The world of social media and content material advertising is a fast-moving house. Any people or groups working in these worlds know the way important it’s to have the precise instruments in place to make on a regular basis work stream extra easily.
At Buffer, not solely are we writing and publishing weblog and social media posts day-after-day, we’re additionally a completely distant and distributed firm. For our Content material workforce, specifically, we’re 4 folks 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 printed and when, and preserve all a very powerful info in a single house.
Enter our content material calendar.
Our Content material workforce publishes not less than 4 articles per week, one for Monday via Thursday, plus we often refresh older content material and ship a weekly publication. We additionally publish to social media day-after-day of the week throughout six social media platforms. Add all of this up, and it means the one option to preserve monitor of every part 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 workforce, 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 which you could duplicate and begin utilizing instantly.
How we work collectively
How we collaborate as a workforce has developed quite a bit over time, and it’s nonetheless altering often. (Right here’s a throwback to how our workforce 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 frequently get nice suggestions from our neighborhood and may make changes and enhancements.
The instruments we use
Instruments are the infrastructure behind any workforce, 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 workforce 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 corporations, there are complete 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 a variety of flexibility and freedom with the expectation that you simply personal your initiatives and drive your work ahead. It’s the identical on our Content material workforce — we collaborate on our content material calendar to determine what we publish and when, however each particular person “owns” the Notion playing cards for the posts they’re engaged on and is liable for protecting them updated and letting the remainder of the workforce know the way progress goes.
How we collaborate
As a distributed workforce that works remotely and a workforce 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 workforce conferences to remain aligned.
- Editorial Evaluate: Each two weeks, we now have an editorial assembly to overview the following two weeks of content material, examine in on timelines, make sure that we now have sufficient selection and canopy any well timed matters, and plan for upcoming holidays.
- Content material workforce conferences: Twice a month (starting and mid-month), we do content material workforce calls the place we overview all of our metrics for the final month, replicate on what’s working and what isn’t, and iterate from there.
Outdoors of conferences, we sustain a gentle stream of threads in our content material workforce channel in Slack, the place we get suggestions from one another, share concepts, and have fun wins.
We additionally collaborate instantly in Notion to depart 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 bit of content material goes from thought to printed
Our system has been working very 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 thought 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 start out planning
Some playing cards get dates instantly, and for others we wait till it’s nearer to once we’ll need 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 effectively. On the weblog aspect, we’ll go over concepts and add dates within the Editorial assembly for the weblog content material calendar to ensure we now have the following two weeks totally deliberate out.
Drafts and critiques
Every bit of content material is reviewed. Content material is both peer-reviewed or totally 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 prematurely – our purpose 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.
Put up-publishing, we monitor an entire host of metrics, and weblog and social post-performance are reviewed month-to-month.
Our content material workforce ideas
There are three ideas that we preserve top-of-mind on the content material workforce for our work since every part we create displays Buffer as an organization and as a model. They’re:
- Add worth. We don’t create simply to create; we now have one thing to say, and we need to assist our neighborhood and clients. A part of including worth is consistency. We are going to present up constantly for our clients and neighborhood with high-quality content material.
- Be Buffery. Our content material ought to feel and appear prefer it’s coming from the Buffer workforce — an enormous a part of that’s voice and tone. Buffer posts sound completely different from posts another 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 likely one of the predominant methods we may also help our entire firm proceed to construct in public. We may also 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 workforce is that this one database in Notion, our content material calendar, the place each piece 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 workforce calendar appears to be like like:
On the prime of this, you possibly can see that we now have completely different views arrange. The principle methods to view the database are:
- The entire calendar
- The calendar filtered for under weblog posts
- The calendar filtered for under social media posts
- A board view to see content material based mostly on standing
- An inventory of concepts for weblog put up content material
Inside Notion, you may get very particular in regards to the properties you arrange. Listed here are the entire properties we use for our content material calendar.
How we handle weblog posts
For weblog posts, our predominant properties are:
- Standing (Thought, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Evaluate, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Printed, 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 predominant properties are:
- Standing (Thought, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Evaluate, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Printed, 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 purpose for all of those properties and for this database is to steadiness together with the entire important info alongside making this a lighter elevate in order that we will preserve this technique working and up-to-date as a workforce with out it taking an excessive amount of time each week.
Our content material calendar template
We now have a simplified model of our very personal content material calendar accessible as a template which you could duplicate to your personal Notion house right here.
We suggest utilizing Notion’s filters to customise the views to no matter you’d use most and, in fact, including in another properties that shall be helpful in your workforce.
Cross this alongside to anybody eager for a greater system for his or her content material, and depart a remark with different templates you’d wish to see from us, plus the rest we will reply on how we collaborate!
