Content calendars can be an overwhelming topic for anyone in the Social Media Marketing world. And for good reason! When it comes down to it, creating a content calendar can feel like stressful business.

So, you might be asking “Who cares?! I don’t need a content calendar!” Well, false. You do. Everyone does. Most especially if you are managing more than one social media account. Planning week by week is not an efficient use of time. With a calendar and pre-planned posts, you’ll be able to utilize your time more wisely and make great content with less stress!

We decided to build a life-size content calendar to show everyone how simple the process can be! Forget everything you’ve read before, and clear your mind.

All you have to remember are these 3 things…

1. Popular Posts — what posts resonate the most with your audience? This requires research. Scope through your Twitter Analytics, Pinterest Analytics and Facebook Insights. If you’re using Tumblr, using Google Analytics might be the way to go. As for Instagram, the insights feature should be available shortly based on this Digital Trends article by Daven Mathies.

2. Consistency — form a consistent plan. For example, we’re rolling out a new feature where we highlight a different team member every Tuesday.So, if you post a weekly quote, maybe choose a specific day to feature said quote. We consistently post “Motivational Monday” quotes, which has also been placed on our calendar.

3. Get Organized! — once you have done your research, figured what days work best for your posts; you can finally put it altogether! Here’s a glimpse at our final product. Sometimes it’s best to keep things simple.

We didn’t overcomplicate our calendar, we stuck to the basics. With a calendar, we are able to plan out our time more efficiently. No more scrambling the day of, or the week of, trying to figure out what content to post or what to do. Preplanning everything keeps your schedule under control. We suggest starting off with a simple calendar. As you progress, and become more comfortable with the basics, you can begin to explore new templates and planning tools like CoSchedule, Hootsuite or Buffer.

Good luck creating your calendars! Share your final creations with us in a comment below or tag us @YellingMule on Instagram. We’d love to see what you make and feature our favorite calendar creations!

See you next week, all you Twitterrific folk!

Our July Content Calendar Board – created with the help of our fantastic intern, Eric