Insurance Marketing Quick Tip: How to Create a Social Media Editorial Calendar, Part 1

It’s not too late to use the momentum of a new year to enhance your insurance marketing strategy by organizing social media content. A social media editorial calendar is meant to reduce the stress and time needed to create posts day-to-day and keep social media content aligned to the overarching business goals and objectives. Now is the perfect time to create and organize a 2014 social media editorial calendar. This blog will answer why it is important to use an editorial calendar for social media content and several tips in getting started. Check in next week to learn the technical elements of building out a social media editorial calendar.

What are the benefits of a social media editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar not only streamlines organizing multiple pieces of content but also forces the social media manager to think further out in the future than today or tomorrow. An editorial calendar will enhance your insurance marketing plan with the following benefits:

• Organize for efficiency: Putting all social media content posts and ideas in one place makes it a one-stop shop to see content types, timelines, deadlines and content gaps.
• Facilitate collaboration: When collaborating with multiple team members in creating content or ideas, the calendar can be used to keep all colleagues on the same page.
• Detect content overlap: Posting social media content on a daily basis instead of planning it ahead of time makes it easy to continually post the same type of content without enough variation. But when laying out social media posts in a calendar, detecting content overlap becomes more straightforward. For example, according to X Company’s business strategy, auto insurance is 60 percent of the business focus. Organizing and tracking the amount of auto insurance-related posts throughout the calendar allows the social media manager to plan and ensure that 60 percent of content is related to the auto insurance industry.
• Oversee multiple channels: Keep track of the type of content and messaging that is being posted on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook since content may not be posted on all social media channels.
• Create more social media buy-in: A social media editorial calendar can be a useful tool when asked if social media is a worthwhile investment. For anyone who doesn’t work in communications or marketing, it is difficult to see why social media can be so important for a business. Use the calendar as a visual representation of the type of content published on what channels and how the content is related in achieving the overall business objective. Once decision makers within the company see how much content is distributed, it could lead to investing more resources into social media content creation.

Where do I start in creating content for a social media editorial calendar?

It’s best to start on broader scale and then continue to break it down further into more detailed actions. For example, first choose topics and themes to correspond with each month of the year. Then go through each month to determine the types of content that relates to each theme. Consider the following content ideas and pieces and start mapping them throughout the year:

• Tradeshows and conferences that colleagues will be attending
• Blogs that are published on your insurance company website
• Promotions and contests that your insurance business will implement to expand reach
• Events that your insurance company will be involved with throughout the year, whether it is a sponsoring a golf tournament or volunteering in a city clean-up
• Season or holiday-related posts that correlate with your insurance company’s strategy, i.e. social media posts related to winter-proofing homes if your company sells home insurance

Make social media marketing more time-efficient and relevant to business strategy by incorporating an editorial calendar into your insurance marketing strategy. Check back next week to learn tips and tricks for building a social media editorial calendar.