4 hot tips to remember when creating a social media editorial calendar

One thing I’m often asked by clients when they want to start with a social media marketing campaign to enhance their digital footprint is what should they post on their social media profiles (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest) and how often should they post/update their profiles. The best way, in my opinion, is by creating an editorial calendar for their campaign that outlines everything regarding their strategy.

The editorial calendar should consist of a framework of what you want to achieve with your social media campaign and will include content ideas, themes, and messages you would like to communicate with your target audience.

It’s important that when you want to start using social media to engage with your target market and to build some brand awareness for your business, you create an editorial calendar so that you don’t lose track of what you must do and the business goals you would like to achieve.

Creating an editorial calendar is easy, but which components should you consider when creating one?

Do you know what you are going to publish on your social media profiles? If you do, when are you going to publish new content and updates? Big businesses that are using a dedicated social media team have the ability post more often because they have a staff to manage it all. Smaller ones will not have the capacity, but it’s important to note this in your editorial calendar because if you are failing with your plan, you are basically planning to fail.

Traditional marketing

If you are combining all of your marketing campaigns where social media can play a key role in the execution of your strategies and reaching your goals, your editorial calendar should include specific dates for what should be posted and where. It’s important that all of your planned efforts with your traditional campaigns are be aligned with your social media campaign. If you are not coordinating this so that all of your campaigns work together, you may confuse your audience and might put your objectives at risk.

When to engage with your audience

There will be times with your social media strategy where you will likely want to increase the level of engagement on selected social media channels. During these periods, dates should be defined and booked to publish magnetic content to drive traffic to the selected channels and any other related websites. Take note that you should also set aside some time to protect you from any issues that creep up if you want to increase the level of engagement with your target audience.

Use other digital marketing methods

If you are busy with any other digital marketing campaigns, ensure that you integrate your strategy into your editorial calendar. If you are using a blog with your digital marketing strategy, plan on what and when to publish specific content and the keywords you are going to target so that it works hand in hand with your editorial calendar. It’s important that if you want everything to work together you should include all the details regarding your digital marketing strategy and have it listed in your editorial calendar along with all the processes of putting it into action.

Marketing goals

Even though your baseline marketing objectives shouldn’t change, there will be circumstances where they might change a bit. This usually happens when budgets are modified and so the objectives will also. If this happens to you and it affects the execution of your strategy, your editorial calendar should be agile and flexible enough to reflect the changes and obtain the new objectives.