Social Seven: Tools of the Trade – Editorial Calendars and Trello

If you don’t have a routine or a schedule, you aren’t going to be consistent with your social media. So, it makes sense to build an editorial calendar. What do you use to build a calendar for your content? This can depend on the client. Everyone has thrie own themes and weekly schedule. Each one is so drastically different, as are their posting options. A social media manager could use tools like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Google Drive and Dropbox for different purposes. However, that means pulling from a variety of different places. Therefore, it makes sense to have everything in one spot instead of duplicating efforts.

Trello is an online tool for scheduling. There are so many things you can do with it. Trello can be set up for one clientor many. There are various boards, lists and cards for each client. You can be very narrow with what you are doing. Typically, with an editorial calendar for a client is there is a social media strategy. In Trello, you create cards. These cards include brief descriptions on what to post, hashtags, timing and anything else pertinent to that schedule.

One major perk to Trello is that images that have been created to share can be placed onto these cards as well. Text can also be added so that everything for the post is in one place. Also, the client can be added in order to review the cards before they are posted. Due dates can be added and reminders via email will be sent to remind team members or clients to approve or review the posts.

Trello also allows users to label the cards with custom labels to help with organization. Then it can be copied into Hootsuite or whatever other scheduling tool is being used to post the content.  For Twitter, it may be better to use something different such as a Google spreadsheet or an Excel file. This is mainly due to the bulk uploading nature of that platform.

There are other tools available such as Base Camp, One Note and Evernote that could be used as well. Base Camp and Trello are very similar. Unfortunately, Base Camp gives you only a specific amount of time to make changes or edit a post, which could cause some issues in the long term. The idea is to keep you organized. Don’t let yourself run dry. Try out some new tools and see if you can make them work for you!