We already covered what to do before you start your editorial calendar. But now, we’re gonna break down some practical steps to starting your own Editorial Calendar.
Starting your Editorial Calendar
List out the months you will be covering. Many editorial calendars are 8 months to a year.
Fill in the time-sensitive content like holidays or seasons that best amplify your content. Is there an annual sale that you hold? Are you busiest during the holidays? Plan out what content people are searching for or your most common questions during that time.
Fill in sale/busy times for promotional periods. When will you be craving a content calendar the most? The answer is always, but plan ahead for the busy and slow times, when you’re so overwhelmed you can’t think of what to post, or when you’re slow and have a lot of time on your hands.
Vary your content. People want variety. It’s helpful to have campaigns and promote your product or service, but it is also valuable to mix it up with a variety of kinds of content (polls, videos, shared content, graphics). It’s also great to share your goals, successes, and news. People like to get to know the faces behind a business.
Sprinkle in branding and key messages. An easy fill in for content is branding and key messages. It helps to remind your followers of why you do what you do. Share your mission, goals, and values.
Planning Ahead
Content planners
Buffer and Hootsuite are both great platforms for planning and scheduling content ahead of time. Once you’ve written all of your content, you can assemble all of your photos and videos and schedule them out with Buffer or Hootsuite.
Buffer the Content Slayer
See what we did there? Buffer is honestly more intuitive, but some plans you have to play for. You can set your content posting consistency, make groups for content to post to multiple platforms, then upload and modify content for each platform. You can make your schedule so that as you upload content it automatically schedules it in the queue, then you can just drag and drop to rearrange. So nice!
Facebook/Twitter
If you’re using the holy trinity (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) then you can just hook up your Twitter to your Facebook page and everything you post to Facebook will also be posted to Twitter.
Facebook itself has its own scheduling system that’s actually pretty nice.
If you have an Instagram account, make it a business account. You get lots of great analytics that you will want to monitor. You can also connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page. So in an ideal world, you could just post to Instagram and that will post out to Facebook and Twitter. But you cannot schedule Instagram posts, you have to post those in real time, so keep that in mind.
To cover all your bases, we recommend having some content scheduled so that your page is consistently populating.
Best IG planner: Preview.
The Preview App ($8) lets you plan all of your Instagram posts, add filters, and create hashtag groups. All you do is upload content, create a consistent filter, write out the captions, pick your hashtag groups, then schedule it. When you schedule, you have to make sure that your notifications for Preview are set on your phone. Preview then sends you a notification at the time that you scheduled your post. Much like the repost app, the Preview app will have everything set and ready for you to go. You can then copy/paste and upload to IG in a matter of seconds. While you’re on IG, check in with your comments, reply to a few, and be on your way.
Related Articles
How to Create an Editorial Calendar: (Part 1) Before You Get to Your Calendar
How to Create an Editorial Calendar: (Part 3) Getting ahead on content
