How to Build a Content Calendar | Social Media Management

January 18, 2012 Leave a Comment

Many of my clients are concerned about the amount of time they will need to spend creating and searching for content to share with their communities. Writing original content through blog posts can be time consuming. Searching for and curating content to share is also a time investment, especially if done without a plan. My post on using listening tools for brand management and content curation will help organize your content curation. Now it’s time to add a content calendar to your strategy to plan what and when to post to your followers.

What is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is an plan for publishing content to all your social media streams. The format is up to you. I prefer using a spreadsheet, but a Word document, Google calendar, or any other tool will work. If you’re sharing the calendar with other community managers a shared Google Document or calendar using any of these formats is a useful tool.

Your calendar should contain an overview of the topics, the dates, the content and links to relevant information. Include notes on social objects such as photos or videos as well.

Plan for Creating your Content Calendar

Calendars can be set up yearly (very ambitious) or weekly or monthly. If you decide to use a yearly calendar plan to update and change regularly as ideas and topics come up. Remember nothing is set in stone. At the very least, decide on what you plan to post this week to get started. Then as this planning becomes a habit, look farther into the future.

Deciding on Content

Start by looking at your business calendar. What events occur regularly that you want to incorporate into your strategy? Do you have monthly meetings, are there community events you want to promote, do you have a regular schedule of marketing activities? Add these to your calendar and plot out the dates. Remember to include holidays and special events.

Now search for relevant articles, social objects (videos, photos, infographics) and links to your own website to support the content. If you’re new to infographics, Visual.ly is a great place to start. If your strategy includes a blog post per week, this is where you decide on the general topic for those posts. A word or two, a link to an article and an idea for a supporting graphic should suffice at this point.

The Big Picture

Remember, a content calendar is a “big picture” document. Drill down for details as the dates approach. The most important thing to remember is, whatever you are sharing, keep it social and keep your audience in mind. What will add value to their day? What are they seeking?

Put in the effort up front on creating your calendar and you won’t be scrambling for content or neglecting your social spaces and your community down the line.

How do you decide what to share with your community?

Filed under Business, social media Tagged with , , , ,

Social Media Wish List for 2012

January 1, 2012 2 Comments

Wish List

Photo courtesy of Plindberg on Flickr

While 2011 was a banner year for social media growth in the business world, those of us in the profession are still struggling with measuring the results of our efforts. In the hopes that 2012 will bring us functional tools for analyzing all that data, here’s my early wish list for Santa in 2012. If you have a recommendation for a tool for any of the items mentioned on my list, feel free to comment and post your links. I welcome your suggestions! And Santa, I promise to be good all year.

Fan Interest Graphing

Facebook insights, for example, gives us information on our fan page demographics such as age, gender, where likes came from (external referrers) and such, there’s still no good way to see and graph the interests (likes) of our fans. Say for example, a majority of your fans are interested in skiing. Providing content on the topic could help keep them engaged and sharing. So far none of the free services I’ve found give us a way to access this data so it’s included here on my wish list.

Social Media Dashboard

While tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Social Mention and Google Alerts allow us to track and analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPI), I’d like a tool that allows me to aggregate all my social media accounts and posts on one dashboard and then share that dashboard with fans and followers. If you’re interested in tracking dashboards, Barry Hurd’s blog post on Social Media Dashboards give a good outline of the tools available now for tracking conversations. Here’s your chance to make a suggestion if you have a favorite tool for tracking, or for setting up a magazine-like page for all your streams.

Trending Data

I’d like a way to see what was trending in, say, New Orleans, for a date in the past. Twitter’s trending tools allow us to see what’s trending now, and what’s trending in a particular location, but not both location and date specific. At least, I’ve not yet found a good tool to do this. Any suggestions?

Ranking System by Industry

Even though there’s a lot of eye rolling when it comes to discussing metrics like Klout in the social media communities, it does offer some valuable insights. The problem lies in measuring everyone against everyone else, Justin Beiber included. I’d like to know how my clients measure against others in their industry. Since Klout uses the influence of your followers as part of the metric, B2B companies looking to engage with small, niche businesses will naturally have lower Klout scores than B2C companies able to engage highly influential followers. Again, if you have a suggestion feel free to let me know.

Social Media Workflow Tools

I know that Hootsuite allows for post coordination under its paid version, which I’ve not tried. I have heard good things about BufferApp.Com and it looks like collaboration tools are included in the free version. Scheduling posts to fan pages is part of the paid version. While the free dashboard Tweetdeck does allow scheduling to all accounts collaboration tools are absent. Any suggestions?

As the year progresses I’m sure my list will change as fast as the landscape of social media changes. As always, I welcome your comments and ideas here, on Twitter @suereynolds or on Facebook.

Happy New Year!

Filed under Business, Facebook, social media Tagged with , , , , ,

Are You Using the 80/20 Rule to Your Advantage?

December 5, 2011 2 Comments

Are you part of the 80%? I’m not talking about an occupy moment here. Instead, I’m referring to the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle. Anyone that’s served on a committee or worked on a team class project has seen this rule in action. It goes like this:

80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Or in business the distribution looks like this:

  • 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers
  • 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your customers
  • 80% of your sales are made by 20% of your sales staff
  • 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people

Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1906 after observing that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population, he developed the principle by also observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. Since that time the principal has been used in economic theory, optimization efforts and quality control measures. For example, Microsoft noted that by fixing the top 20% of the most highly reported bugs, 80% of the errors would be eliminated (Wikipedia).

How this works with Social Media

Simple. You’ll get the best results and engagement from your efforts if 80% of what do you adds value to someone else, either by providing free information, sharing articles written by others, offering discounts, crowdsourcing ideas or pointing out others’ successes. The other 20% can be about you, your products and your ideas. In other words, talk about yourself only 20% of the time. That’s 2 tweets out of 10.

Do you see this principle at work in your social media efforts? Share your ideas with me here.

Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Filed under Business, Marketing, social media, Twitter Tagged with , , , ,

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