Best Practices For Your Content Calendar

Great content doesn’t always come on a whim, it often takes time to develop a focus or theme for a particular period. Curated and created content falls into this category. As a small business owner, it will be difficult to find that time to create and post every single day. Posting content is important to your brand. It is important because it identifies your business as a leader in the industry, providing information only you can to your audience. Especially if you’re working full time and being an entrepreneur part-time. This is where the creation of a content calendar is important. A content calendar is a layout of all the information you’d like to share about your brand, or anything related to it, for a certain amount of time. Using the calendar allows you to plan ahead for your social channels. According to Hootsuite, there are a few best practices which should be applied when creating your content calendar:

Accessibility

Your content calendar should always be accessible to you and those who work with you. This helps to keep abreast of what’s going on at your business. You may not always be able to pull up the page to check what’s scheduled. So, it should be uploaded to cloud solutions such as google docs and Microsoft Excel, where ideas can be shared in real time and information updated. In addition, it should be accessible from anywhere in an emergency.

Information Required

Save your calendar in a format that is easily understandable. This should include social media channels. Specify what will be posted where. Try not to duplicate content across all your channels at the same time. Include the days and times. When you schedule your content is important to its engagement. Check the insights of the particular network to identify when your audience is most active. Also, include the complete copy or text that will accompany the content. Lastly, add the type of content being posted. Whether its a video, image or just text. Creating your content calendar with this specific information offers a full view of the post before it is posted.

Social Media Days and Events

Every month before ACM creates a content calendar for clients, we research popular social media days that we can recognize, with relevance to the brand. This is an easy way to incorporate fun content and inform your audience that the day exists. It is also imperative that you take note of the events happening around you. For example, you might want to add and recognize a day like Labour Day to your calendar. Keeping up with current events can save you a bunch of backlashes. If there is a disaster of some type, you might want to look at your calendar and reread the posts that you have scheduled. You may need to reschedule. Just because it’s hurricane season in the Caribbean, revisit this blog about social media do’s and don’ts during a disaster before you create your next calendar.

We hope you apply these best practices to your social media content calendar. Just remember to be flexible and adjust it to suit the climate of wherever you are. Above all, when the dust has settled, schedule your content. The calendar can easily become null and void if it isn’t scheduled on time. Plan and schedule!

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