How to Become Insta-Famous
I'm about to blow your mind. Money, fame, adoration - you can have it all if you learn the ways of the digital content calendar. What is this magical tool, you ask?
A digital content calendar is a big spreadsheet where you organize your social media posts. There, you plan what you're going to post about in the future, track whether or not you've created the content or not, and schedule when to post. And okay yes, at first glance, spreadsheets seem like a kind of sad and inorganic way to run your online life, but in order to fully take advantage of the opportunity that social media has to offer, you can't rely on magic - have to treat it like it's your job.
The main point of a digital content calendar is to make sure that you're posting regularly and to help you organize the massive number of posts you're creating. The Blue Line posts daily, if not more on all of it's accounts. Let me tell you, that can pretty crazy, especially when multiple people are doing the posting. There's no way that we could reach as many people as we do through social media without our organizational system.
So how do you begin to plan content? First, it's helpful to decide what type of posts you want to make regularly. With the Blue, it's pretty straightforward. We mainly post about art of the day, reminders of upcoming events and artist call deadlines, advertisement for upcoming classes, and other news. For a store, post types might include a product of the day, notifications for the start or ending of a sale period...etc. You can really tailor this bit to what your needs are.
Figure out what your content is. Once you have your post types picked out and you know how often you'd like to make posts in each category, you can start brainstorming ideas for each individual post. For example, our Gallery Coordinator, Cara, decides what will be the art of the day will be for each day of the month at the very beginning of the month so that we don't have to waste time picking which artist to feature down the line.
Decide on the format of a post type in advance. The template we generally use for art of the day is to post all the general info about a piece (artist, medium etc), a quote from the artist's artist statement, and a bit about how the piece can be purchased in the gallery or online.
Use an external app to help you keep on track. There are tons of apps out there that can help you store up a backlog of drafted posts that can be automatically posted on a future date of your choosing. At the Blue Line, we use Buffer, which has the added capability of adding tags in a separate comment and posting to multiple social accounts simultaneously.
Why do you care? The great part about a digital content calendar is that they're useful beyond social media. This organizational technique can be applied to blogging or newsletters - anything that requires creating content and sending it out regularly.
Check out some examples of content created with a content calendar:
Instagram: @bluelinearts
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlueLineArts
