It is recommended to think about responsibilities and timing when publishing your counter or alternative narrative campaign, independent of its size or duration, but especially when you aim at launching your campaign on multiple platforms.
Similar to the planning ahead section, it might be best to actually use a calendar for the day(s), week(s) or month(s) that your campaign will be active. For instance, a calendar can help you to rather plan customized posts for each social network that you want to be active on than spamming all platforms with the same message.
You can either use templates, as provided by Google Drive, use management apps such as Trello or rely on the No Hate Speech Movement’s WE CAN template for a counter-narrative action plan, which is a helpful tool to plan the launch and moderation of your digital campaign as it allows to assign actions, responsibilities and a timeline.
In addition to planning and strategizing the publication of the respective content blocks of your campaign, an editorial plan also helps you to assign responsibilities: Who is responsible for publishing individual content blocks on which platform? Who will be responsible for the community management? It is good to think about those questions in advance and plan accordingly – but no need to stick to the plan come hell or high water, as a digital campaign, first and foremost, needs to be able to act spontaneously.
Lastly, having an editorial plan or calendar can help you in the long run with monitoring the performance of your campaign as you can track the performance of the individual content blocks you published in your calendar, which later facilitates the evaluation of your overall campaign.
Next to all the planning and strategizing, don’t forget: creating and launching a counter or alternative narrative campaign is an exciting and creative process – so don’t get lost in all the to-do lists and calendars. It is good to have a plan, but equally important to have fun.
Schedule publishing of content
An editorial plan can be a valuable tool to schedule the individual postings of your campaign for the different platforms
First of all: It is possible to schedule your postings for the different platforms, either on the platforms themselves or by using external tools. This is especially helpful if you plan various postings on different platforms, but cannot be in front of your computer or smartphone at all times.
However, you have to find a balance. If you publish too much, your content is outweighing each other. It is usually recommended to have one to three postings per day on Facebook and Instagram. So if you are planning a social media campaign for an Action Day on those platforms, make sure there is enough time between your postings. Meanwhile, Twitter does not seem to put you at a disadvantage if you publish a lot and is generally a useful tool for campaigning and simply staying relevant, as you can easily participate in public debates, connect to relevant stakeholders and/ or spread your hashtag.
Lastly: It is possible to schedule your postings for the different platforms, either on the platforms themselves or by using external tools. This is especially helpful if you plan various postings on different platforms, but cannot be in front of your computer or smartphone at all times.
Scheduling posting
Facebook
Facebook provides Publishing Tools, which you can access once you create a new post on your page. Here you can not only see a list of past postings and an overview of their performance, but also create drafts and schedule postings. When scheduling your postings, you can choose whether the posting should be published either on Facebook or Instagram or on both platforms. It further offers you to check what your posting looks like on the different platforms, either on the desktop screen or mobile version.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application, aiming at supporting users by basically facilitating the use of Twitter as it allows for different customisable columns, so users can view trends, current tweets, messages, etc. at the same time. Tweetdeck not only facilitates the monitoring of your own Tweets, but also allows you to schedule Tweets. You can further schedule Tweets on Twitter directly, just click the calendar symbol when creating a Tweet.
Other tools
Other tools helping you to coordinate the publication of content across the different platforms include: Buffer, however, you have to sign up, but can manage three social media channels for free with up to 10 scheduled postings. There are further options available, though not for free. There are other options available, though all of them come at a monthly price of 20$ and up.
Schedule publishing of content
Scheduling posting