There are lots of articles about how you need a content calendar if you’re going to blog or post frequently on social media. However there’s not a lot of how-to’s or example of what it looks like. There are event fewer examples if you don’t want a digital calendar. So here’s how we do ours.
Our calendar pages have a place for major topics & awareness campaigns in the top left, a place for blog ideas in the top right, and a traditional monthly calendar to write in daily topics. We made ours using Excel and Word.
A quick google search will help you fill in some of the blanks. For example September was Hispanic Heritage Month and Deaf Awareness Month. Those goes in the top left corner. Either of them could also become blog posts. If you want to use one of them as a jumping off point for a blog post also add it to the top right.
For the calendar part at the bottom, we list any major holidays and when we intend to blog. You can also find a bunch of untraditional holidays online, like Sandwich Day, which falls on November 3rd, 2019. You could also take hashtags into account if you need more content like #throwbackthursday or #workoutwednesday. We fill up the rest of our calendar with scheduled activities. Here’s this month’s calendar.
Certain activities might stand out that we know we’ll want to focus on such as the talent show, birthdays, field trips, and lessons that might be visually appealing on social media. These help to fill in the blanks for us.
Occasionally we might have two things we want to focus on. We gather content on both and decide if they are both visually worth posting or if one will be more appealing to our social media followers than the other. One the calendar we separate the two topics with a dotted line.
And that’s about it. It really helps to keep us on track and saves a lot of time.
Other things we keep with our calendar are frequently used hashtags, wording for specific things like a weather closure or an upcoming fundraiser, and things like that.
Do you have a content calendar? Do you prefer pen and paper or digital? Is there a good tip that we left out? We want to hear from you.