The Breakdown of the Social Media Content Calendar

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By: Matt Creagan, @MatthewCreagan & Stuart Drew, @studrew1

It doesn’t matter if it’s preseason, in-season, playoffs, or off-season, your social media calendar should be clean, clear, and consistent. These calendars will help you in making sure you are keeping track of the content that has passed, as well as the content you are looking forward to executing in the future.

“There is no one right way, but you should always know which way works best for you.”

How the Content Calendar Came to Be.

If the content calendar didn’t exist, social media managers and content creators would be up a creek and without a paddle. The content calendar can keep a brand’s content organized. Think about it, a brand has stories, images, videos, sponsorship posts, player tweets, and ticket posts. That is just scratching the surface. Some of these posts might be Facebook or Twitter specific. The content calendar divides platforms, specific days, and assists content creators when it comes to staying on top of posts.

Clean.

The last thing you want is your social calendar to become more of a burden than a benefit. Whatever template you use, carefully organize your content by platform so you can quickly and easily determine where you are at in your schedule. For organizations that manage multiple teams, make team-specific sections that you are able to keep organized.

Clear.

Some organizations have more than one set of eyes on content calendars, so it is important to make sure someone else can decipher what’s going on in the schedule. Writing a bunch of details about the content can cause the content calendar to become messy and complicated, so make sure include simple details (Ex: Content title, link, etc.) that will make each piece of content clear to read.

Consistent.

You can find yourself posting more content then planned on a busy day, so make sure that your calendar doesn’t get bogged down with content that isn’t necessary on it. Make sure you hit all of your key strategies first. Your social media calendar will give you peace of mind so you never have to be stuck thinking, “What am I going to post next?”
Management

A content calendar is also an easy way for your superior to access the copy that you are pushing out. Some organizations require an approval process prior to posting. Having all of your copy written out in one place can make it easier for approval. On the flip side, you could be managing interns. Having a way to give immediate feedback when it comes to copywriting is clutch if there are multiple interns working on the document. It also allows you to keep an eye on productivity.

Why is all of this important?

One word, organization. This allows double posting not to occur, spacing out posts appropriately and keeping the variety of posts fresh. You don’t want to put out three sponsored posts in a row. If fans see multiple sponsor posts in a row, they might be more inclined to mute or hide posts.
Social media managers can be pulled in many different directions throughout the office. Keeping the content calendar up to date with all the requests is critical. Your content calendar can keep your stress levels low, and your work productivity high.

Like we said above, there isn’t a perfect content calendar out there, but we have a few templates that could fit for you. Check them out.