Being a social business is tough. There’s a lot of content to create and curate, and a lot of friendly back-and-forth that has to happen every day to keep your customers engaged, loyal and energized about your brand. And, of course, never enough hours in the day.
My secret to maintaining a solid social media presence for clients? The Social Media Editorial Calendar. This sounds like a big, complicated thing, but it’s really not. You can create one for your business; all you need is Excel and an hour or two over a few days to brainstorm and get it rolling.
Here’s how you do it:
1. Platforms
Outline all of the social and content platforms your business uses regularly. In many cases, this includes a blog, Twitter and Facebook. It could also include YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumbler or other platforms. You should also include any platforms you don’t currently maintain but you’d like to maintain – your calendar could phase new platforms in over time.
2. Topics
Determine the key topics you wish to incorporate into your content. You can go very narrow and on-topic for your business, or you can go broader in the hopes that you can attract people who may not be aware of your company. For example, if you’re a small accounting firm, you could focus your posts on tax issues, bookkeeping issues, and other financial/accounting-related topics; alternately, you could focus your content on the issues your ideal clients face more generally. So if you mainly work with artists and freelancers, you could post about a wide variety of subjects which could be appealing to them: finding work, improving your personal brand, how to manage money effectively, etc. Whichever way you go, don’t worry, this is not set in stone. You can broaden or narrow your content over time.
3. Categories
Determine how to bucket your topics in a handful of key content categories. This is an important step which many companies overlook. They start writing on a variety of topics, and eventually get off track because they lose focus over time. If you choose your categories at the outset (or add them in to make order within your content), you’ll always have a guidepost for your content as you can determine which categories are underserved and post in those categories. Category examples for the accountant example above (the broad version) could be: Managing Your Money, Getting Gigs, Your Personal Brand, Arts Happenings (interesting things around your local area or national), and Real Freelancers (stories of real people). You might also have a category for Company News (your company news) and maybe for Case Studies (your clients).
4. Focus
All of the content you create should fit into one (or maybe two) of your categories. If your content fits into more than two categories, that particular post or video may be too broad, and you may be able to break it into two or more posts or videos. If you find yourself having to break up a post or video, that’s not a bad thing – you get twice as much content for the work you’ve just done!
5. The Calendar
Now comes the fun part, and the part where you break out Excel. Create a little grid, like this (click to embiggen):
(Don’t worry if yours is not colorful. Just make sure it has all the info.)
Here’s how you use each column:
Category: this is the category the content piece fits in to. Every item you post should fit into one (or two) categories.
Blog Topic: if your piece is a blog you’re writing, you can define the topic here.
Blog Title: When you write the piece (or as you think of it), add the title. The title may not come to you until later, so leave it blank if you need to.
Twitter: If you’re posting something to Twitter (your own or someone else’s), add that item here. Remember, your Twitter items should still fall into one (or two) of your categories.
Facebook: If you’re posting something to Facebook (your own or someone else’s), add that item here. Ditto on categories.
Links/Photos and Notes: These columns are like a “scratch pad” for whatever links, images, or notes you want to jot down for upcoming items in your calendar. You could include links to blog posts that sparked an idea, an link to (or note about) an image you know you want to include, or thoughts about clients you want to include in a case study post.
Due Date: Use this column to set a firm date for when the final draft of content you create is due to be posted into WordPress (or finalized as a video, etc.). This is important if you have other people creating content, but also helpful so you can stay ahead of your calendar. This date should be 1-3 days ahead of your Date Scheduled, to give you some room to review, edit, and/or move around if something more important comes up.
Date Scheduled: The date you want your content to appear in your venue or platform.
Date Posted: After your content piece goes live, note the actual date posted here. This way you can see how often you post and on what categories, when, as you look back across your work.
