Sara Nguyen

Helping Sassy Solopreneurs Reach more people and get more clients

How to create a social media content calendar (for 2020)

I’m excited to create, I’m excited to create, I’m excited to create and I’m excited to present today’s topic, which is how do you create a social media content calendar? And I thought this was a really good time to do this live stream as we end 2019 which I cannot even believe, and we move into 2020. It’s about this time of the year.

Get your free social media checklist: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/social-media-checklist/

📝 Resources mentioned in the livestream📝

Related video: How to set goals 2020: Business goal-setting process (plan with me): https://youtu.be/zv1GaxHNJ3E

How to create a social media calendar (for 2020) – Video Transcript

Some people are really organised and do it earlier. But for me, I did my content calendar a couple of days ago and I’m really excited and I thought I’d create a video to show you what mine looks like. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

And also how I came to create it because one of the big things I think that will be 2020 is that content will be even more prominent in 2020. There’s content everywhere.

I was watching a YouTube special and one of the comedians, like you’ve got content like on your phone, you’ve got content on your computer, you’ve got content on your watch like there’s just screens everywhere. Content becomes even more prominent in my theory, in my belief for the next year.

And so as business owners, we need to be able to make sure that we stay on top of our content and that we own our content and it doesn’t run us. But those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help awesome entrepreneurs like yourself, build and grow your business using social media with ease.

Make sure you check out the description ’cause I’ll put links to everything that I referenced in this video there, and let’s go ahead and get into it. I’m going to show you my content calendar. Let’s go over now.

This is my content calendar. What happened was I sat down about a week ago, can’t remember the exact day, everything’s a blur, you know that period between Christmas and New Year’s when you don’t even know what day it is or who you are? Yes, we’ve heard that. We’ve seen that floating in social media and I’m doing it again now because I can.

This is my social media content calendar and this is my real calendar. It’s not a make-believe one. This is the one that I’m actually, that I actually created and that I will use for myself. And what I’ve done is that I’ve planned my social media for the next three months.

How beautiful is that? I feel so organised. And I was saying to a friend, I’m really like proud of myself. Like I’m really impressed. Like this took a lot of work and now I’ve got a plan. I know what I will be doing for the next three months and I can once again be on top of this and I’ve created it so that it suits me.

I’m going to walk through how I created this and how I’ll use it and kind of just help you formulate a content plan that works for you. I’m going to start with a blank template. What I’ve done is for argument’s sake, this is what a blank template looks like.

This is my live document, hence why I’d created the blank one for the next quarter instead of duplicating it. Anyway, so what I’ve done is I essentially started using Google Sheets. I find Google Sheets the most versatile way to create a content calendar.

One, you can share it with your other team members or other, I guess, business people, to get their feedback if you have accountability partners. And two, it’s really easy to edit. And three, it’s free. Who doesn’t love free?

Particularly in business where you have constant costs and considerations like that. I started with a Google Sheet so that I could have the flexibility of sharing with my team and modifying it as I need it.

I really feel that for content, the more organised that you can be, the better it is. For me, I planned out three months so I like to see these three months in one place. And three months may be too much for you, so if it is too much for you, by all means, I would create it for a month view at a time if that’s too much.

But for me three was a good view because I was able to see what’s coming up for the next three months. I use– this is a free template that I got from vertex42.com. I’ll put that link in the description after this live stream. And they have a whole bunch of calendar templates.

And this one I found really useful, and I’ve used it for a long time and you can just copy and paste and use what they’ve already provided for you. It’s a calendar. There’s no need to like build one from scratch.

There’s always calendar templates everywhere. Use free stuff and I’ll drop a link in the description to vertex42 so you can find the calendar template and I’ll link the one that I used here as well.

After I created this sheet and I added the three-month view, what I did was I created this top section here that says goals. And for me it was about being honest with myself and saying, what do I want to do and what do I want to achieve in the next quarter and what am I going to try to do?

For me, my goals will be to release one YouTube video a week and then one livestream per fortnight. In all reality, if I had a perfect world, I would release videos every day. I would live stream every day.

But that’s not my reality right now. That’s okay. And for you, it might be the same. One per week may be too much for you. If one per week is too much, start with one a fortnight. Start with whatever is achievable for you.

And you may do videos or you may not do videos. For me, video is the centre of my marketing strategy and my content strategy. And I build out from videos.

If video isn’t your main thing, if you blog instead, just have a focus on how many pieces of content, whatever medium they are, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog, whether it’s something else, maybe it’s a podcast, whatever the goal is, set a goal of how many you want to release that is consistent whatever works for you and write it down.

