Keep a content calendar a month ahead

Content calendars fail in a particular way. They are full for two weeks, then thin, then they become a document nobody opens, and posting goes back to whoever remembers on the day.

The reason is that filling a calendar is a different skill from writing a post, and it is the one nobody enjoys.

Set your pillars before anything else

Open the Social Desk and write your content pillars. Three or four is right. A pillar is not a topic, it is a reason you post: something you want to be known for, or an argument you are willing to make repeatedly.

"Industry news" is not a pillar. "Opinions we will defend" is.

Without these, a calendar fills up with plausible marketing content that could belong to any company in your sector, and you will not be able to say what is wrong with it.

Ask for a month, not a week

Fill the content calendar for the next four weeks.

Three posts a week, spread across our pillars rather than clustered. Vary
the shape: some are a single claim, some tell a story from client work,
some are a short list.

For each one give me the hook and the angle, not a finished caption. I want
to approve the idea before anyone writes it.

Do not schedule anything on a pillar we have already posted twice that
week, and do not end every post with a question.

Asking for the hook rather than the caption is the trick. Approving thirty finished captions is a job nobody does properly, so it becomes rubber stamping. Approving thirty ideas takes ten minutes and is a decision you can actually make, and the writing gets better because it happens after the idea survived.

Kill a third of them

Go through and reject about a third. Not because they are bad, but because rejecting sharpens the next month more than editing does.

Say why in a sentence when you reject. Those sentences accumulate into the brand voice, and the second month is noticeably better than the first for exactly that reason.

Write only what survived

Once the shape of the month is approved, ask for the drafts. They arrive on the calendar and wait for your yes; nothing publishes without one.

Then let it keep itself topped up

Every Monday, look four weeks ahead. If any week has fewer than three
approved posts, propose enough to fill it, following the same rules.

If all four weeks are full, say so and stop.

That last instruction is what stops the calendar becoming noise. A job that proposes content every week regardless of need will bury you.

What good looks like

You spend ten minutes on a Monday and the next month is planned, in your voice, against reasons you chose.

The honest measure is whether the calendar is still full in month three. That is when the initial enthusiasm has gone and the standing job is doing the work.

Also covers

Publishing on approval. A calendar that only plans is half a system. Once your channels are connected, an approved post can go out on its scheduled date without anyone opening the app.

The property worth keeping is that approval is the gate, not the schedule. Nothing publishes because its date arrived; it publishes because you said yes and then its date arrived.

Publish approved posts on their scheduled date and time. Never publish
anything not explicitly approved, even if it is scheduled.

If a post is scheduled and still unapproved an hour before, tell me rather
than publishing or silently skipping it.

That last line covers the failure people do not anticipate: a post that silently does not go out looks identical to a quiet week.

Keeping messaging consistent from one brand knowledge base. The brand voice and pillars you saved at the start are not only for the calendar. Every employee that writes reads them, so the proposal an employee makes in the Desk, a caption in the Composer and a blog draft all come from the same source.

The practical consequence is that correcting the voice once fixes everything downstream. When a draft is wrong, edit the brand voice rather than the draft, or you will make the same correction every week.