August 2011 – Wheeler Blogs.

Generating fresh, engaging content several times a day can be difficult. A daily content calendar can help prevent you from getting social media ‘writers block’ and keep your followers engaged. After all, content is king!

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of putting together a daily content calendar to help with generating ideas for engaging posts. While long-term strategy is always important, it is equally important to have short-term strategy in place. With short-term strategy, we are generally talking about smaller marketing campaigns within the larger campaign such as online contests, event/sales promotions, etc. However, with any social media campaign, there is bound to be times when there is simply not any pertinent messages to post.

As I mentioned in my previous article however, it is important to continually have fresh, engaging content posted on your main social media sites (typically Facebook and Twitter). This can especially be a challenge for the small business owner who may not always have company news or upcoming events to promote. Also, it is important to maintain a lighthearted stream across all social media platforms and to constantly have fresh content that people will want to share and comment on. It’s all about keeping the conversation going!

For anyone looking for ideas on keeping up fresh content across various social networking sites, read my blog post “30 Ideas for Providing Fresh Content in #SocialMedia.” The image below contains my daily content calendar at KVSC-FM. I do not follow it religously, for I usually have several different promotions going on with the station each week, but I do pretty much stick with some of the regular postings our listeners look forward to. Those include Music Monday, From the KVSC Archives (Tuesdays) and Trivia Thursday. The rest on the calendar is just filler and can easily be substituted for other content. Also included in the document are more content ideas and tips for running a successful Facebook page I retrieved from an article on PR Daily by Kamila Hankiewicz titled “14 Tips for a Successful Facebook Page.”

Daily Content Calendar for Social Media used at KVSC-FM

Click image to view the full PDF or click here: Social Media Daily Content Calendar

As you can see, the calendar is not too detailed–just enough to help you generate fresh content and hopefully not bore your followers. I included the additional tips and resources as a reminder to myself and also to ensure an easy transition for my successor. Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions for my daily content calendar or have an example of your own, please share in the comment section below or send me an email at ericdylanwheeler@gmail.com.

Whether looking to increase website traffic, increase sales or build a stronger brand, strategy is what drives the communications vehicle. If you are a PR or marketing communications professional, chances are you have a long-term communications strategy for your brand, business or client. It is important to understand how social media fit into the long-term communications strategy. One area that should never be overlooked is providing fresh content for each of your chosen social media platforms (generally Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, coming soon, Google+).

As I have mentioned before, providing fresh content can sometimes be a challenge. The smaller the business or brand, the more difficult it may become to think of new and engaging content to post on each respective social network. In particular, Facebook can be a challenge because of the algorithm it uses in its news feed.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to keep your news feed from getting out of control. Without getting into great detail, EdgeRank basically has three pillars: 1.) An affinity score (users who interact with you more are more likely to see your posts); 2.) Likes and comments have high importance; and 3.) Timing (newer posts take precedence). You can read more about EdgeRank here.

Knowing that Facebook uses EdgeRank as an automated “gate-keeper,” providing fresh, engaging content at the right time of day is very important. The same concept of posting fresh, engaging content can be applied on other social media platforms as well. On Twitter especially, Tweeting thought-provoking content, enticing (clickable) links and adding a little humor or anything that might encourage re-tweets becomes important. With Twitter though, there is no algorithm to maintain a more manageable news feed, and therefore, sending out more tweets at the right times become important. Again, without getting too detailed, the best times to Tweet are generally noon and 6 p.m. and at a rate of 1-4 tweets per hour. For more on timing, view an infographic from KISSmetrics.

Understanding the importance of frequency and timing of engaging posts on social networking sites, I have a daily content calendar I maintain for KVSC-FM. I have been the Director of PR & Social Media for two years at KVSC-FM and have done a number of social media marketing campaigns in promoting upcoming events/programming and have performed a lot of social media contests along the way. However, even if a long-term social media strategy is set, coming up with 2-4 posts for Facebook per day and 1-4 Tweets per hour can be a bit of a challenge. For this reason, I have developed a daily content calendar to help in generating ideas.

Some of the daily post ideas have become something listeners of the station look forward to each week. For example, Music Monday, where I simply post a music-related article or Trivia Thursday, where I ask a random trivia question (this is also a chance to be sneaky and relate the question to a current promotion). Again, the idea is to generate conversation and, ultimately, build a positive relationship with your followers. Building a daily content calendar is not difficult, you just need to sit down and think of a few ideas you can share on each social networking site each day. For more ideas on providing daily content, read my article “30 Ideas for Providing Fresh Content in #SocialMedia.”

Image: Ray Kowatch’s Blog.