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Planning your Posts

Lesson 17 from: Social Media Content Strategy

Rita Cidre

Planning your Posts

Lesson 17 from: Social Media Content Strategy

Rita Cidre

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Lesson Info

17. Planning your Posts

Next Lesson: Selecting Visuals

Lesson Info

Planning your Posts

one of the best ways to stay on top of all your content is to create a content calendar. There are many ways to do this and where you'll land depends on the size of your organization, how many marketing channels you manage and your overall business objectives I'll share with you the one template I used to manage my social media content just so you know, this one is also available for you to download in the download section in the important links document, you'll also find a link to an article with dozens of marketing content calendar examples in case any of those strike your fancy. Okay, let's dig in. So there are many different approaches to content calendar ring. This is my approach that I'm going to share with you. So this is a really, really simple social media content calendar template at the top here we have the start and the end of each week as well as the days of the week monday to sunday we have two rows in here to highlight either new products, so stuff that is going on inter...

nally, that is really important that we should keep in mind as we build our social media content and then stuff that is going on seasonally. So stuff that is going on externally that we should also keep in mind and I'll share some examples in a second. Then finally in the bottom and this is probably the most important part of this content calendar template. We have the different content pillars that we already identified for our brand. So for Starbucks, we identified college pride coffee, calm study spaces and motivation slash inspiration. So these are our four content pillars. So the first step in using this calendar is to figure out when we're going to utilize these content pillars in the different days of the week. So keep in mind that you don't need to necessarily know at this time, what it is that you're going to post about, The only thing you want to do is figure out a good mix of content that you can provide to your audience, so as to keep them really engaged with your brand and also so that your brand pillars come out really, really clearly to your followers. So let's just start right here. So 41 is the beginning of the, of the week, it's a monday. So we're going to say that actually we're going to start with motivation and inspiration, so I'm just going to copy this color and add it right here. Then we're going to follow that with a little bit of college pride right here. Then in the middle of the week we're actually going to talk, we're actually going to share some content around coffee because it's a Wednesday and you really want people, people really need to pick me up friday, we're gonna share calm study spaces and then we're going to end the week on saturday with college pride. So you would basically go through this process, This is how I start my content planning, just figuring out the mix of content. Um and before you complete this entire process, I really encourage you to think about what the content, what you have here on Rose 12 and 13. So let's say that Starbucks, you know, the weather is getting really warm. Starbucks is starting to promote a new line of iced coffees and that is going to start the in the middle of the month. So around 4 15. So I'm gonna write here, ice coffee release, right? This is something that we should really keep in mind as we are building our content. Another thing that we could keep in mind that it's more external, so not internal to Starbucks, but external to our audience, and I just realized that I misspelled coffee, So give me one second is graduation and finals. This is something that's really, really relevant to Carla the college students. So we're gonna add in here that this is like finals or around this time, and then graduation is around this time. I'll make this pretty and color coded a little bit later. But as you're planning your content, let's say that you're planning your content for the week of 4 15 and iced coffee is going to be released. So I would say that you probably want to go a little bit heavier on the coffee content. So I would probably say, okay, let's start the week with coffee, we're going to do a midweek post of ground thursday about coffee and then we're going to talk about coffee again on sunday and then we'll do two posts around coffee the following week to really reinforce and you can fill out the rest so with the rest of your pillars, so as to keep a really good balance of the type of content that you are providing to your followers. Oops, missing college pride. Oh sorry about that guys, just I'm mixing up the colors here, so here and this is just an example, you can spend a lot of time doing this. So for finals the situation would be very different. So for finals you probably want to go much heavier on the motivation and inspiration. You probably still want to promote coffee obviously, but I would say motivation, inspiration is probably the most important thing during this time. So maybe you do those post twice a week, around that time. Just going to add that here and then around graduation, this is a time of celebration. So your content pillar around college pride will be much, much more important during graduation time. So I would definitely double up on that. And so again, this is this is the process. So you don't know at this point what it is that you're going to do, are you going to run a contest? Are you going to do a survey? Are you going to post lifestyle pictures, are you going to do a quote? There's a variety of different ways that you could approach each of these content pillars. But the important thing here is that you're taking the time to figure out what the mix of this content is going to look like, way in advance before you sit down and actually think about the what it is that you're actually going to say for each one of these posts going through this process really ensures that you have a content strategy. That is, that makes sense. And it also comes through really, really clearly to your audience now that we have a content calendar, it's time to figure out what you're going to post before we do that. Take some time to personalize your own content calendar, add your content pillars, product releases or seasonal highlights as well as get a general sense of the types of posts you want to run for the next month or so. I've done this for our Starbucks example here. Great, so I spent a lot of time thinking through my content pillars and how they could be associated to different things that are going on both internally and externally that are relevant to Carla, the college student and this is what I ended up with. So you can see here that my content is really a great mix of these different content pillars. So I'm not Sort of highlighting one content pillar over and over again. So it's a really interesting mix of content for Carla who's following me. But in addition, as I talked about before, it really reflects the different types of things that are going on um at Starbucks and outside of Starbucks that are relevant to carla. So for the ice coffee release, we have a lot more content around coffee. And then for finals and graduation I decided to sort of bundle those up into one category. We start off with heavier mix of motivation and inspiration as well as calm study spaces and then by the end or middle to the end of May, which is when graduation is finally happening, we shift much more heavily towards college pride because it's a time of celebration. So I would recommend that you use this content calendar to plan your content way in advance. I typically have my content planned out at least a quarter in advance, which is great because you can prepare and be ready and not have to deal with any kind of last minute issues usually. Um now the next step is to really think through what you want to post for each one of these content pillars and we will address that next

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Social Content Calendar Template.xlsx
Competitive Research Template.xlsx
Social Media Content Strategy One Sheet.pdf
Starbucks Case Study.pdf

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