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What do cross-country road trips, wedding speeches, and social media marketing have in common?

You could wing all three, but it’s probably better to have a plan for what direction you’re heading — especially when it comes to your social media content strategy.

By now, most marketers recognize that social media plays an integral role in an effective inbound marketing strategy. And with so many social networks to manage and publish on, it’s important to stay organized and have a plan for when and what you’re going to share on these platforms.

In this post, we’ve rounded up some of the most helpful tools and templates for building out an effective social media content plan. Check them out below. 

The Benefits of Using a Social Media Content Calendar

Let’s face it: We’re all busy. And when we’re busy and don’t have a plan in place for the tasks we have to get done, things inevitably slip through the cracks.

Just like with blogging, a successful social media strategy requires regular publishing and engaging with followers to see positive results — whether that be in terms of SEO, brand recognition, lead generation, or all three. 

So if you’re not already using a social media content calendar, hear me out:

1. Calendars help you get organized to avoid the dreaded scramble when things come up. With a social media calendar, marketers can plan out posts for entire weeks or months in advance, which frees up working hours to strategize for the future — and to dash off any posts about breaking news in your industry. Otherwise, you’ll spend valuable time each day searching the internet for that day’s content to share, which is a known productivity killer.
2. A calendar helps you plan for each social network to customize posts instead of spamming all platforms with the same message. Social media marketers should take the time to craft custom messages for each network, and doing this in advance will save time throughout the week and ensure that you’re being thoughtful and intentional when you do post.
3. Calendars can help you track performance and plan for future posts. Without a calendar, social media marketers are publishing content into the void and are unable to track big-picture and past performance. With a calendar, marketers can look back and analyze which content performed best so they can adjust their strategy accordingly.
4. With the help of a calendar, marketers can plan for holidays and observance days, such as National Cat Day, when they can tailor their content and engage with a wider audience. 
5. Social media calendars improve efficiency. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of social media marketers with a documented strategy rated themselves as highly effective, versus 32% of marketers with only a verbal strategy.

Now that you understand the merits of having a social media content calendar in place, check out our list of top tools to stay organized and on top of your game.

4 Helpful Tools for Organizing Your Social Media Calendar

1) Trello

Trello is another organizational tool that’s highly effective for team collaboration. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello’s flexible assignment “cards” and customizable “boards” and “lists” to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and house ideas from a brainstorm.

Here’s an example of a Trello board a social media marketing team might use to plan posts for the upcoming week:

But you’re not limited to just one structure: Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week, on a specific platform, or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.

Trello cards allow for a ton of customization as well. Here’s a fictitious social media editorial calendar card with Twitter copy options around a piece of blog content. Note that you can track progress toward completing a checklist, which could be useful for social media marketers looking to track campaign progress. 

Additionally, Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize the labels (as in the image below) with different publication statuses so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they’re due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks that content is being published on. 

Source: BlueGlass

Trello also offers a full calendar view (shown below) which makes it easy to visualize what content is going out, and when.

Source: BlueGlass

2) Microsoft Excel

Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis in their roles, but it’s a highly useful tool for social media content calendar organization, too. Excel can be customized according to whatever priorities or metrics a team is focused on, so it’s a great tool for planning ahead.

The good news? We’ve already done the heavy lifting for you by creating a free, downloadable social media content calendar template using Microsoft Excel. Marketers can use this template to easily plan out individual social media posts — monthly or annually — while keeping an eye on bigger picture events, holidays, publications, and partnerships. 

For more on how to use the templates, check out this in-depth guide from my colleague Lindsay Kolowich.

Use the Monthly Planning Calendar Tab above to get a bird’s-eye view of what’s coming down their content pipeline in a given month. 

In the Content Repository tab, users can record the content they’re publishing on this tab to keep track of which pieces have been promoted and to easily recall older content that can be re-promoted on social media.

On the Social Network Update tabs, users can draft and plan out social media posts in advance. These tabs are for organizational purposes, and the content of the posts themselves must be uploaded into a social media publisher.

This free resource can be used to draft social media posts, or it can be bulk-uploaded into a publishing app to maximize efficiency. (HubSpot customers: You can use this spreadsheet to organize content and upload it directly into Social Inbox. For instructions on how to do so, check out the template’s cover sheet here.)

3) Evernote

Evernote is a note-taking app that marketers can use to keep track of all the moving parts that comprise a social media campaign.

The tool also features yearly, monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, which make it easy to keep track of when you’re publishing content on social media, when you’re producing blog content, and other team-wide priorities. (Evernote offers customizable templates for each of these that can be downloaded into the app.)

Another useful feature? Evernote’s Web Clipper extension for Chrome. Marketers can use this tool to easily save links to their Evernote Notebook for sharing later on.  

The Evernote mobile app also boasts some interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later.

Source: Evernote

This feature is of particular valuable for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram. 

4) Google Drive

Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build out an effective content calendar. 

Here’s an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track both their editorial and social media calendars to make sure they’re aligning posts with new blog content. These calendars can be easily shared with multiple teams to avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure that campaigns are aligned. 

Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members — all on the same platform as their calendar.

With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments all in one place and can collaborate on different projects without emailing back-and-forth or having to schedule a meeting. This is a particularly useful feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.

