A content calendar is a tool that lets you plan and schedule most of your social media content in advance. You make it, and like meal planning, it helps to ease the burden of posting regularly.
Did you know that, depending on the platform you choose, you may need to post several times per day to best engage with your community? This can seem like a lot of work, unless you plan ahead and have some posts pre-prepared.
Later I’ll discuss content curation. Curated posts are another tool in your toolkit that help make your social media life easier. These can go in your content calendar along with your original content… but we’ll return to this idea later.
For now, we’re learning about how to make a content calendar. This video from Hootsuite provides a great overview. Watch the embedded video here, or, if embedded video is unsupported by your device or web browser, access it at this link on YouTube.
The Hootsuite blog also provides other great resources that will help you put together a content calendar. For example, at this link, you will find a post with tips and templates for creating a social media content calendar [link].
Some social media platforms (like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite) will allow you to schedule posts on some social media platforms (like Twitter) in advance. If you are blogging, most WordPress plugins also allow you to create content in advance and schedule the posting of that content. This means that once you have created your content for your content calendar, depending on the platform, you may be able to set it ahead of time, so you don’t have to think too much about.
Watch out with pre-made posts though. It’s good to prepare a content calendar, but also be ready to be flexible. For example, if a big and tragic event hits the news, you may not want a humorous or lighthearted (but seemingly out of touch) post to appear in your social feeds the same day. Set your content calendar, but don’t forget it! Pivot your content when needed to respond to trending topics or important news stories.
Next, I’ll show you how to increase the amount of content you have in your calendar using content curation. Content curation allows you to use your social listening for the purposes of collecting relevant content aligned with you own. It helps you to be part of the community, and allows you to post frequently without always having to create new content all on your own.