How to Create a Monthly Social Media Calendar

You've hit that mid-year lull, haven't you? That time when, instead of creating social media posts with an objective, you're posting a lot of cat videos. Instead of planning goal-oriented posts that express your personality, appeal to your fans, and move you closer to your business goals, you're re-sharing the tired memes from your friend's feed.

It's all right. The annual social media calendar we created in January can get a little dusty midway through the year. Today, we'll clean that calendar off and give it new life in your monthly social media calendar. A monthly social media calendar allows you to know what you're going to post EVERY DAY!! It helps you balance promotional posts with fun and personal ones, it insures you're talking about themes and topics important to you and your audience, and it focuses you so that your social media posts are moving you toward your goals.

And the time investment for this ease and focus? Only about two hours at the end of each month. Here's how to build your own monthly social media calendar:

Step 1: Write down your list of topics from your annual social media calendar.

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If you created an annual social media calendar, then you already have a list of business goals, content topics, and personal events that you want to focus on in your blog writing, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, and other social media content this month. If you didn't create an annual social media calendar, then make a quick list now of those items.

Should writing this list give you ideas for specific posts, go ahead and write those down now, too. For example, I have "summer entertaining on deck" as one of my topics. I need new outdoor pillows, and I figured it would be a fun Facebook post to quiz my lifestyle-and-home-focused followers about what color scheme they prefer for the deck.

Step 2: List the dates of any business, personal, family, holiday, or fun events you having coming up.

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Use these events to inspire posts. I have a professional organizing client whose college-age son came home for summer break. We used his homecoming to inspire a Facebook post about how to help your almost adult get and stay organized over the summer.

Step 3: Determine the topics and dates of your blog posts for the month.

Your blog post can be the foundation of a week's worth of social media posts. By creating posts that direct traffic to your blog, you are directing eyes to your website, which is property that YOU control. It's great to get Facebook and Twitter love, but traffic that stops there is ultimately benefitting Facebook and Twitter most.

Step 4: For each weekday, decide which social media channel you're going to post to and the overall theme of your social media posts.

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I don't post to every social media channel every day, and I don't require it of my small business clients. Who has the time? Determine which social media channels you're going to post to on which days.

Also, you can insure your social media streams are both useful and entertaining by balancing your business-related and personal/fun posts. Choose now which days you will post "business" posts and which day you will post "entertaining" posts. You don't have rigidly hold to this, but it does help you to remember in case all of your posts are listing to one side.

Step 5: Now, begin to fill in your calendar.

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Fill in your blogs first. As I mentioned, your blog posts can be the inspiration for many of your social media posts that week. The days before you publish your blog, you can build interest by posting a photo or tip as a "teaser." After the blog is published, you can continue promoting it by listing a new fact, thanking the sources mentioned in the blog, or giving a shout out to sites where readers can get more info.

Step 6: Fill in date-specific events.

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Use those book signings, holidays, and special events in your life to create posts that give your audience greater insight into you or connect you with your audience on a larger scale. Post a picture of your Mom on Mother's Day, post a picture of a fan from a book signing, show off your spangly gala dress, and give a thank you to that organization that invited you to speak. Your followers love the peek into your life, and they also love it when you show appreciation!

Step 7: Fill in the rest of the calendar using unused ideas on your list.

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Now that you have the "must-haves" filled in, you can use the rest of your calendar to discuss the "like-to-haves," the topics that are important to you and help define your message. Promoting my wonderful clients, providing tips on social media best practices, and highlighting fun things to do in the D.C.-area are all topics that are important to me and that I'll make sure to include now. Other go-tos to fill in your monthly social media calendar include:

• Ask people to follow you on other social media channel
• Promote other people or services in your community
• Share an article that might appeal to your fans
• Use an easy app like Recite.com to create and post a quote you enjoy
• Post a pic of your pet
• Re-share older blog posts from your website
• Ask your audience a question

Happy calendar building! And feel free to contact me if you need any help!

What's one topic or theme that you're interested in that could make your social media stream distinctive this month? How could you use that topic or theme creatively in a post?

Re-starting Your Goals Once You've Stopped

I started 2016 like the president of the student body-head cheerleader-valedictorian, that girl that we all love to hate. I was focused and goal-oriented and ready to kick some ass. I even wrote a totally obnoxious blog about it.

This is what my goal planning calendar regularly looked like.

This is what my social media calendar looked like.

And then life kicked in.

In the six weeks between spring break and now, I traveled six times. That's six hotels. Four car trips. Two plane trips. I toured four separate college campuses. I ate so many burgers. I had A LOT of cocktails.

During that time, this is what my goal planning calendar looked like.

And this is what my social media calendar looked like.

So now it's the beginning of May and I've finally gotten to unpack my toiletries and do some laundry and wake up in my own bed on a Saturday. And I've looked down the pathway of May and realized that those goal posts and milestones I'd set up for myself earlier this year...they're gone. Obliterated by reality. Shadowed by the goals of March and April glaring back at me with disapproval and disappointment.

Sorry. I anthropomorphize.

When our goals have slipped away from us, it's easy to beat ourselves up. It's easy to pull up the anchor of goal planning -- of setting our sights on a more meaningful objective and working toward it -- and instead get carried away in the tide of the day to day. And it's exhausting to goal plan when you're just trying to play catch up.

Don't let the negative voice get in your head. Even if it's Beyonce's.

But I gotta believe that those larger goals -- for our careers, our families, our relationships, our personal health -- are worth putting down stakes for. I gotta believe that the hoped-for results are worth the planning.

So I'm doing a few things this month to get my goals back in place. First, and I think most importantly, instead of beating myself up for what I didn't accomplish, I'm acknowledging what I did. I helped my kid choose a college. I helped raise some money for my writing chapter. Seldom are we just sitting on the couch eating bonbons and lazily watching the opportunities to fulfill our goals pass us by.

Secondly, I'm letting go of what I couldn't accomplish. As my dear friend Paige Trevor said today, "the world doesn't stop spinning because a few things were shoved under the bed." I may not be using the quote in the best way (sorry, Paige!), but it is valuable for me to remember how few of the things that I get worked up about will make the world stop spinning if they don't happen. Like, none. 

Third, and this is the hardest part, I'm going to put one foot in front of the other and begin again. Re-starting -- making those lists, writing out those calendars, confronting the to-dos that I thought would be completed already -- always feels like the most daunting and frustrating task. But even daunted and frustrated, I can start. I can do. I can be powerful in my ability to overcome my own inertia. 

In my office. Ready to begin again.

What is a goal that you've let slide that you would like to begin again?