How To: Create a Scalable Hotel Social Media Content Calendar
June 20, 2019
Creating a monthly content calendar can get overwhelming. What will you post? How many times will you post? What creative will I need? How do I make sure I’m promoting each department properly? The truth is: You don’t have to restart this process from scratch every month. Creating a scalable hotel social media content calendar starts with a simple formula. Follow the steps below to create a plan that’s customized for you.
Creating a Formula for Your Content Calendar
1. Start by creating a content calendar breakdown.
What are the most important topics to cover in order to holistically promote your hotel? List these out. All topics should align with your overall business goals.
Topic |
View |
Pool |
Local Attractions |
Local Events |
Sunday Brunch Buffet |
Weddings |
Seasonal F&B Menus |
Meetings |
Upcoming Renovations |
2. Determine your frequency of posting.
There is no magic formula for the optimal number of times to post. However, remember that quality is more important than quantity, and ad budget is important if you’d like your posts to be served on feeds beyond its organic lifetime—especially as organic reach continues to decline. Recommended Frequency: 1-2x per week.
3. Determine the frequency of each topic.
If you’re only posting 8x per month but you listed 10 different business initiatives and potential topics in Step 1, ask yourself: Which ones are the most important to promote regularly? Are there topics that can be combined into one subject? Ex. If you have two different F&B outlets, these can be combined into the overarching topic “F&B.” Then, you can rotate the outlet you promote every other month. The above example then becomes:
Topic | Frequency (Per Month) |
View | 2-3 |
Pool | 1-2 |
Local Attractions/Events | 2-3 |
F&B (Brunch/Seasonal Menu) | 1-2 |
Groups (Weddings/Meetings) | 1-2 |
Upcoming Renovations | 1-2 |
4. Create a central location for these topics and frequency. You can be granular with your posting frequency. If you’re looking to post 2x per week, you can create a breakdown for 4-week month and a breakdown for a 5-week month. Example below.
4-Week Month | 5-Week Month |
View | View |
Pool | Pool |
Local Attraction | Local Attraction |
F&B: Brunch | F&B: Brunch |
Groups: Weddings | Groups: Weddings |
Upcoming Renovations | Upcoming Renovations |
View | View |
Local Event | Local Event |
F&B: Seasonal Menu | |
Groups: Meetings |
5. When it’s time to start planning for a new month of content, simply copy-paste this list into your content management space.
Although the baseline for your month’s calendar is created, you should be customizing and adjusting based on strategy, timely events and creative you have available. There you have it! You now have a scalable hotel social media content calendar.
Tips for Monthly Planning
- At the beginning of every content cycle, start by doing research on timely items. Look at ongoing events in the area, national and social media holidays that are relevant to your property or any other on-site events. You can either replace evergreen topics you’ve created or add them to your already existing content breakdown above.
- Take a peek at your existing docket of content before you start your calendar planning. Did you curate 3 great photos of your hotel view? Adjust your content calendar so you can utilize them. Are you short on F&B photos this month? Go capture content, or switch out this topic if there is no sense of urgency.
Don’t have a content management system?
Start with our Sample Content Calendar Spreadsheet.
Tips for Using a Content Calendar Spreadsheet
- Use filtered views in your spreadsheet. This will allow you to hide any rows you no longer need.
- Collaborating? Ensure column names are self-explanatory—or have notes for other viewers. If someone else is involved in the content process, this will allow for easy delegation, as well as give everyone the visibility they need into the content calendar.
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