August 6, 2018

3.7 : Develop social media editorial calendar

3.7 : Develop social media editorial calendar

Dr. Aleksej Heinze, Associate Professor at KEDGE Business School (France), Visiting Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

So in terms of social media calendars, it’s important to try and break down your campaigns in different sections so that you have an overall overview of how your structure of the content publication works and that gives you a general overview of the dates and the content that will be shared and, ultimately, this will give you a consisting feed of information.

A good rule of thumb is to have one blog post a week, for example, or at least one blog post so let’s say that some businesses might think it might be too often you might want to do one a quarter. But what is useful for you to do is look at your competitors and see where do they sit and then so you are not behind.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

So we do use a social media calendar. Perhaps for half of the social media content that we produce, we would refer to a calendar, and because it is scheduled in advance, we are sure that we are getting the right messages out amongst all of the ad hoc messages that are going out for the other half of the schedule.

Scheduling ensures that the right messages for your buyer persona go out at the right times

So, for example, on a Monday, for a recruitment agent, it’s very important to have messages going out about jobs, etc. because they are the days (Monday and Tuesday) that candidates tend to apply and look for new opportunities. Later in the week, our messages tend to get a little bit more friendly and advice-driven and commenting on digital marketing trends, just to engage with candidates. Knowing that the responses and the actual engagement and the applications for jobs aren’t as volume-heavy later in the week compared to a Monday and Tuesday. So by scheduling this, you’re ensuring that you have the right messages going out at the right times no matter what else is going on across your business.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

We are calling it a content map. So it’s based on a calendar with specific days and major events, but also it’s based on the seasonality of our product.

Content is season dependent

Let’s say for the gardening products, you can see that, after March, it is the hot season for our client. So we have different content strategy during winter and during summer.

Kristina Chokoeva, Marketing Director, DINO, Bulgaria

In terms of digital marketing, our main focus is on social media. We have a social base of about 5,000 likes and we constantly try to engage with our fans. But content is key; therefore we have a weekly calendar with the posts we want to publish this week, which includes products suggestions, any new events we are being part of, or some interesting information that might be useful to our fans. All these posts get scheduled on Hootsuite, which automatically publishes them to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Plan engagement around wider events like Halloween – that are relevant to your buyer persona

We try to vary the posts so that they are interesting and exciting, by launching new campaigns such as “Friends of DINO”. We’ve asked our fans to send us pictures of how they wear our clothes. The results were fascinating! We got pictures from all over the world, from small villages in Bulgaria to the metropolitan areas in the US. We often organize games on social media. For example, last Halloween, we had a competition called: “Halloween for me is…” Our clients had the freedom of sending us tales, pictures, poems, drawings, and the winners got a voucher to use in our stores.

Exercise

Develop an editorial calendar

Editorial calendars don’t have to involve complex documents it could be a simple spreadsheet that gives you an overview of what is going to go live and when.

Here is an example of a simple template:

Editorial calendar template
Social media content calendar

Create your calendar

Think about your blogging activities so far. Have you amplified your content through networks other then Twitter or CreativeHive? Think about the potential buyer persona for your blog posts, and plan some activities until the end of this course that will help you to engage with others interested in Digital Marketing. Populate your plan and put it into practice!

Additional materials

Editorial calendars

There are a number of reasons for editorial calendars – read this blog post on how editorial calendars are being used by brands

http://mashable.com/2013/02/25/brands-editorial-calendars/

http://graywolfseo.com/seo/seo-editorial-calendar/

References

Creating an Editorial Calendar for Content Marketing

 https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo…

How to Build and Operate a Content Marketing Machine

 https://moz.com/blog/how-to-build-…

Pleae see chapter 3 links below:

3.0 Buyer persona development
3.1 The importance of understanding who the target audience is
3.2 Planning integration of search and social media
3.3 Keyword research for buyer persona
3.4 Social media channels for buyer persona
3.5 Develop keyword plan for a campaign
3.6 PPC keyword vs organic keyword plan

For chapter 4, follow these links:

4.0 How campaigns fit into a wider implementation of the overall organisation strategy
4.1 Example company campaign plan
4.2 Key elements of campaign management – Gantt chart
4.3 Risk management
4.4 Digital project management tools and techniques
4.5 Project plan monitoring and review
4.6 Marketing automation
4.7 PPC campaign planning