2018 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING 411 |  GOALS | CALENDAR

  INTRODUCTION

So you’re revving up your social marketing—with the help of our Sample Social Media Tactical Plan, you’ve figured out your social objectives, defined your goals, and determined the metrics you’ll use to measure success. The only thing missing? A way to map, track, and share your social marketing plan company-wide.

This sample editorial calendar will help you manage your daily, monthly, and yearly marketing on social. Check out how Marketo plans our social content, and then create your own editorial calendar using our handy templates.

In our experience, companies tend to have one of two problems with social—either they can’t think of anything to post, or they’ve got so much material that they overwhelm their audience. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, the question of what (and how often) to post on social is a very important one.

To help you answer the cadence question, we’ve shared our own posting schedule for each social network. But to figure out the right mix for your own business, you should start with your priorities: what do you hope to accomplish with your social presence?

You probably have several objectives, which might include:

  Sharing relevant content

     Showing off your brand’s sparkling personality Promoting events

  Announcing new products

    Gathering new names for your marketing database Acquiring new customers

     Building/nurturing relationships with your current audience Increasing traffic to your blog/website/landing pages

At Marketo, we prioritize promotions that our marketing team has specifically requested (see our “Social Request Form” template later in this guide), events that need to be promoted, our daily marketing blog, and our newest educational content.

We also look at each day/week’s post as a whole—using our social editorial calendar, we can clearly see if we’re over-posting about a certain topic, or failing to support one of our core competencies.

Your editorial calendar should reflect your own priorities— fill them in below:

Priority1: Priority 2:  

Priority 3:  

Priority 4:

At Marketo, we always aim for the 411 rule on social—

we try to post four educational, entertaining posts for every one “soft promotion” (such as an event promotion) and one “hard promotion” (such as “watch a demo”).

We’ve found that this approach works in email marketing, on our blog, and in social marketing. It lets us engage in conversations with our audience, build awareness, and keep in touch with our followers— without coming across as pushy or sales-y.

  So even if one of your top priorities is “announcing new products,” we don’t recommend tweeting about your new releases all day. Likewise, if you want to acquire new customers on social, it’s still not the best venue for advertising deals. You can certainly mention promotions on occasio but do so with caution. Your audience’s trust—ultimately, your most powerful selling tool—hangs in the bala

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 4

Social is the perfect place to show your brand’s human side

—you can be conversational, engaging, and even funny (if that aligns with your brand). But while you might adopt a more playful voice on Twitter, and a more professional voice on LinkedIn, consistency is key.

Stephanie Schwab of Social Media Explorer breaks down a brand’s voice into four categories: Character/Persona, Tone, Language, and Purpose. Here’s her list of attributes for each category—which of these descriptors belong to your brand?

Character/Persona

            Friendly Warm Inspiring Playful Authoritative Professional

Tone

     

Personal Humble Clinical Honest Direct Scientific

       Purpose

                            Engage Educate Inform Enable Entertain Delight Sell Amplify

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 5

DEFINING YOUR VOICE

Once you’ve defined your voice, you’ll want to aim for consistency across your entire company. Here are some strategies we use at Marketo to achieve a consistent voice:

• Align your writers. Make sure anyone writing for your brand (whether it’s advertising, press releases, ebooks, or blog posts) is closely aligned. Often, this content is all written by the same person. If these functions are handled by multiple people, meet regularly to review and improve.

• Extend the review process. At the end of each day, our social team sends their scheduled tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn posts to a cross-functional team of reviewers. This way, members of our PR, demand generation, content, SEO, and PPC teams

all have a chance to weigh in. (This is also a great way to catch typos and bad links!)

• Keep an editorial calendar. A calendar isn’t just for planning out your future social posts—it’s also for recording your posts from the past. It isn’t easy keeping track of which ebook you’ve

already tweeted about, or which event you’ve already advertised on LinkedIn, especially if you have multiple people on your team.

At Marketo, we’ve created a company-wide Social Promotion Request form, which we created in Google

What would you like us to promote?:

(Please include any applicable links)

Forms. Anyone in the company can request that Marketo  

post about a particular event, asset, or announcement. Once they fill out the form, the information automatically populates a “Responses” document, which our social team then reviews.

