By Willona Sloan
We all get busy. We make grand plans to post on Facebook three times a week and tweet once a day. We have ideas in our head for great posts that connect, promote, and engage. The only problem? Life gets in the way.
When we get busy, something’s got to give. The first to go is usually thoughtful social media posts. Instead, we opt for lazy retweets and quick Facebook shares. Since we’re not going to get any more hours in our day or have fewer things to do, the best idea is to plan ahead by building a social media calendar. 
Here are some tips to help you create a social media calendar that will keep your posts on topic, on target and on time.
Determine how often you plan to post. Do you want to be posting once a day or three times a week? Do you have an upcoming event that requires some extra posting?
Focus on strategy. Be sure to align your social media calendar with your social media strategy. Planning ahead gives you the best opportunity to meet those strategic goals.
Pull out an actual calendar. Think about where your posts will fall in real time. Are there any big holidays coming up that you can tie into your posts? Do you want to post on the weekends?
Find your organization tool. You can write out your posts in a table in Word, in an Excel file, on a calendar template or even in your Outlook or Google calendar. Use whatever works best to keep you organized.
Start writing. Draft your posts. Include all of the hyperlinks. Pull the images you want to use for each post and save them in one folder. Make a note of the image filename on your calendar. The goal is to make posting as streamlined as possible.
Align with your editorial calendar. Look at your organizational editorial calendar to see when blog posts, website stories, reports, and other content will be published and add corresponding social posts to your social media schedule.
Do your research. Remember the 80/20 rule that says 80% of your content should not be about you. Where will you find that content? Try researching related articles, resources and videos that you can share. Be sure to seek out recently published content so that your social channels don’t read like old news.
Check the flow. When you have all of your posts laid out on the calendar you can see how they will flow together. Are you building excitement? Are the posts on topic? Are you using the 80/20 rule?
Be flexible. Adjust your posts to be timely, responsive, and engaging in real time. It’s nice to have a schedule, but don’t be bound by it. Stay flexible.
Now, to pre-schedule or not to pre-schedule? You can either enter each post on the day it will go live or you can use a social media scheduling service such as Hootsuite to pre-schedule posts. Posting live can feel more in-the-moment; however, pre-scheduling helps you to make sure you never miss an intended post. You can even try a combination of the two by posting live during the week and scheduling your weekend posts. Here’s a list of scheduling platforms you can try.
Ready to get started? Build your own calendar or download a template. Remember to experiment, revise and always track your progress.
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