6. Brainstorm
Now grab a cup of whatever you drink, sit down, and fill in your calendar. Maybe enlist help from colleagues. Start with the content you’re going to create: blog posts, videos, questions on Facebook, etc. Add your topics in, week-by-week, taking care to balance the categories and the day of the week you’re posting. (How often to post is the subject of another conversation entirely, and varies widely by company and platform!) Think creatively, and think about what you can really execute on. None of this is set in stone, so just get it all out there for now. Here’s what the start of a filled-in calendar could look like (click to embiggen):
7. Execution
On the day-to-day, your social media editorial calendar should be a roadmap to your social content presence. Ideally you’ll stay out ahead of it somewhat, filling in new ideas as you get them and removing those which you’re never going to actually get to. Hopefully you’ll stay a post or two ahead (at least) so the pressure of “what do I write today” is off, making social content much more enjoyable overall. And feel free to move things around, too; if there’s breaking news you have to get out there, you can easily push today’s post out a few days and substitute the news.
That’s it! An editorial calendar in seven easy steps. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Please let us know in the comments if you can add to our ideas or if you have questions. Good luck!
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook — social media provides so many ways to reach out to consumers and clients. How do you know what format is right for your brand or business? The first step is understanding how each of these social media platforms works.
Twitter: Twitter is a microblogging platform; you have exactly 140 characters (about the length of a text message) to convey a quick bit of information. Twitter is frequently compared to a cocktail party — there are a variety of conversations all going on at once, and you drift in and out of several at a time. Twitter can be used to direct followers to blog or Facebook posts, or to offer quick snippets of information.
How to use Twitter: Your brand needs a distinct voice to be heard in the crowd. Don’t just share links to blog posts or contests; talk about more than just your brand.
Facebook: Facebook is the online coffee shop, where friends meet to catch up and find out what’s new and cool. Facebook allows you to share multiple mediums — blog posts, photos, videos, quick snippets of information — with fans, in a format that is more detailed than Twitter’s. Keep in mind, though, that your Facebook updates show up in your fan’s feed in between updates from their actual friends; like Twitter, think of this as a conversation, not a billboard.
How to use Facebook: The best Facebook feeds are those from brands who are able to personalize their business. Successful brands have a voice — and sometimes a face — behind their Facebook updates, someone who makes the brand feel like a friend, not a company.
Blogs: A blog is old school social media at its best. Blogs allow you space to talk in detail about your brand or product, to provide consumers with in-depth information or inside scoop. But keep your blog posts relatively short — no one wants to read a dissertation-length treatise on why you’re the brand leader — and make sure you’re posting consistently. You’ll never create a following if your posting schedule is something akin to “once in a blue moon.”
How to use a blog: Keep blog posts focused and tightly edited; provide readers with enough detail to keep them engaged and informed. Make sure that your posts have a voice and a point — and, ideally, some type of narrative. People love a story, because it gives them a way to relate to you — or your brand.
No matter what platform you choose, there are a few general rules to keep in mind.
Updates — no matter what their length — should be well-written and grammatically correct. It’s ok to draft a Tweet or Facebook status update in the way you would draft a blog post; just because you’re limited to 140 characters doesn’t mean you can’t carefully edit what you’re writing.
Engaging in a social media forum means being social — take time to engage with your fans, followers and commenters. And don’t stop at responding to conversation they direct at you; engage with them on their own ground as well. The cocktail party analogy is useful here — no one likes the guy who only talks about himself. The same is true for brands.
Finally, if you’re going to use social media to reach clients and customers, make a commitment to do it right. Designate or hire someone to manage your blog and update your Twitter and Facebook feeds. In order to create a significant online presence, you need someone who can be online for a significant amount of time each day.
Engaging with consumers via social media requires a commitment of time and resources, but the return is amazing: you will create a community of fans who are loyal to and enthusiastic about your brand. And that’s absolutely worth the effort.
As the major news channels in the world focused on the facts and figures behind hurricane Irene’s impending arrival last week, I chose to get my information on her through my friends, followers and followees on Facebook and Twitter. Instead of getting the facts about her wind speed, trajectory or the latest clip of Mayor Bloomberg talking about evacuation, I got the inside track on how people were feeling and what they were seeing, via pictures, video and words.
The New York Times featured a Twitter ticker with updates from contributors to the paper on their thoughts and insights on Irene. New York City-based celebrities announced to their legions of followers what the view was like from their apartments high in the skies of Manhattan. And then there were my friends on Facebook–including my husband–who were making light of what was quickly turning into a scary situation. There’s nothing like a little humor to help ease the nerves.
