Small businesses across the world rely on social media to provide affordable, customizable, direct marketing to their customers. But as the medium matures, platforms like Facebook are making it more difficult for businesses to reach their fans without paying for ads on the site.

But this ins’t all bad new. While organic reach of your posts may decline, marketing blogs report that engagement is up, which means higher quality interactions with the fans who see your posts. In order to optimize the number of people who see your posts and the engagement you get from them, social media demands quality content worth sharing.

Posting regularly to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram while maintaining your email, print, direct mail, radio and other advertising sounds daunting, but one simple tool can automate the process and cut your work in half. If you want to make your marketing as easy as possible, adopt and stick to an editorial schedule.

An editorial calendar is essentially a calendar that contains a detailed plan for how, when where and about what you’ll advertise. Marketing agencies, creatives, bloggers, and companies of all sizes use editorial calendars like an action plan for their marketing.

Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan magazine online.