The benefits of using an editorial calendar to plan blog posts and other content marketing efforts are well understood by most web writers, but I’ve often come across site owners who don’t make the same effort where social media is concerned. Often social media posting is carried out on an ad-hoc basis, and at the most, a queueing tool like Buffer is used to time-shift posting to some indeterminate point in the future.
I think that’s a mistake. The most successful marketing efforts are based on a coherent strategy that combines blog articles, social media, advertising, and other efforts. If all of a site’s promotional channels are aligned, site owners can expect better coverage and engagement, especially if each channel actively supports the others.
What Is An Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is simply a calendar on which publishers plan content topics, milestones like draft completion, editing, and publishing. They’re used by everyone from business bloggers to the biggest online and offline publishers. Without an editorial calendar to set a direction, publishing lack cohesion and no-one involved in the process knows what’s happening. For a small one-person blog, that’s not much of a problem, but when there are multiple stakeholders — writers, content strategists, editors, social media strategists, and other members of an organization — the lack of an editorial calendar is a recipe for chaos.
The consequence of that chaos is a strategy that fails to achieve its goals, short circuits itself, and doesn’t reflect the needs of the business. A comprehensive editorial calendar that includes social media facilitates input from all areas of a business and the crafting of a strategy that works because everyone is pulling in the same direction.
According to Sprout Social's Michael Patterson:
“Once you’ve involved the right stakeholders, department and networks, it’s time to start building engaging content for your social channels. This content—whether a video, tip sheet or simple Tweet—should all ladder up into your business objectives.”
What would the process of creating an editorial calendar that includes social media look like?
In the first instance, site owners should decide on the topics they would like to publish about. These topics form the basis for content sets, each set including content suitable for all the site’s promotional channels. Blog articles are developed and added to the calendar based on the topic, and social media posts, both directly and loosely related to the blog article are written and edited.
Content creators, including blog writers, ad creative, and social media know what they need to write, which images should be found, and how publication should be scheduled to coordinate work on all channels.
Tools For Integrating Social Media With Brand Editorial Content
Surprisingly, there aren’t a huge number of tools available that allow for the management of a blog publishing schedule together with social media planning. Buffer is great for queueing social media posts, but it’s not well designed for planning coordinated content and social media releases.
Buffer has recently released a new tool that goes beyond a simple queue. The Buffer Social Media Calendar does allow for the sort of planning we’ve talked about for social media posts, but it’s still a secondary tool — it would have to be backed by a primary editorial calendar that includes other forms of content.
My preferred editorial calendar tool is CoSchedule, which is a full fledged editorial calendar with excellent workflow management tools that also includes comprehensive social media integration. Social media posts can be scheduled alongside blog posts — the combination can be treated as if they were a single unit.
What tools do you use to plan your content publication strategy? Let us know in the comments.
About Rachel Gillevet - Rachel is the technical writer for WiredTree, a leader in fully managed dedicated and vps hosting. Follow Rachel and WiredTree on Twitter, @wiredtree, Like them on Facebook and check out more of their articles on their web hosting blog, http://www.wiredtree.com/blog.
