From the course: B2B Foundations: Social Media Marketing

Creating a social media content calendar for your business

From the course: B2B Foundations: Social Media Marketing

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Creating a social media content calendar for your business

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- [Instructor] Creating a social media content calendar for your business. As a B2B marketer, you may not always be the expert about your business, and that's okay. You don't need to be a manufacturing expert or know everything about law or accountancy to market a business, but it does mean that you can't create all the content you need for social media by yourself. Your role is probably more like that of a newsroom manager, journalist, and editor. Let's look at how to create a social media content calendar for your business, and how to help you plan what you need to create and when to post. I tend to plan monthly and write weekly, allowing enough time to gather inputs from others and get any approval sign-offs I need. But first, you need to decide how much content you're able to create and share. Maybe one or two long articles a month, daily short posts on LinkedIn, Monday to Friday, and three to five posts throughout the week on Instagram and Facebook, perhaps. It's best to make this all as manageable as you can with the resources that you have available. Start small and scale up. To manage the social media content, a simple Excel spreadsheet will do the trick. If you're managing social media across a larger team, you may want to look at some specialized content marketing software, but to begin with, let's start simple. You can find this file in the exercise files. This is the simple overview template that I start to work with and I will adapt this for every client that I work with, depending on their resources and their requirements. I have the first tab on my Excel spreadsheet as a month by month overview. And then I keep a list of my master content. I keep a content inventory, so I know what I've got to work with and can refer to it any time, knowing the type of content it is, what the key message is that it sharing, who it's intended for the stage of the buying process, any links and any notes. I also have a tab for the individual social media platforms I'm using. In case I want to use this to write my tweets, write my Facebook updates, write things for LinkedIn or Instagram, perhaps as well, it's very simple, I can change the dates, the days, and the times, put my messages in there and circulate this for approval. So I would use this. Perhaps set something up similar for yourself and make sure it works for you. I also have an ongoing notebook of content ideas. They're usually based on frequently asked questions, things that come up day-to-day that I can note down. Most of those will be what I call evergreen, which means they could be created at any time, they're not date specific, which is great, but there is often content that's date specific. It could be a product launch, a business milestone, or some awards you're involved with. It could be a key day like World Intellectual Property Day or an that's happening like Learning at Work Week. These will be fixed in your content calendar and you can then fill any spaces with other evergreen content. It's important to stay agile with your content so that you can adapt to any world events or news topics that start trending on social media. If you have a plan, you can adjust it. COVID-19 as a global crisis caused many marketers to adjust their content calendars as the world changed, and this is okay. If you don't have a plan, you'll constantly be looking for content to post which can be super stressful and ineffective, so let's avoid that and create some plans.

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