As with any other digital marketing initiative, social media needs a plan and the top social media agencies know they need an edge. An editorial calendar puts them in the driver’s seat when it comes to planning and executing their content plans. So what’s the big deal? Editorial calendars have been around for a long time. Agencies use them to plan blog and PR content. But a social editorial calendar has even more value, here’s why.

Building Relationships – Getting to Know What Works

When first building a following on social networks, social media agencies work to establish a brand voice. At the same time they have to understand what will resonate with their intended audience. Especially at first it’s key to track what content is getting the best engagement. It’s also important to create a habit of consistent posting. An editorial calendar can help you do that. You’ll know what got posted where and you can see if it helped build a rapport with followers.

How to Create a Social Editorial Calendar

Here are some great examples of how to set up a social editorial calendar:

Hootsuite’s Template: https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Editorial-Calendar-Template.xlsx

Hubspot’s Template: http://bit.ly/2aVrAKY

Both of these use Excel to help you keep your social content planned and organized. If you don’t care for the Excel/tab/sheet method (although the above templates are well thought out and great for many situations), you can try Trello. I have recently become a big fan of Trello for a number of projects I am working on, and I can easily see how this visual system which allows for infinite customizations, collaboration, creation of tasks, attachments and more would work as a content management tool. Plus it gives you a tactile sense of accomplishment as you move the cards around and define various aspects of he process as done [bold, italicize].

I highly recommend reading this explanation from the Trello blog if you are looking for a unique and useful way to manage your content yourself and with your team.

What’s the Best Reason to Use a Social Editorial Calendar?

Short of better organization and efficiency, accountability is a big benefit to using social editorial calendars. If you are the client, have your social media agency share the calendar with you so you can track the development, publishing, and tracking of content. You want to be able to hold your agency accountable for the production and distribution of content. You also can weigh in on some of the trends you notice in the reactions to the content (make sure your agency adds a section to the calendar that tracks re-tweets, shares, likes, comments, etc.). These may help you develop new content ideas to present to your agency.

If you are the social media agency, then the editorial calendar also acts as a reporting tool. Every month you can tabulate the results and present them in a report format, and discuss the trends and how your hard work creating content has paid off. The calendar can also be a godsend when you are in a hurry and don’t have time to think about new topics to push out over several clients’ social channels. This methodical content planning and publishing tracker keeps everything organized.

Are you looking for a Gatlinburg social media agency that has been using content calendars efficiently for years? Organically certainly has! We can transform your content marketing into a lead generating powerhouse! Contact us today.