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Public Relations Tools | What is an Editorial Calendar?
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Public relations and social media offer a lot in the way of available tools and tactics. These tools and tactics can be implemented to help further increase brand awareness, increase traffic to one's site, and to, hopefully, increase the number of current customers/buyers/supporters.

One such tool can be the editorial calendar. As an intern at a non-profit, I was first exposed to the editorial calendar when assisting with event coordination. The editorial calendar is a tool publications (online and offline) use to indicate themes or stories that are planned and scheduled for the coming months. These are primarily issued by magazines, though changes online may have had an impact on how newspapers and online publications make their request for advertisements. The goal of these calendars is to attract advertising (the main source of revenue for magazines) based on topics they plan to cover.

This information can be useful to PR and advertising firms or in-house teams. Knowing what stories are being featured can assist in the selection of advertising space purchases. Additionally, it can also assist in knowing when to send a press release that may be related to the topics already scheduled to go live. This is a vital tool for PR professionals to send out relevant, timely pitches.

Some things to note about editorial calendars:

1. Not every publication issues one, but if they do it will usually feature scheduled publications for the next year and will be released sometime at the end of the previous calendar year.
   
   
2. Publications may be fearful of submitting one for public view because of competitors, so editorial calendars may not be available.
   
   
3. Some editorial calendars are available earlier than others, due mainly to the number of issues published and budget allocations.

Lastly, some tips to using an editorial calendar successfully:

• Avoid spam pitches. Just because you can see the topics a publication plans to write on doesn't mean you can spam any and all journalists and writers who are writing something slightly related to you, your industry, or your product. You still need to do your homework and make a relevant pitch. (For more tips on pitching, check out PR & Media Relations | How Not to Pitch the Media.)
  
  
• Pitch with their deadlines in mind in addition to your own. If you know what you're already planning to do in the coming months, great. Be aware of the publication's deadlines as well; this consideration and prior planning can greatly increase your chances of getting published. This means paying attention to their listed deadlines, and knowing that for weekly publications you should pitch at least 4 weeks in advance, and for monthly publications, perhaps 3 months in advance.

Be conscientious and courteous; you'll be amazed at how far you can go.