Rather than just hearing accounts from random people-on-the-street, I was actually getting updates from my friends. It was refreshing and at the same time entertaining and informative. This was crowd sourcing at its best. Various TwitPics showed New York City in its pre-Irene stages: Times Square eerily looking like a ghost town; empty shelves at neighborhood grocery stores; and the windows of Bloomingdale’s boarded shut.
When Irene finally did touchdown in New York, Twitter was afire with updates from locals alerting the rest of the world what they were seeing. The #irene and #hurricaneirene hashtags were a flurry of everything from humor to public assistance and general information. Even those with power outages were able to get updates via smart phones and iPads. If there were ever an event to showcase that social media is more than just a passing trend, Hurricane Irene was it.
If you’re a Facebook user, by now you’ve undoubtedly gotten used to seeing ads on the right side of your Facebook pages. Once the province of big brands (who paid tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to appear on your Facebook home page), they’ve been accessible to everyone for a year or two now, yet I’m surprised at how few brands and companies are taking advantage of this amazingly targeted advertising opportunity. You can use Facebook ads to advertise an outside website (like your own blog or site), or to promote your Facebook Page to people who could Like your page. Even if you’re not yet ready to advertise, you can use the very insightful Facebook Ads platform to understand the universe of users on Facebook who are in your target.
To get started with either demographic analysis or advertising, first go to: www.facebook.com/advertising. Once there, click on the green “Create an Ad” button on the upper right side. You’ll be taken to a screen where you choose a destination and ad type. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to assume you’re advertising an outside URL (like your website) and that you’re going to run Facebook Ads. (Sponsored Stories, the other ad type, are very cool, but that’s for another post.)
If all you want to do is browse Facebook demographics, you do not need to enter any creative, just skip to Section 2, Targeting. This is where you can start to learn how big Facebook’s reach could be for your exact target market. By selecting various locations, interests, ages and more you can winnow down to the precise demographic you’re interested in. At this point, you may not be ready to advertise, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to tell your boss that there are 262,000 women ages 25-50 within 50 miles of Stamford, CT who are interested in cooking? (Or wherever your business is or with whatever demographic criteria you choose.) That level of information is not available anywhere else, at least not without paying thousands of dollars for market research.
Play with this tool (for free!) and you could learn a lot about who you’re trying to attract to your Facebook page, or you could extrapolate that to the general public (assuming that 51% of Americans age 12+ have Facebook pages).
If you do want to give Facebook ads a test, it’s very easy to setup and manage on a small scale. You can test with just a few dollars, though I recommend a $500 test budget initially so that you can really give it a fair shake. And there’s no need for fancy banners or creative – it’s really something anyone can do themselves. All you need is a 25-character ad title, 135-character body copy and a small image (110×80 pixels or larger, which is a 4:3 ratio). All of that goes into Section 1 of the ad setup page (first image, above).
In Section 3 of the ad setup, you’ll be able to specify whether you want to pay for clicks or impressions; I recommend clicks, so that you’re only paying for traffic to your site. You can set a daily budget and also a cost-per-click (Facebook recommends the range of per-click cost that matches your demographic; you should generally stay within their recommended range, and you may find you want to change your criteria to lower the cost.)
Note that some days you’ll spend up to your desired budget, and other days you may not spend anything at all; that’s because Facebook’s platform is a bid driven, meaning that you may get outbid in your demographic for a period of time. When my spend starts to wane I usually just wait it out for a few days, but you can also tweak your demographics a bit, which may get the spend started again. Raising your bid will also help, of course, as it will put you farther up the ranks in the bidding system.
Are you already using Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments. Or let us know if you have questions about how understanding Facebook demographics can help your business.