I find just a– I want to say magic, but I find power in writing down your goals because it helps you to be just that little bit more accountable when you can see what you promise you would do right in front of your face. For me on my template, I wrote down my goals here. That’s where you would put your own goals, put it somewhere on the content calendar so that you have it in that place.

The next thing I did was I plotted out a bit of a calendar legend based off the goals. On this blank, when you see I’ve got away which is yellow, purple which is my YouTube video of how many times I want to release, live stream is this blue, and Instagram and Facebook mini clips is in magenta or pink or whatever you want to call it.

After I have the goal set down and I’ve got a legend, a colour code legend. Then what you want to do is you want to plot it out in your calendar. Let’s go back. Now you can see what I’ve actually done.

Yellow is away. It’s important to plot out when you’re not going to be there, because that means that you, you know, you know that you can’t if you can’t release content on that time because you’re away or you’re unavailable, put that in the calendar so at least you know the boundaries that you’re working with and then plot it out.

My goal of one YouTube video per week, so I’ve got YouTube videos in purple. You can see here on Sundays, my plan is to release them on Sundays or whatever day works for you, and then plot it out on the calendar.

I’ve got one a week and I’ve plotted it out for the next three months. There’s a power to doing this because the first step is colour-coding and then plotting it out on the actual calendar. And then the next step is to then fill in the actual spot.

Once you build them out, I’ve already done the keyword research for the videos that I know I want to release. What I’ve done is I then put the text in the actual date.

On the 12th of January, I’m going to release a video, a Canva video, about Canva video. On the 19th of January, I’m going to release a YouTube video about Instagram tools.

And so I have already done this list of topics that I want to cover. I’ve done the keyword research separately and I’m not going to cover it in this video. I’ll drop a link in the description to how to do keyword research so you can do that yourself.

But I’ve got that list and then I’ve plotted it out in the calendar. What this did for me was that one, I could see the variety of content that I was going to release for the next quarter or the next three months, and it allowed me to also adjust.

There was a time where I was looking at this when I was creating it and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m too heavy on just Canva tutorials. I need to spread them out a little bit so people won’t just receive Canva tutorials for the next month.

I swapped it out for Instagram videos and I moved things around a little bit so there was a bit more variety between tutorials and tech reviews and live streams. This really helps.

It really helps so you can see everything visually and in one place. And the other thing I love about Google sheets is that it’s really easy to use and move around. Today I am doing this social media content calendar live stream, so it’s blue, it’s a live stream. It’s today.

I had planned to do this live stream today, but we had a lot of problems and it’s not gonna happen. With this calendar I can move things around so I can move it to tomorrow or I can move it to next week.

I just drag and drop it. It will probably be tomorrow that I do it so I just shift it around. And that’s it. That’s what I love about Google sheets.

It’s really flexible and it’s easy to use. It’s, you know, it’s select a cell type in what you want to type and then colour code it. I love colours. Who doesn’t love colours? Everyone loves colours.

But this makes it visual so you can see exactly what you are going to create and where it will all come into place. This is the first part. The other thing that I have on my content calendar is I’ve got this column, I did get this idea from another creator, the Content Bug.

I liked how she did this. She had a content calendar that looks different to this. I did not copy anyone. I borrowed this idea where she had a space for her ideas. You’ve got on one hand on my calendar all of the dates that I’m going to drop content or you’re going to drop content and when they will go, and then there’s a space for your ideas.

These are topics that I’ve added here that I haven’t gotten in my calendar yet that I want to create content for but I haven’t fitted in yet, so that when I go to create next quarter’s schedule, I can either drop them in or if stuff is happening and things don’t go to plan, and for argument’s sake, I can’t get to my Squarespace livestream, I can’t cover that topic for whatever reason.

I don’t have it ready in time. I could either swap out this topic for another week’s content or I can swap it out for another video. It just gives me the flexibility of constantly having a running list of ideas whether I come up with the ideas during a session where I do keyword research or if I come up with the idea or I see the idea based off just life and seeing other YouTube channels, what they do and see other creators, what they create.

There’s a space for it all in the one place. And then I can translate that into the next quarter when I’m planning the next quarter’s content. This I found to be a really powerful exercise to sit down and to go through.

I think that seeing what you’re going to create, really helps you own it. It really helps you go, ‘yup, this one I’m going to do’. And then the next goal is to working around to actually implementing that.

My content calendar isn’t done. All I’ve done, not all I’ve done, what I’ve done in this stage is I’ve planned it. I’ve planned what I’m going to do, how often I’m going to do it, and then I’ve slot in the topics that I’ll actually create. The next part is implementation. What I did next was I use Asana as my project management tools. I know there’s lots out there.

I love Trello. Trello is a really great one. I really love Favro they’re a great little one as well, but they’re a little bit expensive for me as a small business owner, there are so many different tools out there.