(HubSpot customers: You can link your Google Drive account to your HubSpot portal to easily upload files from Drive into your HubSpot software.)

Ready to Plan?

Now that we’ve reviewed a few helpful tools to kick your social media strategy into high gear, experiment with them. Every social media team is different, and it could be a combination of these tools that helps you execute your strategy efficiently to drive ROI. For getting all of your ideas down and developing a big-picture plan for your social assets, we recommend starting with our template and going from there.

What tools do you use to build your social media content calendar? Share with us in the comments below.

When starting with new clients, one of the first questions we ask is ‘are you prepared to blog weekly?’ And the answer needs to be YES!

Now a lot of people completely freak out when we tell them this. But all is not lost! Here’s some keys to attracting more Credit Union members with a well-developed and realistic blogging strategy.

1) Pay Attention to Your Target CU Member’s Pain Points

The first task you need to conquer is to define your target personas. This is key to setting SMART goals, and creating a strategy and all content that you will curate and share. Then we blog about issues that will appeal to them.

It’s important that you don’t just blog about financial topics. Consider blogs about fun activities in your area, seasonal topics and leisure ideas that might be of interest to your target audience. And you should definitely blog about everyday problems your persona might be facing.

Research your targets by talking to other members in the same stage of life, talk to friends and family, and do research online. Create a persona by identifying demographics and personal characteristics, hopes and dreams, and worries and problems. Then use this list to inspire your content creation and curation.

2) Don’t Write All the Content Yourself

In fact, you don’t have to write ANY of it if you really don’t want to. There’s great ways to outsource content creation or subscribe to blog content feeds designed specifically for CUs. One of our favorites is Today’s Credit Unions, which offers lots of content for a very reasonable monthly fee.

But my guess is you can find the time to create great content, without a ton of extra stress or worry. First, create a spread sheet of keywords and possible titles that you would like to share in the future. Then when it’s time for a new blog, use this sheet and pick a title.

For us, we require that all full-time employees contribute 1-2 blog articles per month. We supplement these with guest blogs and outsource some writing. If you have your keywords set and have titles in place this really isn’t that difficult. I firmly believe that the hardest part about a blog is writing a good title and coming up with a quality keyword to focus on.

3) The Title is Half the Battle!

Now, I just mentioned keywords, and maybe I lost you, but stick with me. Keywords are short or long phrases that your target audience might use to search for information online. So, for example, if your Credit Union is targeting young families, in their prime borrowing years, perhaps you should think about keywords around parenting or having your first child.

When blogging for a Credit Union you can put a dollars and cents spin on most things. Do a little keyword research (great tools: keyword.io, Google, HubSpot’s keyword tool…) and you might come up with the keyword ‘having my first baby.’

Then using a title tool (we like the HubSpot Blog Topic or the IMPACT Blog Title tool) you might create the title: 10 Ways I Could Have Saved When Having My First Baby! 

Now, if you’ve never had a baby, maybe you should pass this title off to another writer, but if you have kids my guess is that with minimal research you can take a pretty good stab at this one!

4) Don’t Forget to Add a Call-to-Action (CTA)

Once the blog is done and posted there’s a few other important steps. First, you need to SHARE the blog as widely as you can. We send out emails every 2-3 weeks to subscribers with lists of recent articles and short summaries. You can do this for your CU as well.

You should also share blogs 2-3 times weekly on your CU social media, and make sure you include some ad support to increase the reach of these posts and drive more traffic to your Credit Union website.

Most importantly, you will want to capture leads from all this traffic, so with every blog you should include a call-to-action within your blogs and at the end of the article to encourage readers to take a desired action. This could be something simple like download our budget checklist, and then all you have to ask for is the lead’s name and email. You might also remind readers to subscribe for more great content.

5) Finally, Nurture Leads with Emails to Convert

This might be one step, but this part does take time to work. Remember that relationships are formed overnight so email your leads every week or so with great content, testimonials and other kinds of beneficial tips that they might find interesting. Keep in mind that the financial services buying journey can be weeks and months long, so don’t give up too easy.

But you will find that if you stick with this process you be able to impact bottom line revenue and member growth, and this is truly the ultimate marketing goal.

Unless you’re a celebrity or a household name brand, it’s really difficult to build a substantial following on Twitter. Maybe you’ve made it to a couple thousand followers but can’t seem to bump it up any more. 

Frustrating, isn’t it?

The good news is that HubSpot put together a helpful kit — How to Get More Twitter Followers — filled with everything you need to know about increasing your brand’s following and generating business from your Twitter account.

In the kit, we’ll share a couple big levers you can pull to gain quality followers for your brand’s Twitter account (not the ones you pay for). You’ll also find tips on the best practices around when and what to tweet, as well as a bonus Consumer Insights Report from the experts from Twitter. 

More specifically you’ll learn:

• How to optimize tweet copy for maximum return.
• How to use captivating visual content to engage followers.
• Best practices and inside tips for promoting your handle.
• How to run Twitter campaigns to increase your audience and prove ROI.
• When to use Ad Campaigns to move the needle on followers and leads.
• How followers become loyal customers and brand advocates.

Download your copy of How to Get More Twitter Followers here.