Your content is a living and breathing entity that needs to be fed constantly, which means you need to organize your time to meet the demands of a hungry beast. How are you keeping track of your feeding schedule? Setting a content schedule helps you stay on top of your content–planning how and when you get your content out there.
The good news is there are many free tools that schedule content publishing, which help you keep your content fluid and up to date. Here we explain the importance of these tools, and which may be the best fit for you.
Why is Setting a Content Schedule Important?
Content schedules or calendars allow you to remain prepared to tackle unexpected opportunities when they arise. If you can plug in your daily, weekly, and monthly blog and social media posts, everything can be planned months in advance, allowing you to become more proactive and continue to grow your online presence.
A content schedule also allows you to respond quickly if something exciting happens to your team, your company, or within the industry. You don’t need to worry about constantly searching for new ideas to share because your calendar is always laid out. As a result, your posts become more thoughtful and strategic. You save time as everything is prepared as far in advance as you care to work. Calendars also help you:
- Be platform-specific: Instead of using the same wording for every platform, you have time to create a unique message suited to that particular format, making your posts more authentic and thoughtful; doing so encourages people to follow you on all channels in case they miss something.
- Measure metrics: With a calendar, you can track the performance of posts to decide where you get the best responses–whether it is shares, likes, or reposts—providing insight to improve your content and better meet the needs of your audience.
- Seasonally relevant: Your calendar marks key days in the year, such as holidays and special observance days you can use to create timely, relevant content, thereby engaging a wider audience.
With all these benefits, it’s worthwhile to find a content schedule to suit your needs.
The Easy Content Schedule Solution
If you already have a manual calendar but find it isn’t providing the organization you’d like, HubSpot offers a ready-to-use Excel template. Although Excel is the go-to program for things like data and accounting, the template is an excellent option for your content schedule. Because it is designed for easy customization and formatting, you can use it for all aspects of your content planning. This free, downloadable social media content calendar template leverages all of Excel’s features to provide easy planning—whether it is by the month or year. The document is organized using tags including:
- A Monthly Planning Calendar for an overview of what’s happening and when it’s scheduled for posting.
- A Content Repository to track the published content to avoid duplications and look for opportunities to re-post information on social channels.
- Social Network Updates where you can plan and even draft social posts, so they are ready to go.
Best of all the template is free and allows you to start plugging in your content info as soon as you download it. You can even bulk-upload the Excel spreadsheet into a publishing app for a no-hassle merging of info. So what are you waiting for? Get started today.
