Creating A Collaborative Content Calendar with Google

Managing multiple social media accounts can be a daunting task, let alone managing multiple business accounts on each platform. One of the most frequent questions I get is, “How do you manage all of that content?”

A simple Google search can tell you that there are TONS of great tools to choose from, but the easiest method (for me) thus far has been utilizing Google Calendar to create a Collaborative Content Calendar (Sophisticated. I know.). But guess what? It’s completely FREE and so simple to set up!!

To learn more about Content Marketing, read our blog: “Content Marketing: More than Just a Fad.”

How to Set It Up

Step 1: Create a Google Calendar.

Go to your Google Calendar, and select Create New Calendar under the My Calendars drop-down arrow.

Fill out the fields that appear on the next screen however you prefer.

Click Create Calendar when you’re done filling this page out, and you’ll be brought to your empty calendar.

Step 2: Schedule out your desired publishing “appointments”.

If you have a regular publishing schedule–like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10am–put that in as an “appointment” on your calendar. You do this by selecting the day and time you want to post and title it something like “Blog Post-TBD” or “Facebook Post TBD”.

To make the post automatically appear every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. (or whatever days and times you want), click Edit Event to be taken to the details of the post. Select Repeat and choose your desired recurring schedule.

Once you’ve selected the recurring days, hit Done and Save, and you’ll have a content calendar framework. Even if you don’t strictly follow the schedule, it’s a good reminder for yourself and your team that this is something you should all be striving for.

Step 3: Try to come up with some topics.

Once you have ideas for what you want to write about, simply change the “Blog Post – TBD” to the topic or actual title of the post.

If you’re struggling to come up with topics, check out our blog “How to Produce Quality Content for Business Blogs“.

Step 4: Assign a few posts to co-workers.

Now let’s say you’re co-worker knows more about a particular subject and you’d like them to write it instead. You can “assign” others to a post by clicking on the event, selecting Edit Event, and inviting that colleague to the post by typing his or her name or email address into the Add: Guests box. Make sure you save the event when you’re done and voila! You have a collaborative content calendar.

Step 5: Share the calendar with your work team.

Now that you have your content calendar framework set up and have a few topics laid out, you can start to invite people to see it!

To share this editorial calendar with people, find your calendar under My Calendars and select Share this Calendar when it appears in the drop-down area. Then, you can add in the names of people with whom you’d like to share the calendar and set the right permission levels for each invitee.

Why I Believe Google Calendar Works Best

I am a huge advocate for using Google Calendar for a company content calendar because it’s simple to create/change and easy to collaborate with. Because our business uses Gmail for our company email and Google Calendar for appointments, everyone looks at their Gmail and Google Calendar all throughout the day. This means that more people are checking the editorial calendar and sticking to their assigned posts.

Also, the ease of adding others to view the calendar makes it easy for work teams to see what’s being published and figure out when they might be able to launch content.

There are boatloads of other solutions out there for maintaining a content calendar, and many of them are probably better than Google Calendar. But if you’re looking for a simple, no-cost solution, Google Calendar has kept us on track for all of our social media accounts. And if it can do that for a marketing firm with multiple clients, it can surely do it for your business, too.

Image courtesy of Ernest Barbaric.

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