Stay ahead in your social media game with Launch Kit's expert tips on creating a content calendar. Learn how we plan, create, and schedule posts using ClickUp and Metricool for seamless content manage
The social media content calendar, that feeling of having your posts planned, created, and scheduled, the feeling of being on top of your game instead of scrambling to put things together at the last minute. This is what we're aiming for.
A social media content calendar is a calendar where you plot out your social media posts to be published on a specific day and time. We use ClickUp and Metricool to create social media content calendars for our clients.
In order to get ahead in our social media planning, we first need to have a plan. We create our plan using ClickUp. By plan, I mean writing a list of content ideas that we want to create based on our business or brand goals. We call this the idea garden. At this stage, we're just listing out ideas and if they are going to be a video, photo, or graphic design piece.
On Monday mornings at Launch Kit, we take a look at a client's idea garden in ClickUp and the next two weeks in front of us. Based on our posting schedule for that client, we map out which ideas are going to be posted when. We do this using the calendar view in ClickUp.
Note - Posting Schedule - Instead of randomly posting, try creating your own routine of when and how often you're going to post. At Launch Kit, we post videos on Monday and Wednesday, blog articles on Thursday, and a portfolio post on Fridays. Knowing this routine helps us all be on the same page.
Notice how I mentioned "two weeks ahead." Ideally, when you sit down on Monday morning, you'll already have this week's posts in place since you planned it last week. Make sure everything still looks good and then look ahead to next week. This feeling of being ahead instead of behind helps open up creative space to think instead of feeling behind the eight ball.
With our posts mapped out on ClickUp, we know what content to prioritize. Via our Content + Social Media membership program, we schedule production days with clients and aim to create 5 videos and 25 photos per production day.
With content created, we're back in the office editing and caption writing. This tees the content piece up for scheduling. Once approved by the client, we move the photo/video and caption into Metricool where we schedule it to be posted at a specific date and time based on our ClickUp calendar.
Metricool will publish the post at that given time.
Brainstorm, list, plot, create, edit, schedule. That is how we create a content calendar for small businesses. We appreciate you taking a few moments to read this article and hope that you learned a snippet or two that can help you in your own content marketing journey.
Over the years, we've learned that organic social media content is a long-term play. Focus on creating content that shares your business's story. The better stories you tell, the better your content will perform.
Each year, we take a fresh look at the various marketing efforts a small business can make. We've built this framework to get started optimizing your business's online presence.