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The world of social media and content material advertising and marketing is a fast-moving house. Any people or groups working in these worlds know the way important it’s to have the fitting instruments in place to make on a regular basis work circulation extra easily.
At Buffer, not solely are we writing and publishing weblog and social media posts each day, we’re additionally a totally distant and distributed firm. For our Content material crew, particularly, we’re 4 individuals unfold out throughout three timezones. The character of our overlap and versatile work schedules means we have to keep much more organized, on prime of what’s being revealed and when, and preserve all a very powerful data in a single house.
Enter our content material calendar.
Our Content material crew publishes not less than 4 articles per week, one for Monday by means of Thursday, plus we frequently refresh older content material and ship a weekly e-newsletter. We additionally publish to social media each day of the week throughout six social media platforms. Add all of this up, and it means the one strategy to preserve monitor of all the things is to maintain it in a single place with a centralized content material calendar.
We work from a content material calendar in-built Notion, and on this put up, we’ll go over how we work collectively as a content material crew, precisely how our content material calendar is about up, and we’ll share a free template of our very personal content material calendar in Notion that you may duplicate and begin utilizing instantly.
How we work collectively
How we collaborate as a crew has advanced rather a lot through the years, and it’s nonetheless altering frequently. (Right here’s a throwback to how our crew labored collectively again in 2017.)
We preserve an open thoughts and attempt to query our personal processes to see the place they are often improved. Plus, by sharing our personal methods transparently (like on this put up!), we regularly get nice suggestions from our group and may make changes and enhancements.
The instruments we use
Instruments are the infrastructure behind any crew, so listed below are the entire instruments we use and what we’re utilizing them for.
How we divide possession
We’re a small and nimble crew made up of Mitra, our Social Media Supervisor, Tami and Kirsti, our two Content material Writers; and myself as our Head of Content material. We additionally work with a content material company that produces roughly 4 posts month-to-month and one freelancer who produces two content material refreshes each month. At bigger firms, there are total groups devoted to enhancing weblog posts and who give attention to publishing — not so for us.
Buffer, as an organization, is a spot the place there’s loads of flexibility and freedom with the expectation that you just personal your initiatives and drive your work ahead. It’s the identical on our Content material crew — we collaborate on our content material calendar to resolve what we publish and when, however each particular person “owns” the Notion playing cards for the posts they’re engaged on and is answerable for protecting them updated and letting the remainder of the crew know the way progress goes.
How we collaborate
As a distributed crew that works remotely and a crew that has a excessive output, we attempt to keep away from too many conferences so there may be loads of time for heads-down work, like writing and batch-filming video content material. Even so, we do have common crew conferences to remain aligned.
- Editorial Assessment: Each two weeks, now we have an editorial assembly to evaluate the subsequent two weeks of content material, test in on timelines, be sure that now we have sufficient selection and canopy any well timed matters, and plan for upcoming holidays.
- Content material crew conferences: Twice a month (starting and mid-month), we do content material crew calls the place we evaluate all of our metrics for the final month, replicate on what’s working and what isn’t, and iterate from there.
Exterior of conferences, we sustain a gradual stream of threads in our content material crew channel in Slack, the place we get suggestions from one another, share concepts, and have fun wins.
We additionally collaborate immediately in Notion to go away feedback — a lot of the feedback for weblog posts occurs within the Google Doc the place the define after which draft dwell, however for social media posts we depend on Notion to go back-and-forth with concepts and ideas.
How a chunk of content material goes from concept to revealed
Our system has been working rather well for us to take concepts to content material that we’re sharing and publishing. Right here’s every step of our content material creation course of:
Including a card to Notion
Each concept begins as a card in Notion. We’ll additionally create and add playing cards for occasions which are already deliberate and have content material related to them — issues like product launches.
