We know, planning is not everyone’s favorite — but sometimes, putting a little bit of work into building a plan saves you a whole lot of work down the line. A social media calendar is the perfect example. It helps you organize your work, plan your content ahead and keep an always up-to-date bird’s-eye view of your social strategy.
Keep reading for your complete guide to setting up a practical and powerful, easy-to-use social media calendar. We’ve even included some free social media calendar templates to get you started!
Bonus: Download our free, customizable social media calendar template to easily plan and schedule all your content in advance.
What is a social media calendar?
A social media calendar is a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts, organized by date and time. It can take the form of a document, spreadsheet, or interactive dashboard.
Social marketers use content calendars to plan posts, manage campaigns, and review ongoing strategies.
Every entry in a social media calendar typically includes some combination of these elements:
- The post creatives (copy, image files, videos, links, tags etc.)
- The date and time it will go live
- The social network and account where it will be published
How to create a social media calendar in 4 steps
Follow the steps below to create a lean and efficient social media content plan.
1. Audit your social networks and content
Before building your social media posting calendar, you need a clear picture of your existing social media accounts.
Use our free social media audit template to create a precise, up-to-date record of:
- Impostor accounts and outdated profiles
- Account security and passwords
- Goals and KPIs for each branded account by platform
- Your target audience, their demographics and personas
- Who’s accountable for what on your team
- Your most successful posts, campaigns and tactics
- Gaps, underwhelming results, and opportunities for improvement
- Key metrics for measuring future success on each platform
- Your competitors’ activity that you can learn from
As part of your audit, note how often you’re currently posting on each social network. Look at your analytics for any clues about how your posting frequency or time of posting impacts engagement and conversions.
Hot tip: Sign up for a 30-day free Hootsuite trial, and use our all-in-one analytics dashboard to easily analyze your performance and track competitors in one spot.
2. Choose your social media channels and content mix
Deciding what kinds of content to post is a key part of your social media strategy — and an important step to building a social media calendar. There are a couple of standard marketing strategies for content mix that you can use to get started:
The social media rule of thirds
- One-third of your posts promote your business or drive conversions.
- One-third of your posts share curated content from industry thought leaders.
- One-third of your social posts involve personal interaction with your followers.
The 80-20 rule
- 80 percent of your posts inform, educate, or entertain
- 20 percent of your posts promote your business or drive conversions
You’ll also need to determine which social channels to use for which types of content. Some may not be necessary at all. The audit you completed in step 1 will help you determine which channels are the best fit for your business.
Don’t forget to schedule user-generated content and curated content. That way, you don’t get too bogged down with hands-on content creation.
Regardless of your strategy for sourcing content, remember to stay focused on who you’re trying to reach. Eileen Kwok, Hootsuite’s Social Marketing Specialist says:
Always put your target audience first. Instead of chasing views and engagements, prioritize content your followers will value.
And remember: you can’t plan everything. Room for flexibility is a crucial element of your calendar:
Leave room for pop culture moments and be ready to shuffle content around. Plus, don’t post during major crises—sometimes you have to sit back and let social media do its thing.
Paige Schmidt, Social Engagement Coordinator at Hootsuite
3. Decide what your social media calendar should include
Your social media calendar won’t look exactly like anyone else’s. For example, a small business owner doing their own social posts will likely have a much simpler calendar than a large brand with a full social team.
Map out the information and functions that are most important to you. That way, you can get the most out of your social calendar.
Start with basic details, like:
- Platform
- Date
- Time (and time zone)
- Copy
- Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)
- Link to assets
- Link to published post, including any tracking info (like UTM parameters)
You may also want to add more advanced info, like:
- Platform-specific format (feed post, Story, Reel, poll, live stream, ad, shoppable post, etc.)
- The associated vertical orsocial media campaign (product launch, contest, etc.)
- Geo-targeting (global, North America, Europe, etc.)
- Paid or organic? (If paid, then additional budget details might be helpful)
- Has it been approved?
If you’re just getting started, a simple spreadsheet works well. If you’re looking for a more powerful solution, consider a social media management tool like Hootsuite. Hootsuite comes with an interactive calendar that:
- Helps you build complete posts and schedule them in advance
- Supports team collaboration on drafts
- Recommends the best times to post for each network
- Allows you to bulk schedule your content
- Lets you pause all your scheduled content (for example, if you’re handling an unexpected PR crisis)
4. Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve
An effective social calendar makes sense to everyone on your marketing team. Ask for feedback and ideas from stakeholders and your team to make sure it serves everyone’s needs.
As you start to work with your calendar, evaluate how it feels to you, and ask the team to provide ongoing feedback. For example, if it feels onerous and finicky, maybe you want to dial back some of the detail. If it’s not detailed enough, you may need to add a few columns.
Your calendar will probably continue to evolve as your business does — and that’s okay!
Free social media calendar templates
We’ve created two free social media content calendar templates for you to use as a basis for your own calendar. Just open the Google Sheets link, make a copy, and plan away.
