The world of social media and content material advertising and marketing is a fast-moving house. Any people or groups working in these worlds understand how important it’s to have the appropriate instruments in place to make on a regular basis work movement extra easily.

At Buffer, not solely are we writing and publishing weblog and social media posts on daily basis, we’re additionally a totally distant and distributed firm. For our Content material staff, particularly, 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 data in a single house.

Enter our content material calendar.

Our Content material staff publishes no less than 4 articles per week, one for Monday by way of Thursday, plus we usually refresh older content material and ship a weekly newsletter. We additionally publish to social media on daily basis of the week throughout six social media platforms. Add all of this up, and it means the one approach to hold monitor of every thing is to maintain it in a single place with a centralized content material calendar.

We work from a content material calendar inbuilt Notion, and on this publish, we’ll go over how we work collectively as a content material staff, precisely how our content material calendar is ready up, and we’ll share a free template of our very personal content material calendar in Notion which you can duplicate and begin utilizing instantly.

How we work collectively

How we collaborate as a staff has advanced lots over time, and it’s nonetheless altering usually. (Right here’s a throwback to how our team worked together back 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 methods transparently (like on this publish!), we regularly get nice suggestions from our group and may make changes and enhancements.

The instruments we use

Instruments are the infrastructure behind any staff, so listed here are the entire instruments we use and what we’re utilizing them for.

How we divide possession

We’re a small and nimble staff 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 modifying weblog posts and who give attention to 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 simply personal your tasks and drive your work ahead. It’s the identical on our Content material staff — 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 chargeable for protecting them updated and letting the remainder of the staff understand how progress goes.

How we collaborate

As a distributed staff that works remotely and a staff that has a excessive output, we attempt to keep away from too many conferences so there’s loads of time for heads-down work, like writing and batch-filming video content material. Even so, we do have common staff conferences to remain aligned.

• Editorial Assessment: Each two weeks, we’ve an editorial assembly to overview the subsequent two weeks of content material, examine in on timelines, make sure that we’ve sufficient selection and canopy any well timed matters, and plan for upcoming holidays.
• Content material staff conferences: Twice a month (starting and mid-month), we do content material staff calls the place we overview 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 gradual stream of threads in our content material staff channel in Slack, the place we get suggestions from one another, share concepts, and have fun wins.

We additionally collaborate immediately 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 reside, however for social media posts we depend on Notion to go back-and-forth with concepts and recommendations.

How a bit 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 can be 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 after 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 nicely. On the weblog facet, we’ll go over concepts and add dates within the Editorial assembly for the weblog content material calendar to ensure we’ve the subsequent two weeks absolutely deliberate out.

Drafts and critiques

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 gained’t come as a shock that we love scheduling our content material out upfront – our aim 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 staff rules

There are three rules that we hold top-of-mind on the content material staff for our work since every thing we create displays Buffer as an organization and as a model. They’re:

• Add worth. We don’t create simply to create; we’ve one thing to say, and we need to assist our group and prospects. A part of including worth is consistency. We’ll present up constantly for our prospects and group with high-quality content material.
• Be Buffery. Our content material ought to feel and appear prefer it’s coming from the Buffer staff — a giant a part of that’s voice and tone. Buffer posts sound totally different from posts some other firm would possibly 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 subject.
• Construct in public. What we share on the Buffer weblog and social channels is among the most important methods we may help our entire firm proceed to build in public. We may help facilitate this by pushing to publish issues early into our journey of speaking about it at Buffer, not ready till one thing is full. We will 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 ready up

Central to our collaboration as a content material staff 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 staff calendar seems to be like:

On the high of this, you may see that we’ve totally 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 based mostly on standing
• A listing of concepts for weblog publish content material

Inside Notion, you may 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 most important properties are:

• Standing (Concept, Deliberate, Engaged on, Drafted, In Assessment, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Revealed, Paused)
• Writer/Proprietor
• Channel (weblog or social media platform)
• Description (what’s the publish about?)
• Publish date
• Draft hyperlink (to a Google doc)
• URL (what’s going to the URL of this weblog publish be?)
• Featured? (a checkbox to find out if we function a publish)
• Final edited by (routinely updates who final edited the cardboard)
• Final edited time (routinely 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 Assessment, Able to be scheduled, Scheduled, Revealed, Paused)
• Writer/Proprietor
• Channel (which social media platform)
• Publish date
• Graphics (hyperlink to any graphics created)
• URL (hyperlink to the weblog publish)
• Final edited by (routinely updates who final edited the cardboard)
• Final edited time (routinely updates the final time the cardboard was edited)

The aim for all of those properties and for this database is to steadiness together with the entire important data alongside making this a lighter carry in order that we are able to hold this method operating and up-to-date as a staff with out it taking an excessive amount of time each week.

Our content material calendar template

We’ve a simplified model of our very personal content material calendar obtainable as a template which you can duplicate to your individual 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 some other properties that shall be helpful to your staff.

Move this alongside to anybody eager for a greater system for his or her content material, and depart a remark with different templates you’d prefer to see from us, plus the rest we are able to reply on how we collaborate!