Calendaring Your Social Media Marketing Content

From the many Website Optimization Webinars I've done over the past six months, I've signed up for many Facebook company pages, and I follow tons of people on Twitter. I realize there are those companies - or people - that overkill on the posting and those that I never hear from. The over-killers tend to post information about themselves, and to be honest, after a while I don’t even read their content. Then there are those whose information is consistently valuable. I may not have time to read everything they send, but whenever I do, I’m rewarded.

It always comes back to content – valuable content that’s either interesting on its own or that helps me. I have to believe that these organizations that consistently provide insight and useful information don’t just come up with it on the spot. They plan ahead and create an editorial calendar.

Some people do it a month at a time, and others plan for the whole year. Certainly print magazines plan at least a year in advance, and that’s the model I might use when plotting out your social media calendar.  We do something similar here at HubSpot.

The real advantage of making an editorial or content calendar is that you can create a framework that shows how much and where you’re planning to interact socially.  Furthermore you can see how the content posting supports your social marketing objectives.

It also helps you in repurposing existing or evergreen content. It’s hard coming up with fresh content and when you do, you want to make the most of it. Planning out your distribution will show when to write that blog post and when to promote it through your various social channels.  And, if that content totally rocks, when to send it out again.

Also, if you create a white paper, you might want to break up its information into bite-size nuggets of wisdom and scatter them out throughout the following few to many months. A calendar will quickly show you how best to spread the information and line up various communication channels to support the distribution.  Things like podcasts, videos, charts, and other supporting marketing materials that makes your content more valuable.