How to create a Content plan for your Social Media activities and automate all the boring work

I love SharePoint and I am amazed by lists - regardless if I use them standalone as Microsoft Lists, in SharePoint or in Microsoft Teams. One thing, all my customers want to know, are calendar views. I run, together with Elio Struyf a sticker shop and we both do not only aim for delivering amazing stickers, but also continuesly improve our business. You could read in my last posts about list formatting Part 1 and Part 2, how I automated some social media activities. In this post I will show you how to create a content calendar and also automate creating actionable tasks from that as well.

Create a list with calendar view

I created a list in SharePoint and added columns for date, tweettext, hashtags URL and additional actions. Important: The Column, that contains the date needs to be a date column. I created some list items and created a new view:

• Click All Items
• Click Create New View
• Give your view a nice name
• Click Show as Calendar
• Click Create

automate creating tasks in Microsoft Planner

We use Microsoft Planner for our tasks, which is why I want the additional tasks, that come along with an event in this calendar to appear in our Planner board. Instead of copy-pasting everything manually, I built a flow that does exactly that for me automatically:

This flow is triggered when a new item is created or modified and then checks if the column with additional tasks is not empty. If that condition returns true, it creates a task with a due date and assignes me to that task. After that, the flow updates that task with a description and a Link to the list item.

automate tweeting about the content from calendar

As I already have content in the list to be tweeted, I now want to post the tweets automatically on value in my Date column. I created a scheduled cloud flow, which runs every day and gets only the items from my list where the Date equals today’s date.

To achieve this, I used a Filter Query in the Get items action: Date eq 'utcnow('yyyy-MM-dd')' and then created and shared an update in Buffer:

Conclusion & What’s next?

With a list, a view and 2 flows I could automate another piece of content management and daily marketing in this small business scenario. I would love to know what you like to use calendar view for and what you want to automate.