Including a date to begin planning
Some playing cards get dates instantly, and for others we wait till it’s nearer to once we’ll wish to publish them. Mitra retains a number of weeks of content material concepts deliberate out at a time, for instance, and nonetheless retains concepts in Notion as properly. On the weblog aspect, we’ll go over concepts and add dates within the Editorial assembly for the weblog content material calendar to ensure now we have the subsequent two weeks absolutely deliberate out.
Drafts and opinions
Every bit of content material is reviewed. Content material is both peer-reviewed or absolutely edited earlier than it goes out on social or on the weblog.
Schedule
It received’t come as a shock that we love scheduling our content material out upfront – our objective is to schedule all of our content material for the weblog the day earlier than on the newest, and Mitra schedules social posts on the finish of the week for the next week.
Publish-publishing, we monitor an entire host of metrics, and weblog and social post-performance are reviewed month-to-month.
Our content material crew rules
There are three rules that we preserve top-of-mind on the content material crew for our work since all the things we create displays Buffer as an organization and as a model. They’re:
- Add worth. We don’t create simply to create; now we have one thing to say, and we wish to assist our group and clients. A part of including worth is consistency. We’ll present up constantly for our clients and group with high-quality content material.
- Be Buffery. Our content material ought to feel and appear prefer it’s coming from the Buffer crew — a giant a part of that’s voice and tone. Buffer posts sound completely different from posts every other firm would possibly write, and one other a part of that’s the content material itself. We must always have our personal distinctive opinion and strategy for each subject.
- Construct in public. What we share on the Buffer weblog and social channels is without doubt one of the fundamental methods we will help our entire firm proceed to construct in public. We will help facilitate this by pushing to put up issues early into our journey of speaking about it at Buffer, not ready till one thing is full. We are able to encourage teammates to take part in weblog posts and social posts to share their work and assist be the catalysts for extra of a tradition of constructing in public at Buffer.
How our content material calendar is about up
Central to our collaboration as a content material crew is that this one database in Notion, our content material calendar, the place every bit of content material we’re going to publish exists in a single card with an entire host of details about it.
Right here’s what a full week of our content material crew calendar appears to be like like:
On the prime of this, you possibly can see that now we have completely different views arrange. The primary methods to view the database are:
- The entire calendar
- The calendar filtered for less than weblog posts
- The calendar filtered for less than social media posts
- A board view to see content material primarily based on standing
- A listing of concepts for weblog put up content material
Inside Notion, you will get very particular in regards to the properties you arrange. Listed below are the entire properties we use for our content material calendar.
How we handle weblog posts
For weblog posts, our fundamental properties are:
- Standing (Thought, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Assessment, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Revealed, Paused)
- Creator/Proprietor
- Channel (weblog or social media platform)
- Description (what’s the put up about?)
- Publish date
- Draft hyperlink (to a Google doc)
- URL (what’s going to the URL of this weblog put up be?)
- Featured? (a checkbox to find out if we characteristic a put up)
- Final edited by (mechanically updates who final edited the cardboard)
- Final edited time (mechanically updates the final time the cardboard was edited)
How we handle social posts
For social posts, our fundamental properties are:
- Standing (Thought, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Assessment, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Revealed, Paused)
- Creator/Proprietor
- Channel (which social media platform)
- Publish date
- Graphics (hyperlink to any graphics created)
- URL (hyperlink to the weblog put up)
- Final edited by (mechanically updates who final edited the cardboard)
- Final edited time (mechanically updates the final time the cardboard was edited)
The objective for all of those properties and for this database is to steadiness together with the entire important data alongside making this a lighter raise in order that we are able to preserve this technique operating and up-to-date as a crew with out it taking an excessive amount of time each week.
Our content material calendar template
Now we have a simplified model of our very personal content material calendar accessible as a template that you may duplicate to your individual Notion house right here.
We advocate utilizing Notion’s filters to customise the views to no matter you’d use most and, in fact, including in every other properties that will likely be helpful to your crew.
Move this alongside to anybody eager for a greater system for his or her content material, and go away a remark with different templates you’d wish to see from us, plus anything we are able to reply on how we collaborate!
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