Planning And Then Calendaring

Step 1: Decide What You Want To Share.
The digital agency I’m a part of relies on both planning and calendaring social media posts–or everything may fall apart quickly. For a quick read on why it’s important to schedule, I encourage you to READ THIS ARTICLE HERE: CLICK ME
We incorporate a two-step process for our client’s social media marketing and even our own personal online activities. The first is a planning board. Then we transition to the scheduling tool.
While even some in the group dread the double entry, “But Rick… We can just use Hootsuite to do both…” I hear the newer team members cry out, I reassure them there’s a reason why we don’t just use one tool.
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We use Trello.com as the first step when developing our client’s content and postings. Trello uses a card system that’s sort of like working with digital Post-it notes. If you can imagine a white board with tons of yellow sticky notes on it, you can get an idea of how useful it would be to rearrange and plan out ideas. We begin with our pre-defined monthly theme, segment into the weeks, and assign our client’s board with a daily topic. Under each day we can assign a note for each of the platforms we’re working with. And if we need to move something around from one day to another, it’s really easy to click and drag.
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[the_ad id=’2017′]Step 2: Decide When You Want To Share.
Another reason, and maybe even more importantly why we use this first step is for editorial analysis and for proofing and green-lighting the content that’s going out into the world. While the team we work with is highly experienced with the dynamics of social media marketing, it’s easy to get lost in our work and lose the voice, message, or focus of our client’s goal for the scheduled period. If we fail to plan before scheduling we may be off point and miss an opportunity. What’s worse, even if the message works, it gets really difficult to explain to our client’s why we made a mistake like misspelling their name, mixing words up such as their, there, and they’re, or something else that might fall through the cracks if not checked first. This is important because when we only have a set-it-and-forget-it approach, we might not see what others may since we didn’t take the time to invest in this process first.

1) Planning; 2) Schedule; and 3) Publish!
So once the Trello board has been carefully reviewed and approved, we move on to step number two: Calendaring.
There are tons of resources for scheduling your posts on social media. Again, I encourage you to read the Entrepreneur article above. For now, we’re just talking about why we use a two-step process. Once our editors have approved the content for publishing, then we can put it out for scheduling. Of course, we’re not pushing or client’s material out into the web whenever we want. We use several tools and analytics to identify the optimal posting times for each platform.
Because we do a little more work up front, we feel more confident managing our client’s brands, and they feel secure putting their trust in us. Not only does this help reinforce our business relationships with our clients, but it also gives them another great reason to refer us to others.
So what do you think about our two-step process?
Please share below and tell us about your favorite tools for planning and scheduling.
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