Thank god for my cellphone. I might not have a complicated data plan, or a Blackberry or an iPhone, but texting works and it’s important to me. It’s nice to have some contact with the outside world, trust me. For me, it’s a way to stay in touch with my friends, especially during the long summer months when everyone decides to drop off the face of the planet. I mostly use my phone for texting because talking on the phone has gone out of fashion, at least for my generation. Let’s be honest, I really don’t have a conversation with anyone on the phone unless they’re over 40. It’s just a plain old hassle, and every time I pick up the phone and someone talks nonstop for thirty minutes, I flinch and think this is why texting is so much more convenient!
You could say that texting is a teenage epidemic. According to my driving instructor, it’s so extreme that teenagers argue they can text and drive because they are so good at typing quickly that they don’t have to take their eyes off the road. I mean, yeah I love texting, but please, that is such bad logic… I don’t text on the road, but I text to coordinate with my parents, coordinate with friends, and admittedly, to gossip with friends over what crazy things happened over the weekend. Once I was texting in the halls at school and a psycho teacher ran up to me and blared “Texting alert, texting alert, texting alert!” right into my ear…needless to say, I don’t text during school, or at least not within view of that teacher. While looking for some stats on teen texting, I found a 2010 survey by The Nielsen Company which found the average teenager (13 to 17 years old) sends or receives 3,339 texts per month which is something more than 100 per day or about one every six minutes in a 10 hour day … that’s a whole lot of interpersonal networking!!
We all know that social media is the way to connect with customers, but as a business or a brand, how do you know who to turn to for help? Everyone seems to be a social media “expert” these days, but not all experts are created equal. There is an art to using social media successfully, particularly to promote a brand, but having a Twitter account does not make someone an expert. Here’s how to vet your expert or agency and get the best possible help with your social media outreach.
Be wary of any social media “expert” who isn’t already using social media, and using it well. Your consultant or agency should be able to speak, from experience, about all of the outlets that he or she is recommending your business engage with — as well as being able to recommend outlets you hadn’t thought of (after all, this person is the expert). They should also be able to explain, in simple, understandable terms, how to use these platforms, and how to choose the ones that will be of most use to you and your customers.
Ask for details on how they will use social media to grow your brand. The agency or consultant should be able to articulate goals and timelines — 500 Facebook fans in the next 30 days, for example, or 10 Foursquare check-ins per day at your brick-and-mortar location, or three blog posts per week featuring your brand or product — as well as offering strategies for achieving those goals.
Have your expert submit writing samples. Social media relies heavily on the written word; if your consultant will be updating your brand’s blog, Facebook page, or Twitter feed for you, be sure that their writing is up to your standards. You are looking for interesting, relevant, grammatically correct content. If the consultant or agency has a Facebook page or Twitter feed that they can share with you (either her personal accounts or another client’s), look those over carefully; feel free as well to ask for sample posts relevant to your brand.
Keep an eye on the conversation. Hiring a consultant to manage social media outreach for your brand doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook. Follow your brand on Facebook and Twitter; read your business’s blog. If you see something that’s not working, let the consultant know and if you see something you really like, let them know that, too. But remember: they may be the social media experts, but you’re the brand expert. Together you can create a voice for your brand and a community for your business.
Looking for examples of businesses and brands that are succeeding at social media? Some of my favorite Facebook pages are listed below including a few clients of Creative Concepts; these brands have a clear voice and an excellent sense of community, and always offer well-written, engaging status updates.
For over ten years, I grew up side by side with Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. I remember the first time I picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a fresh birthday present, and promptly got lost in the wizarding world. Every book holds a place of honor in my book case, much loved and well-worn since I haven’t put any of the books down since. And like so many other fans, I pretended that the owl carrying my acceptance letter from Hogwarts was merely a couple of years late.
It’s why sitting in a darkening movie theater with my best friends, awaiting the start of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”, was such a terribly sad moment. It was truly the end of an era. With the publication of the last book, Harry Potter fans were in denial, hoping that really JK Rowling was holding out on us, and there were more books on the way. But the last movie was a final goodbye to characters that had become friends, and places like Hogwarts that had become home. Unsurprisingly, I found myself tearing up multiple times throughout the movie. Also unsurprisingly, I don’t want to say goodbye to Harry Potter.
