CREATING A CONTENT CALENDAR WITH IMPORTANT EVENTS | AUGUST

 Many social media content writers find it impossible to work without a content calendar, however, if you still figuring it out, we here to help

A content calendar works in tandem with your social media content strategy which keeps track of your social media goals and objectives, allowing you to map out your publishing schedule to ensure your content is a consistent, balanced, strategic and relevant week after week.

So what exactly is a content calendar? Well, it is meant to be a constantly evolving document that contains your planned content and social media posts for all your social media platforms. Keeping in mind that social moves at a very fast pace, you need to remind yourself not to plan too far ahead as you need to allow flexibility for new trending topics. So, what are the best practices you need to consider when creating a social media content calendar? Let's take a look.

First, if you are working with a team, its best to have the calendar accessible to those who need it, keeping it hosted on a platform such as a Google Drive or Trello Boards, this allows team members to collaborate together with ease.

Another best practice tip is to keep a larger monthly calendar with very general information about upcoming events and launches that will impact your content strategy. This will, of course, be in addition to a detailed weekly calendar with specific copy and assets.

Your larger monthly calendar could contain entries such as influencer takeovers, campaign starts, new blog posts or product releases.

Your smaller weekly calendar could be a detailed schedule for every post for each social platform. An idea on how to organise this would be to separate your calendar by the platform, with the specific times you have scheduled each post to go out. See the example weekly calendar below and customise it to what your social media scheduling needs are, have fun with it, use emoji's, and colour code your calendar for extra organisation.

An important tip to remember is to repost your content that is performing well for each platform and customise the message you are trying to bring across, otherwise, you stand a chance of your content looking very robotic. Not all networks are suitable for reposting content, the platforms to stay away from for this would be Instagram and Snapchat. To make reposting content easy, have a section in your spreadsheet that lists all of the content that does well, this just makes it easier to 'grab and go' and ensures you have an evergreen library that contains the copy, tags, URLs and images. When needed you can just add and remove from your library.

In addition to organising your calendar, be sure to be on the lookout for trends and important events happening globally, we are hopefully here to save you time, so here are a few important events you could possibly fit into your August content calendar.

Events & Special Days

1st August – World Breast Feeding Week 
6th August – International Friendship Day
6th August – International Forgiveness Day
6th August – Hiroshima Day
8th August – World Cat Day
13th August – International Youth Day
19th August – World Photography Day
26th August – Woman's Equality Day
26th August – Burning Man Festival

Historic Events

1st August 1944 – Anne Frank penned her last entry into her diary: "[I] keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people living in the world." Three days later, Anne and her family were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on March 15, 1945, at age 15.

2nd August 1939 – Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt concerning the possibility of atomic weapons: "A single bomb of this type carried by boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory." Six years later, on August 6, 1945, the first Atomic Bomb, developed by the US, was dropped on the Japanese port of Hiroshima.

3rd August 1492 – Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain with three ships, Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria seeking a westerly route to the Far East. Ten days later he landed in the Bahamas thinking it was an outlying Japanese Island.

4th August 1961 – Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.

5th August 1962 – Marilyn Monroe died at the age of 36 from a sleeping pill overdose.

6th August 1945 – The first Atomic Bomb was dropped over the centre of Hiroshima at 8:15 am by the American B-29 bomber, Enola Gay. The bomb detonated about 1,800ft above ground, killing over 105,000 persons and destroying the city. Another estimated 100,000 persons later died as a result of radiation effects.

15th August 1969 – Woodstock began in a field near Yasgur's Farm at Bethel, New York. The three-day concert featured 24 rock bands and drew a crowd of more than 300,000 young people. The event came to symbolise the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

16th August 1896 – Gold was discovered in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in Alaska, resulting in the Great Klondike Gold Rush.

16th August 1977 – Elvis Presley was pronounced dead at the Memphis Baptist Hospital at 3:30 pm, at age 42.

18th August 1920 – Woman were granted the right to vote in the US.

21st August 1959 – Hawaii became the 50th US State.

24th August 79 AD – Vesuvius, an active volcano in southern Italy, erupted and destroyed the cities of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum.

26th August 1883 – One of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurred on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa. Explosions were heard 2,000 miles away. Tidal waves 120ft high killed 36,000 persons on nearby islands, while five cubic miles of earth were blasted into the air up to a height of 50 miles.

27th August 1910 – Mother Teresa was born (as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) in Skopje, Yugoslavia. She founded a religious order of nuns in Calcutta, India, called the Missionaries of Charity, and spent her life working to help the poor and sick of India.

31st August 1997 – Princess Diana dies at the age of 36 due to traumatic internal injuries suffered in a controversial high-speed car crash.

If you have your social media content calendar ready but are still looking for a scheduling tool, look no further! Loopascoop is your one-stop-shop for all your social media scheduling needs, sign up today and get scheduling!