing Expert, Gloria Rand, states that an editorial calendar allow you to: defeat writer’s blog, stay current and up-to-date on posts, schedule guest posts, manage projects, organize creative assets, post consistency, make sure the content meets the needs of your target audience, track which posts receive the most engagement, schedule posts and reduce stress.
Editorial calendars allow you to be strategic, organized and efficient with your posts. In our final projects, we are faced with the challenge of creating editorial calendars for our clients. The most difficult part of using an editorial calendar is the implementation process.
I ran across a post by SproutSocial that explained the process for creating editorial calendars for beginners:
1. Figure Out The Social Posting Workflow. Developing a system can help you create positive content: start brainstorming, make sure the idea has authorization, write the copy, edit the copy and make sure it’s fit for publishing and come up with an image.
2. Decide On How Often to Post. This step really depends on the company and the social networks being used. Always keep your audience in mind when posting, you don’t want to overload them with a ton of information.
3. Find Out How Long it Takes From Idea to Execution. Figure out how long it takes you and your social media team to create content for each social network. By doing this, you’ll have a good idea of how long before an event you should start creating material that way you aren’t waiting till the last minute.
4. Start to Fill Up Your Social Media Calendar Events and Content. After you’ve got the process down, start to fill out your editorial calendar. Think of relevant content to post, look up holidays, determine photos to share and give people a reason to follow you. This is where you can let the company’s personality show.
What advice do you have for editorial calendars? Do you think any of these professionals left out any advice for developing and maintaining social editorial calendars?
Your post on editorial calendars was extremely enlightening. I definitely agree that the implementation aspect tends to be the most difficult. At my internship, I am currently in the process of working with my editor, who is very unfamiliar with social media, to create an editorial calendar. Do you have any advice in explaining the importance of finding relevant content ahead of time, rather than trying to discover new topics when you choose to post?
Cody,
I really liked this post and all the tips you put into it. Personally, the editorial calendar for our final was my favorite part because I felt like after reviewing all the data it was a fun way to show how to implement what we had learned about our clients. I think one thing that worked well for my group when doing this was to put things in that we would want to see too. Keeping things fun made the project easier and, in my opinion, made our calendar better too.