Article

Issue #149 | Kill Your Content Calendar

Marketing Meta Testing

January 11, 2026

If you made it through this week, congratulations – you survived the first gauntlet on the calendar – between the “circling back” emails, the “new big ideas”, the “I need it yesterday” requests and aggressive goals, the first business week of the year is always a challenge.

So: take a deep breath. You made it.

Now that the dust is settling, I want to talk about the one thing that likely made your week more challenging – whether for your company brand, your personal profile, or the clients you manage:

The Content Calendar.

Whether you’re in-house, agency or solo, you probably have some form of a content calendar – and (usually) for good reason: it organizes your thoughts. It acts as a forcing function to post consistently (something we’ve all been trained to think is necessary). It avoids the last-minute, “oh-my-God-what-am-I-going-to-post” freakouts.

Put another way: we’ve all been taught to think that content calendars are both good and necessary.

I want to challenge you to stop.

The way we’ve been approaching organic content creation + distribution is fundamentally broken. The content calendar is an artifact of a time gone by – when consistency was king and simply showing up was good enough to (eventually) compound into visibility and engagement.

We don’t live in that world anymore.

The “Agency Model” Trap

Let’s be honest about how the sausage gets made. The traditional workflow looks something like this:

A Senior Strategist drafts a “Big Picture” summary
A junior person hunts for arbitrary hooks: “We definitely need a post for National Pancake Day…”
Once the “quasi-holidays” and mandatory posts (i.e. the team retreat, the new product launch, whatever), the remaining slots are filled in with random stuff to hit a frequency metric (3x/week, because Neil Patel said so…which really means someone else said it)
The calendar is shared with the relevant stakeholder, approved, content is created and scheduled – all on autopilot.

It’s clean. Simple. Corporate. Here’s the problem: this method prioritizes scheduling over substance. It’s built on the false belief that both people + platforms care what day it is.

The reality – and the data – both agree: neither gives a single damn.

The only thing that matters is whether the content is engaging, relevant and value-additive for your audience. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if the short was recorded yesterday or 3 months ago. It doesn’t matter if the article shared is brand new, been around forever or recently updated – if it’s good, comments/clicks/likes/quotes follow. If it isn’t, it doesn’t matter how many times you post it, when you post it, or how much “pop” the graphics team puts into the image: the post will fade into the aether of the internet, never to be seen or heard from again.

Posting more and/or more regularly does not matter if what you’re posting is fundamentally uninteresting to your audience. And, candidly, content calendars are set up to siphon the interest out of your content.

Don’t believe me? Think about the typical process to create and execute a content calendar: the draft goes to the Point of Contact (“PoC”), the PoC sends notes, the draft gets revised. That revised draft then goes to leadership, who has “a few tweaks.” Then the “final” version goes to legal/compliance, who proceed to sit on it for 4 days, then squeeze the final drops of personality and differentiation out of whatever it is you wanted to post. It’s death by committee.

By the time your calendar + content is approved, your content is about as differentiated as Wonder Bread…and if that wasn’t bad enough, while you were taking the week (or more) to destroy your content’s unique edge, the internet moved on. The trend you were hoping to capitalize on is now over. The news cycle has changed. Even if the post was timely when you first drafted the calendar, that time has long since passed.

It’s time to face facts: the calendar is an instrument of standardization and compliance – two things that are inversely correlated with positive outcomes on any social media platform. The internet thrives on differentiation. Uniqueness. New perspectives. Rapid responses. Novelty. Value-additive content. All of these things make the internet an interesting place; the content calendar systematically removes them from the equation.

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t be investing in organic social – to the contrary, I think organic social – done well – is the true top-of-funnel marketing. It should be one of the biggest investments brands make (in addition to content creation) this year – but that’s another conversation that most people are not ready to have.

What’s even more interesting is that the brands winning on social right now aren’t the ones with the most process or workflow or polish; they’re the ones that have done something radical: they trust their people.

Instead of a 60-cell content calendar that’s shared with everyone and features color-coded approval boxes and pre-packaged, boring-as-all-hell themes, these brands give their team two things:

Crystal-clear brand guidelines: voice, tone, what’s on-brand, what’s off-limits, the relevant legal/compliance requirements, any other non-negotiables
The authority to post without asking permission

That’s it.

No week-long back-and-forth that kills whatever modicum of differentiation was there. No “can we circle back on this tomorrow?” No death-by-committee. Just a talented person who understands the brand and is empowered to do their job, when, where and how s/he sees fit.

Some days, that might mean (gasp) posting 5x. Other days, not at all. There will be errors and issues and consternation and tense moments and fire drills. But there will also be real, timely, authentic conversations. Truly interesting content. An actual point of view. Controversy. Genuine engagement.

For most brands, that prospect is TERRIFYING, because it requires real trust – the kind where you accept that not every post will be perfect, but speed and authenticity matter more than polish. The kind where you let your social person make judgment calls in real-time because they’re closer to the audience than you are. And candidly, if you don’t trust your social media person to post without a 3-layer approval process, you either have the wrong person or the wrong process. Probably both.