Asana I’ve come back to time and time again because their free offering is very adequate and it’s very good and it allows you to do everything that you need for free. I use Asana not only to manage my content, I guess, for myself in organising the creation of my content.

I also use it to manage my team, my video team. I don’t produce all of my videos. I have a video editor and I have an assistant to help me create the content so that I can create as efficiently as possible.

We also use Asana. It’s not this board that you see here, but for the purposes of this tutorial, it’s really handy in helping you implement.

As you can see, what I’ve done is I’ve taken all of the topics that I plotted out in my calendar so Canva video, let’s take that as a demo. For the 12th of January, I went over to my project management tool, Asana.

And you can see here I have this card that says Canva video and the due date of the 12th of January. I’ve plotted all of the topics in Asana. Everything has a card, so I know that they’re coming up.

I can see the dates here and then knowing these, I can move it into the correct column and move it along my workflow process. I know this is coming up. I know I have to start it. Once I have started it, I’ll move it into the start column.

Once I’m in development where I’m creating and doing all the research and creating all of the elements, I’ll move it to development and then just continue to move it across the workflow. Use whatever workflow works for you.

I find that I’m constantly tweaking the workflow, whether it’s the workflow for myself or the workflow for the team that I work with. And there’s no right or wrong way. Like I’ve seen lots of different Kanban board workflows, whether it’s, you know, to do, doing, done, start, in progress, done.

There’s lots of different workflows and it really is adjusting it to what works for you. There’s no right or wrong way, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

That’s the next stage. And the thing that I love about Asana is I’ve plotted out all of the dates of all of the videos that I’ll create and I can see that here. I also can look at the calendar.

Okay, come on. And in the calendar view here, I know I created the calendar in Google Sheets, but I also have a view of it in the calendar as well. I uploaded all the videos and I can see like when they’re due.

And this also allows me in Asana to manage other projects so if I assign dates to them and assign them to myself, I can see it all in one place. That’s what I really love about it. The board view, I’m a visual person, so for me, the board view is the best, but they’ve also got this list view, which is also very handy and powerful.

As you can see. It’s the exact same titles, but it’s just in the list view. For me, this type of format is, I dunno, it’s just not visually appealing to me as this board format.

And I prefer to be able to drag the cards across the, I guess, the columns as opposed to viewing it in a list. And that’s just how I personally work. But for me, I feel really good about this calendar.

I feel for a change, I was listening to a training by Jim Fortin, the transformational coach. If you haven’t listened to his podcasts, highly recommend it.

There’s one of his videos or one of his podcasts and he was saying about– he was talking about time management and he’s saying how you should own your calendar, you should run your calendar. It should not run you.

And that was probably what prompted me to create this calendar. And really, I really had that aha moment of, ‘you know what my calendar does run me and why does it run me? How can I take control of this so that I can create the results that I want?’

And it really was about figuring out one, what does it look like visually? And then two, how do I implement it? That pretty much is it, how I create my social media content calendar. I’ll put the links to everything in the description and I’m in a good mood.

I may even create a copy of this so that you guys can if you want, use this template for yourself and hopefully you found it really, really useful. I’m also going to drop a link in the description or a comment to my Social Media Checklist.

If you are wanting to get up and running on social media, I’ve got a Social Media Checklist to help you figure out exactly what you need to do to start getting up and running on social media so you can start leveraging social media for business, particularly in 2020.

I know people say this every year, but I really feel that 2020 is going to be a biggie for content. Just the feels that I’ve got from what the social media platforms are planning or the speculation of what they may be planning.

Content will be very important this year or next year. And I really feel that having a content calendar and planning everything out makes it less overwhelming because social media can be so overwhelming and it can really be, I guess, a time suck.

But if you plan it out then you’ve got at least a step in the right direction and then you can control it a little bit better that way. I really appreciate everyone for this year.

It’s been a peak year for me. This year I reached 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, which I’m stoked about. I understand that it’s not 100,000. I understand that it’s not a million. But for me, 10,000 was a real accomplishment because I started the channel from scratch.

I started the channel without, I guess, any big influences referring me traffic. And then I think being able to grow to 10,000 as a milestone and monetize the platform and then to use it to grow my business and get more email subscribers and all of that has been a really big year for me.

And I’m so grateful for both the audiences, whether you’re on YouTube or whether you’re on Facebook live. And I’m really grateful for you and I’m getting a bit emotional because it’s just that time of the year.

But thank you so much. I hope that you have found this really handy. Check out the descriptions, everything’s going to be there, and I really, really look forward to seeing you on the next video.

Bye for now. While I try to end this broadcast. Okay. Bye!

Sara Nguyen
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