For example, our content team might fill out the form to promote a new ebook, while our events team might request promotion for a speaking appearance. Once a request appears on our Responses document, we add it to our editorial calendar. This gives our social team a “big picture” view of our upcoming posts, and ensures that our important promotions are properly scheduled.

Here’s what our form looks like—feel free to tweak for your own company’s needs:

When do you want this promoted?:

(Ex. “3 times in March,” “1 week before the event,” “1 day before the webinar,”)

If you’d like your post to go on Twitter, please write the exact message below:

(Make sure that the messaging in under 140 characters, link included. Don’t forget to include Twitter handles or hashtags if applicable.)

If you’d like your post to go on LinkedIn, please write the exact message below:

If you’d like your post to go on Google Plus, please write the exact message below:

(Don’t forget to include Google Plus Accounts or hashtags if applicable.)

Anything else we need to know about?

(Please write any comments, details, or notes that we should be aware of.)

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 7

 

Whether there are five or 500 employees at your company, you should make them a part of your social strategy.

Research has shown that people trust their friends and families more than brands on social, and most employees at your company will have a social network to leverage.

Encourage your teammates to share your messaging in the same way you’d encourage your audience:

1. Make it as easy as possible, removing any potential roadblocks

1. Offer an incentive for doing so

We recommend using a tool like GaggleAmp, which allows you to pre- load messaging for members to share—once an employee has synced her social profiles, she can either allow GaggleAmp to post messaging automatically, or she can pick and choose which messages to share.

Either way, it makes the process as easy as clicking “yes” or “no.”

One of the golden rules of blogging is “Don’t bite off more than you can chew.” If you update your blog inconsistently, your audience won’t know when to expect new content, and they’ll inevitably feel frustrated when you haven’t added anything new.

Of course, some weeks you’ll have a dozen things to write about; other weeks you’ll have none. Creating an editorial calendar for your blog will help you maintain a consistent cadence. If you have more material than usual, you can just pop it on next week’s calendar. If you notice the calendar for the coming week is light, you can gather some new material with time to spare.

A calendar also helps you map time-sensitive content ahead of time. We keep our content, social, and PR teams closely aligned, so that blog posts containing new announcements, releases, or awesome new content assets are firmly on the calendar weeks in advance. At the end of each week, we send around the blog topics for the following week— this way, any “last minute” changes aren’t actually at the last minute.

Here’s how a typical week of blog posts looks at Marketo:

• MONDAY: New asset promotion
• TUESDAY: Post about best marketing practices
• WEDNESDAY: Partner post
• THURSDAY: Post about best practices
• FRIDAY: Fun, lighter post

Samp

Fill in the following information on the next page to build your own blogging calendar:

1. Who will contribute content to your blog? (Check all that apply)

  Our content marketing team Our PR team

Our marketing team

  Other teams within our organization Our partners

Our customers

Industry experts/thought leaders

1. Who will be responsible for editing each blog post, to ensure consistency /accuracy/quality?

1. List any upcoming releases, company/industry events, announcements, or content assets you will want to promote on your blog (If applicable, sync with your PR, content, social, and product teams to determine this):

       

1. List any holidays, national/international events (i.e. The Academy Awards, The Super Bowl, etc.) that you’d like to create blog posts about:

1. Who will need to give final approval on each blog post before   it’s published?

1. How many times, per week, will you blog?

(We recommend you post at least 3 times per week)

  times per day

  times per week

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 10

Facebook is one of our favorite social marketing networks. With over 1.32 billion active users, it’s practically guaranteed that your audience (or a segment of it) is

on Facebook as well. We recommend posting to your Facebook page no more than twice per day—most people get annoyed when a close friend floods their Facebook feed, never mind a company.

But even though we aim to post only twice daily, our social team tends to have Marketo’s Facebook page open all day long. That’s because if your audience is engaging with you, via comments, likes, shares, and messages, it’s important that you join the conversation. If someone has a question or complaint, you want to be on hand to

address it immediately. (Also, an unfortunate truth is that visitors may use Facebook as an opportunity to post inappropriate or offensive content to your feed—if you aren’t monitoring closely, you might not “hide” the post from your feed in time.)