The best brands in 2026 will be the ones that hired well, established clear guardrails and then got the hell out of the way. That starts with ditching the calendar.

This isn’t just hypothetical. It’s exactly what I did with my own social media. We used to have a whole thing – a calendar, weekly post reviews, marketing team meetings – it was a thing. And my social media sucked. So, I took my own advice. I gave my team control of my handles, provided clear guidelines on what I don’t want, and got out of the way. Since doing that? Millions of impressions. Thousands of new followers. 10+ high-quality inbound leads. 3 speaking engagement requests. Everything went up-and-to-the-right.

Anecdote over. Let’s imagine you’ve killed the calendar. You’ve empowered your team. Now comes the next question: what do you actually post?

This is where most brands get stuck. The biggest hurdle isn’t when to post or who approves it. It’s what to say. And the answer isn’t “brainstorm 30 ideas for February.” The answer is the Content Engine.

Do do that, stop trying to conjure 30 individual ideas to fill your calendar. Instead, focus on 3 things:

The “moments” you must support – new product launches, sales, new designers, major events, key activations, whatever. Every brand should engineer at least 1 “major moment” per quarter (that’s 4 a year) and at least 2 “minor moments” per quarter
A set of high-value pillar assets – several incredible, well-researched, wildly comprehensive articles and/or videos that provide outsized value to your audience
The rapid response / trends – whatever conversations are happening on the internet that you can meaningfully participate in and add value to

What gets posted is (in some ways) governed by the above priority order: you absolutely must support the moments the brand needs to win. Then you promote/distribute/remix the core piece of content. And the gaps are filled in with participating in other conversations/capitalizing on trends.

As for that content: the key is to diversify each piece, so you can continually re-use and re-share them. One article can easily become:

2 YouTube videos (10 mins each)
1 Podcast episode
3 Short-form clips (TikTok/Reels)
5-7 Text threads (LinkedIn/X)
3-4 Emails
1 Infographic

Note: I broke down the full “Diversify” framework in Issue #138: The New Content Playbook if you haven’t read it, it’s worth your time.

AI tools have made this easier than ever. What used to take a video editor a full day now takes minutes. A single podcast episode can be chopped into 8 Reels before your coffee gets cold. Tools like Opus Clip, Descript and CapCut are turning one recording session into dozens of native-format assets, complete with captions, hooks and platform-specific aspect ratios. The static posts practically write themselves.

The excuse of “we don’t have the resources” is gone. The barrier isn’t production anymore; it’s having something worth producing in the first place.

This system kills the daily question of “what do I say today?” and replaces it with a library of assets derived from high-quality sources. What was once one post is now 20+ shots on goal, spread across multiple weeks.

The calendar doesn’t drive the content. The content drives the calendar.

Everything I’ve said so far is about organic content. But there’s a massive, hidden benefit to building this engine that most people overlook: it’s the only way to survive the new paid media landscape.

We’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in how Meta delivers ads – specifically with the rollout + newfound interest in the 2025 Andromeda update. In the old world, you used targeting to find your audience. You told Meta: “Find me men, 25-40, who like golf.” The platform obliged.

Andromeda killed that.

Under this new AI retrieval system, the creative IS the targeting. Meta’s AI scans your video or image, understands the context then serves it to people who will resonate with that specific hook. Your audience selection inputs matter far less than they used to (though they still matter!) – creative is doing progressively more of the heavy lifting.

This means you can no longer rely on one “perfect ad.” You need creative diversification – a variety of angles, formats, and hooks to find different pockets of users.

The Content Engine solves this. By chopping one core idea into 10+ different assets, you’re giving Andromeda the variety it needs to work. You’re not guessing which hook will land; you’re testing all of them.

These two worlds – organic and paid – collide when you start to distribute everything organically first. The organic winners (read: the posts that get traction without paid support) can then be pulled into your ad account directly (thank you, post ID). You’re not guessing anymore; you’re promoting proven performers.

I wrote about this dynamic in detail in Issue #137: Creative in the Age of Andromeda.

At this point, you’ve got the framework: kill the calendar, trust your team, build a Content Engine, let organic performance guide your paid strategy.

But there’s one final strategic decision you need to make:

Option A: Go Wide You choose volume. You distribute everything. You flood the zone with diverse creative assets to feed the algorithm, gather data and find the winners. This is the “shots on goal” philosophy: more attempts means more opportunities to score.

Option B: Go Deep You post less. You reject the pressure to fill every slot, operating on the belief that when you do post, the quality is so undeniable that it creates disproportionate impact. This is the “craft” philosophy: fewer swings, but each one is designed to be a home run.

There’s no universally right answer. It depends on your resources, your audience and your risk tolerance. But here’s what I know for certain: you can’t be both. The worst place you can be is in the middle: posting mediocre content on a mediocre schedule just to fill a spreadsheet. Mediocre is the middle. The middle is death.

Pick a lane. Go all in.

The brands that win will be the ones that stop trying to be everywhere with average content and start dominating somewhere with exceptional content – or overwhelming everywhere with sheer volume and variety.

The content calendar was a tool for a different era. The Content Engine is built for this one.

Cheers,

Sam

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