Heather Burks has been working with Jive for 4 years...first as a customer, and now a member of the Jive Professional Services team. She enjoys her role as a Social Business Advisor, sharing Jive's best practices and community management expertise. Her personal goal is to help our customers become unstoppable! In this piece, Heather shares how to ensure content creation in your community through developing a thorough content calendar.
A content calendar is essential to making sure valuable content continues to flow into your community. The content calendar can be kept by the Enterprise Community Manager, who should be working with a variety of community members to gather, develop and publish the material.
Key persons contributing to the content calendar are:
- Community advocates
- Subject matter experts
- Organization leadership members
Items to include in your content calendar are:
- Content type: Blog, document, discussion, video, poll, etc.
- Place: Where the content will be published
- Owner: The Community Manager who is responsible for the community the content will be posted in
- Author: Who will write the content-call on others to help contribute
- Topic: The main idea of the content
- Resources: What will be needed to complete the content, such as source content or access to experts
- Due date: When the content needs to be completed
- Publish date: When the content will be published
- URL: Final link to the content for easy reference
Your content calendar should be set at least one month ahead, with weekly and monthly items identified. However, make sure to look at the year as a whole so you can identify important dates and events that will need supporting content. Important company events such as employee all-staff meetings, annual conferences, and new benefits programs make great community fodder. Generating content around these events not only promotes what's going on in the company, it also helps encourage people to visit regularly. You can either use a Jive table (see below) or Excel spreadsheet for your content calendar, and maintain it in the private Community Managers group in your community.
This sample blogging calendar illustrates how a Jive table can be used to create and maintain your content calendar.
To explore additional thoughts on content calendars, visit these links:
- Hannon Hill provides a 5-part series on editorial calendars, including what it is, how to set it up, and how to use analytics with your content calendar. For their thoughts on how to create a content calendar, visit the second installment in the series, How to Set Up Your Editorial Calendar + Free Template
- For a list of questions to get you thinking, visit: 5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing an Editorial Calendar
What obstacles have you encountered in ensuring content creation?