As with your blog, it’s important that your Facebook posts contain a healthy mixture of educational, fun, and entertaining content. Again, aim for the 411 rule—only a third of your content, at most, should be promotional.

To help us schedule content ahead of time, and to give our audience an idea of what to expect each week, we repeat themed posts on certain days of the week. Of course, these mini-themes align with our overall theme—marketing!

For example, on Monday, we post a “Motivational Monday” quote to inspire our audience for the week; on Wednesday, we post a “Hump Day HAHA”—a clever marketing campaign to lighten up the mid-week doldrums. On Friday, we post “Flashback Friday” images of classic marketing campaigns from the past.

There are plenty of ways to plan out themes—you might decide to post about new releases on the first Monday of the quarter, or answer audience questions every Wednesday.

Do a quick brainstorm with your team, and list some ideas for repeating themes below:

1:  

2:  

3:  

4:  

5:  

Added bonus for marketing automation users: The best solutions

Lastly, don’t forget to take advantage of your other Facebook real estate—your cover photo and profile picture. We have a great cheat sheet about leveraging these highly visible (and free!) areas of

your profile.

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 12

Here’s how a typical week of Facebook posts looks at Marketo:

COVER PHOTO: Marketing Nation Roadshow promotion MONDAY:

2 FB posts

• 1 blog promotion
• 1 “Motivational Monday” post

TUESDAY:

2 FB posts

• 1 blog promotion
• 1 new asset promotion— Pin for the Win

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 13

WEDNESDAY:

1 FB post

• 1 “Hump Day Joke” post

THURSDAY:

1 FB post

• 1 blog promotion

FRIDAY:

2 FB posts

• 1 blog promotion
• 1 “Flashback Friday” post

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 14

Fill in the following information to build your own Facebook calendar:

1. Who will be responsible for posting and monitoring your Facebook page?:

1. List any upcoming releases, company/industry events, announcements, or content assets you will want to promote on Facebook (If applicable, sync with your PR, content, social, and product teams to determine this):

1. How many times per day will you post?

(We recommend you post 1–2 times per day)

    times per day Monday through Friday Seven days a week

Other  

      

4. List any holidays, national/international events (i.e. The Academy Awards, The Super Bowl, etc.) that you’d like to post on Facebook about:

     

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 15

Unlike Facebook, you can post to Twitter many times a day—in fact, we recommend posting roughly once per hour. If that sounds time-consuming…it is. That’s why we highly suggest using a tool that allows you to pre-schedule your tweets. Hootsuite, Buffer, and Oktopost are all inexpensive choices which allow you to both monitor and schedule your posts.

But just because you can tweet frequently doesn’t mean you can afford to be self-promotional—keep the 411 rule firmly in mind. Take advantage of the variety of ways you can engage your audience on Twitter. You’ll want to be continually “favorite”-ing, retweeting, and responding to tweets from your audience. We always schedule at least one tweet per day linking to an awesome article or study (one not written by us), and typically retweet external links throughout the day.

Just like on Facebook, your profile picture and cover image are great places to advertise special events, promotions, new content, and more. We typically adjust our cover image depending on our biggest upcoming event, as shown below. (Note: to give all of our social channels consistency, our Twitter cover image is the same as

our Facebook cover image.)

orial Calendar 16

Here’s a typical list of scheduled daily posts on Twitter—at the end of the day, we would send this around to the whole team for feedback. You’ll notice that our Twitter posts are aligned with our posts on Facebook— for instance, on Monday we tweet about Motivational Monday, and we use both profiles to direct traffic to our blog.

While this schedule was made in Hootsuite, which we use to schedule/ manage posts, you can plan your tweets ahead of time without additional tools. Just make sure your message is below 140 characters (including the link), uses relevant hashtags, and includes an image

if possible.

