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 fitting instruments in place to make on a regular basis work circulate extra easily.

At Buffer, not solely are we writing and publishing weblog and social media posts day by day, we’re additionally a completely distant and distributed firm. For our Content material crew, 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 high of what’s being revealed and when, and hold all a very powerful info 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 Thursday, plus we commonly refresh older content material and ship a weekly e-newsletter. We additionally publish to social media day by day of the week throughout six social media platforms. Add all of this up, and it means the one option to hold monitor of all the pieces 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 submit, 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 developed quite a bit over time, and it’s nonetheless altering commonly. (Right here’s a throwback to how our crew labored collectively again in 2017.)

We hold an open thoughts and attempt to query our personal processes to see the place they are often improved. Plus, by sharing our personal programs transparently (like on this submit!), we frequently get nice suggestions from our group and might make changes and enhancements.

The instruments we use

Instruments are the infrastructure behind any crew, so listed below are all the 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 modifying weblog posts and who concentrate on publishing — not so for us.

Buffer, as an organization, is a spot the place there’s quite a lot of flexibility and freedom with the expectation that you just personal your tasks 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 liable 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 Evaluation: Each two weeks, we have now an editorial assembly to assessment the subsequent two weeks of content material, test in on timelines, be sure that we have now 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 assessment all of our metrics for the final month, mirror on what’s working and what isn’t, and iterate from there.

Exterior of conferences, we sustain a gentle 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 instantly 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 reside, however for social media posts we depend on Notion to go back-and-forth with concepts and solutions.

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 might be 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 facet, we’ll go over concepts and add dates within the Editorial assembly for the weblog content material calendar to verify we have now the subsequent two weeks totally deliberate out.

Drafts and opinions

Each piece 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 gained’t come as a shock that we love scheduling our content material out prematurely – 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 a complete 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 hold top-of-mind on the content material crew for our work since all the pieces we create displays Buffer as an organization and as a model. They’re:

• Add worth. We don’t create simply to create; we have now one thing to say, and we wish to assist our group and prospects. A part of including worth is consistency. We are going to present up persistently for our prospects and group with high-quality content material.
• Be Buffery. Our content material ought to appear and feel 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 may write, and one other a part of that’s the content material itself. We should always have our personal distinctive opinion and method for each matter.
• Construct in public. What we share on the Buffer weblog and social channels is without doubt one of the most important methods we might help our complete firm proceed to construct in public. We might help facilitate this by pushing to submit 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 each piece of content material we’re going to publish exists in a single card with a complete host of details about it.

Right here’s what a full week of our content material crew calendar appears like:

On the high of this, you may see that we have now completely different views arrange. The primary 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 primarily based on standing
• A listing of concepts for weblog submit content material

Inside Notion, you may get very particular in regards to the properties you arrange. Listed below are all the properties we use for our content material calendar.

How we handle weblog posts

For weblog posts, our most important properties are:

• Standing (Concept, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Evaluation, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Printed, Paused)
• Creator/Proprietor
• Channel (weblog or social media platform)
• Description (what’s the submit about?)
• Publish date
• Draft hyperlink (to a Google doc)
• URL (what’s going to the URL of this weblog submit be?)
• Featured? (a checkbox to find out if we characteristic a submit)
• 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 most important properties are:

• Standing (Concept, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Evaluation, 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 submit)
• 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 all the important info alongside making this a lighter elevate in order that we will hold 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

We have now a simplified model of our very personal content material calendar obtainable as a template that you may 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, after all, including in every other properties that might be helpful in your crew.

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 anything we will reply on how we collaborate!