Free Tools to Make an Effective Social Media Editorial Calendar
There are certain tools I use to make an effective social media editorial calendar for all of my clients. The tools you use will definitely depend on the size of your team and the amount of people who will need to have access and be able to make changes etc. For this post, we are going to talk about how to create an effective social media editorial calendar for smaller businesses in which one to two people are creating and managing the editorial calendar.
Where do you start?
1. Create brand guidelines. If you are hiring someone (or even if you're not) you should be able to hand them off some brand guidelines, which will serve to inform them how to adapt them and incorporate them into best practices for social media and they will be a good reminder for yourself if you're implementing the strategy. Your brand guidelines can be a simple doc that talks about tone, who you are, things you say/don't say, expected response time to questions, types of images (icons or real photos), etc.
2. Hire someone who knows what they are doing. (Okay this isn't free obviously, but it's also not necessary IF you understand social media best practices and have the time to manage your own strategy.) Believe it or not there are a lot of tricks to making a beautiful, relevant social media presence. Make sure you have found someone who is going to focus on engagement as well as pushing your brand and message. Furthermore, make sure this person knows the best practices for each platform you have a presence on. Most importantly, make sure you trust them. You don't want to create more work for yourself. Hire someone you trust and don't have to be constantly reviewing their work.
3. Set up a Google Drive account (if you don't already have one.) Google Drive is a great tool to use for keeping your marketing organized. I know, because it's essentially my lifeline. I will make a google sheet of all the mapped out content for every day. This way my clients can go in and see what I'm posting and make suggestions - if they want to. (Additionally, setting up content this way makes it easy to create a report at the end of the month.)
Google Drive is also a great tool to store photos. Depending on the style of photos you are using, real life vs icons, you can still upload your photos to organized files on Google Drive. This is great if you are trying to get your social media manager real photos from your location.
4. Set up content aggregators. We all know that it's standard to follow the 80/20 rule on social media. (80% helpful, non sales-ey content, 20% self-promotional.) Tools like Google Alerts, Feedly (or any blog reader) and Flipboard are great places to find content to share with your followers. Come up with a list of blogs and topics that are relevant to your business or service and pass those on to whoever is managing your accounts.
5. Hashtagify.me and Twitter #s. I use these tools to find relevant hashtags to the types of content I'm posting. Then I create a big list of hashtags that I reference when I'm scheduling my content out. This a, reminds me to use hashtags and b, saves me a lot of time.
These are just some of the free options you or your social media manager have available to them to help create an effective social media editorial calendar. It's important to note, that while making an editorial calendar and scheduling out content is an important first step, it's not where your social strategy ends! It is essential to also focus on daily engagement.
