Whenever I meet with a prospective client, a recurring theme is a lack of time. Everyone seems hard-pressed these days to “keep up” much less add new tasks to an already over-committed schedule. But, it has become obvious that having a public presence via social media is critical to success.
There are tons of different time management tools and techniques. Before I ever knew it had a name, I used a form of http://pomodoro.com which involved intense bursts of effort broken up by short breaks where I’d get up from my desk and walk around the office, eh, interrupting others. What can I say?
So, what’s my point anyway? This is supposed to be about Editorial Schedules!
Exactly!
Once you’ve identified the social media tools that best fit your business and your market by developing personas, you’re off to a great start. The goal is to ensure that it doesn’t fizzle out like a sparkler on the fourth of July.
That’s where an editorial schedule comes into play. Just as in the Pomodoro Method, the stages of planning, tracking, recording, processing and visualizing are fundamental.
Planning (aka Laying the Foundations!)
Developing editorial schedule/s. This is your To Do List and should give you a good grasp of the effort and time needed to accomplish your objectives of Tweets and other short-form blog posts, longer blog posts, and email broadcasts.
Tracking (aka What, Where, When!)
At Venntive, we use a combination of iCal and our own easy-peasy Projects app to set reminders and manage deadlines for creating and publishing content. But, you can take it a step further by implementing the Pomodoro technique of working in 25-minute increments to achieve your goals.
Recording (aka Write!)
This is the content creation stage. Recording encompasses everything from book marking articles to creating and editing your content itself. Make notes, bookmark articles, and even save to Draft in your blog whenever an idea hits. During that half hour in the morning where you go through your email and catch up on news and scan relevant online articles, newsletters, and emails, you will be presented with a wealth of ideas.
I love having a widget on my browser to save to Wordpress and Blogger as drafts. This is a great way to quickly save ideas and make a few notes to come back to later. You can do the same with email broadcasts that you come back to finish. Again, we use our own tools to save social posts as drafts to send or re-send later or schedule to go out at a later time.
Processing (aka Send!)
No matter how many years may have passed since one’s very first newsletter broadcast, there’s always a little thrill of excitement combined with a level of trepidation. Before you hit Send, at least, on longer pieces, it’s a good idea to get a fresh pair of eyes double-check spelling, grammar, how it reads, and do all the links work.
For longer posts and emails, i.e. blog, you might opt for weekly, biweekly, or even monthly.