And so I find myself looking for Harry Potter blogs where the author reminisces about how great it is to be a fan, analyzes the books or weeps about how it’s all come to an end. I find myself watching countless YouTube videos about the ten year journey Harry Potter has made. It’s become addicting, I swear. I’ve even signed up for Pottermore, the mysterious Harry Potter website that JK Rowling created to reel in her fans a little more (like she needs to). I didn’t need to turn to social media when the books were being published, because they were more than enough. But now that the last book has been published and the last movie has been revealed, I find myself looking for Harry Potter anywhere on the Internet, blogs or YouTube, to keep that connection going. And so I’ve become a participant, because I’m in agreement with the billions of other fans…it would be heartbreak to really let go of Harry Potter.
I make my living as a freelance writer and editor; in those roles, I do a substantial amount of work with brands. As a fashion blogger, most of this work consists of product reviews and giveaways, and in some way, all of this work is compensated. Because, of course, this is how I make my living.
The question of compensation for bloggers has been a hot topic for the past couple of years. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission revised their guidelines for endorsements and testimonials to call for greater transparency in product reviews, particularly on the part of bloggers and celebrity spokespeople. In other words, a blogger reviewing a product is now required to reveal if — and how — she is being compensated.
There are typically two ways in which bloggers are compensated for writing about products: either we are paid a fee, as part of a campaign or sponsored post, or we are provided with product samples, for a one-off review. Sponsored content is clearly advertorial — you are paying a blogger to create content around your brand or product, rather than asking for a review of that product, and you are compensating her for the content she creates. A review, on the other hand, is just that: an honest assessment of a product or service. Reviews should be entirely editorial — they should be the honest opinion of the blogger.
Giveaways are a third — and slightly trickier — category. A really good giveaway should have an editorial component; the blogger should be able to speak about why she likes this product and wants to share it with her readers. But a giveaway can be a lot of work for a blogger, and its success relies on her influence. For this reason, more and more bloggers are asking for compensation for giveaways.
Before you approach a blogger with a pitch, consider what it is you are offering, and what you are expecting in return. Remember that you are asking the blogger not only for her time and effort but for her influence — you are asking her to share your brand or product with her community, through her blog, Twitter, Facebook and whatever other online communities she participates in. In return for both the body of work she creates and her online reach, she deserves fair compensation. While there is no set standard for what’s fair, asking a blogger to promote your brand for free is never fair. Obviously.
I make a nice living freelancing, and I get to test out some really cool products.
We spend a lot of our time researching and imparting our wisdom (and experience) about social media, client news, blogging and mobile updates along with some interesting teen insights. What we don’t spend enough time doing is asking you questions and getting to know you better which we will be doing more often going forward.
So today is the first poll of many and we are curious to know more about your blogging quandaries. As a blogger representing a brand or your own site, there are many challenges associated with keeping an interesting, informative and entertaining blog so please answer our questions or add your own thoughts so we can learn from you or even answer some of your questions.
Sometimes it takes more than the written word to really get the consumer excited about your brand. In today’s culture of You Tube and reality TV, people are used to getting up close and personal with everyone from celebrities and socialites to the girl next door.
Video presents a unique opportunity for brands to showcase their products in a way that’s not possible through print or the in-store experience. At Creative Concepts, we partner with brands to help them create engaging and informative videos that tell a story and draw the viewer in.
Our client Ecover recently hosted an Earth Day event in a jaw-dropping New York City penthouse, teaching guests how to make sustainable choices inside their homes. Attendees were taken on a tour of the penthouse and given tips on how to make healthy living choices for each room. Celebrity interior designer Robin Wilson along with Ecover’s Kipling Wagner brought the event to life on video for all to see.
When Ouidad threw a curly party, our cameras were there to record the effusive guests who were ecstatic about their gorgeous new hair styles. Their enthusiasm was contagious–something that definitely would not have come through had it been only in writing.
Video has the ability to turn something static into something dynamic. It brings the brand into the context of real life and helps people interact with the brand. The recipe for a successful video? Feature people who are passionate about the brand, add an expert who can teach the public something interesting about the brand, keep it exciting and easy to watch. Then put it on You Tube and get ready for the hits!