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 17

Fill in the following information to build your own Twitter calendar:

1. Who will be responsible for posting to and monitoring your Twitter page?

1. List any upcoming releases, company/industry events, announcements, or content assets you will want to promote on Twitter (If applicable, sync with your PR, content, social, and product teams to determine this):

    

1. Who will be sent the next day’s scheduled tweets for review?

  

1. How many tweets, per day, will you schedule?

(We recommend you post 10 times per day)

    times per day Monday through Friday Seven days a week

Other  

5. List any holidays, national/international events (i.e. The Academy Awards, The Super Bowl, etc.) that you’d like to tweet about:

     

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 18

Because LinkedIn is a professional networking site, we typically use it to post links to articles and blog posts, new educational content, and upcoming events. Unlike Twitter, which is highly interactive (and therefore time-consuming to maintain), or Facebook, which is best for fun/entertaining content, LinkedIn is the most “serious,” straight to the point social network. It’s also a powerful recruiting tool—you can post job openings on LinkedIn, and it’s probably one of the first thing potential employees check out.

We also recommend building LinkedIn “Groups” around your company’s specializations and core competencies. Encourage customers to use this as a forum for discussions and assign someone to monitor your group. The monitor should post responses and keep the conversation going.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to build your own, become an active participant in established Groups that speak to your core audience. Make a list of keywords that relate to your prospects or the industries you target, and run a search for any LinkedIn Groups related to these keywords. Once you find the right groups, participate in discussions, ask questions and make connections.

LinkedIn followers aren’t likely to check your page as often as Facebook or Twitter, but we generally post to our LinkedIn page 1–2 times

per day.

Fill in the following information to build your own LinkedIn calendar:

1. Who will be responsible for posting to and monitoring your LinkedIn page?

1. List any upcoming releases, company/industry events, announcements, or content assets you will want to promote on LinkedIn. (If applicable, sync with your PR, content, social, and product teams to determine this):

  

1. What Group(s) will you create on LinkedIn, and who will monitor them?

  

1. Which established Group(s) will you join, and who will participate in them?

6. List any holidays, national/international events (i.e. The Academy Awards, The Super Bowl, etc.) that you’d like to post to LinkedIn about:

4. How many times per day will you post to LinkedIn?

(We recommend you post 10 times per day)

    times per day Monday through Friday Seven days a week

Other  

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 20

Marketers often talk about two kinds of social traffic— “paid” and “organic.” Organic traffic is the kind you naturally earn when you post relevant, high-quality content and work hard to engage your audience. Paid traffic is earned when you take that same high-quality content, and pay to improve its chances of being seen.

At Marketo, we put a portion of our marketing budget behind paid promotions on all of our social channels—as sponsored posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These networks charge based on audience interactions with your posts—the more successful your ads are, the more they charge. That means it’s important to be strategic with your ad placement, and to check in on their progress regularly.

We always have a variety of paid campaigns running, but generally speaking, we refresh our Facebook ads every two-to-three months, our LinkedIn ads every two weeks, and our Twitter ads every two weeks.

Of course, this depends on how well our audience is engaging—if you’re reaching the end of your budget, you’ll need to either allocate more money or pull the ad.

To determine how effective a campaign is, we recommend taking the long view—are your impressions/click-through rates/conversions dropping? If an ad isn’t getting enough traction, you might want to switch it out ahead of schedule.

Sample Social Editorial Calendar 21

Social marketing has a lot of moving parts. Print out or copy this checklist to make sure you’re completing the necessary daily tasks:

Check any incoming tweets/FB comments/LinkedIn mentions from yesterday.

    Refer any support questions to the appropriate team Reply to any comments

  “Like,” “favorite,” or “re-tweet” where appropriate

Check for friend requests and new followers, accept and follow back where appropriate.

Double-check the tweets/posts you scheduled last night.

    Check for relevance (situations can change overnight!) Check all links

   Check for typos

Check for new social promotion requests from your team, whether this is done via a dynamic form or an email alias.

  Check your paid promotions.

    Are you still within your budget? Is your audience engaging?

Check your editorial calendar and colleagues to confirm any events, industry news, or announcements you’ll need to monitor.

Send tomorrow’s tweets, Facebook posts/LinkedIn posts around for review.

    Check all links Check for typos

  Check your tracking parameters

(if using marketing automation or tracking platform to collect data)

 

Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading marketing software for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Marketo’s® customer engagement platform powers a set of breakthrough applications to help marketers tackle all aspects

of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real-time. Marketo’s applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation™, a thriving network of more than 250 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint™ ecosystem and over 40,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA with offices in Europe, Australia and a joint-venture in Japan, Marketo serves as a strategic marketing partner to more than 3,000 large enterprises and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety

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