Social media content calendar template
The social media content calendar template linked above has room for the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok). But it’s highly customizable, and you’re free to make it your own with the channels that make sense for you.
Make sure to create a new tab for each month, and plan out your editorial content week by week.
Among the many helpful items in this calendar, don’t miss the tab for evergreen content. This is where you can keep track of blog posts or other content that always performs well on social, despite seasonality.
This template includes columns for you to track and schedule:
- Type of content
- Original publication date (keep track of this, so you know when it’s time for an update)
- Title
- Topic
- URL
- Top-performing social copy
- Top-performing image
Social media editorial calendar template
Use the editorial calendar template linked above to plan individual content assets. Think blog posts, videos, new research, etc. This is where you plan out the content that your social media efforts will be promoting.
The template is easy to use. Just create a new tab for each month, and plan your editorial content out week by week.
This social media editorial calendar template includes the following columns:
- Title
- Author
- Topic
- Deadline
- Published
- Time
- Notes
You may want to adapt your template to include other important information, like target keyword or content bucket.
8 benefits of using a social media calendar
1. Get organized and save time
A social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your work, avoid multitasking, and note down all your content ideas for later.
Social media planning calendar tools even allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time. That means your accounts can be active every day without you having to log into all your social platforms every hour on the hour.
The average internet user regularly uses 7.5 social media platforms. For marketers managing multiple social media accounts, the number can be much higher. When you’re managing multiple accounts, getting organized is essential — and planning your content frees up time for more strategic work, which is often more fun anyway.
2. Make it easier to post consistently
There is no hard and fast rule about how often you should post on social media. That said, there are some generally accepted best practices to use as a baseline. The most important rule, no matter how often you decide to post, is to post on a consistent schedule.
Sticking to a regular schedule is important, so your followers and fans know what to expect. It’s also a good way to make clever use of weekly hashtags like #MondayMotivation. (I prefer #MonsteraMonday, but that might not be for everyone.)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CbGhYbrulxO/
For a real-world example, take a look at the weekly content calendar for The Winnipeg Free Press. Sure, this isn’t a social media content calendar, but it is a weekly plan anchored by consistent content ideas.
Source: Winnipeg Free Press
Content frameworks like these give you one less thing to consider as you create your posts. Scheduling posts in advance allows you to stick to a schedule while ensuring you always have quality content ready to go.
Social media calendar tools also allow you to post at the best times for your audience, even if those times don’t align with your core working hours. Which leads us to…
3. You can take a real vacation
When you create content and schedule it in advance, you can actually take time off. No logging into your work accounts on Thanksgiving, late at night, or early in the morning.
For busy social media managers, creating a social media calendar is an act of self-care.
Reminder to our community, check in on your mental health. Take a break away from your screens when you can
— Hootsuite
(@hootsuite) March 4, 2022
4. Reduce typos and avoid big mistakes
Planning posts ahead of time allows you to check your work and build a safety net into your workflow. Everything’s easier when you’re not rushing to post.
A social media calendar — especially one with an approval process — is the best way to prevent everything from minor mistakes to social media crises.
5. Make higher-quality content and cohesive campaigns
Social media production values have skyrocketed since the early days. Today, it’s not unusual for a single post to have a whole social media team of creatives behind it.
Asking your team to drop everything for an emergency Instagram Reel won’t win hearts or minds. It’s not going to result in your best possible content or a cohesive account either.
A social media calendar helps you distribute resources and make sure your team has the breathing room to do their best work.
Following a long-term plan also allows you to craft content that supports your social media marketing goals and beyond.
6. Time your content to important holidays and events
Planning your content in a calendar forces you to keep an eye on what’s happening in, well, the calendar. This means you’re prepared for everything from Daylight Savings Time to the Super Bowl. (And everything else: We’re looking at you, National Pizza Day.)
we know pineapples on pizza is controversial, but how about on final score graphics since it's #nationalpizzaday?
pic.twitter.com/AQ2P2P1J2v
— Seattle Kraken (@SeattleKraken) February 10, 2022
We’ve created a Google Calendar of holidays you can use to frame social media posts. You can import it into your own Google Calendar to give your content planning a little extra relevance.
Let’s take a look at the Charlotte Parent magazine’s 2022 editorial calendar. It shows how content themes and specific articles align with relevant events, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
Source: Charlotte Parent
7. Spot opportunities for partnerships or sponsored content
Planning content in advance gives you time to think about partnership opportunities. Or to approach influencers about working together on sponsored content.
It also makes it easier to coordinate your organic and paid content, so you can make the most of your social advertising dollars.
Influencers and bloggers usually have their own editorial content calendars. This is another opportunity to compare notes and find more partnership opportunities through content planning.
8. Track what works, and improve it
What gets scheduled gets done, and what gets measured gets improved.
Your social media analytics are an informational goldmine. You can use those insights to improve lackluster results and produce more of your best content.
If you’re using a social media marketing tool like Hootsuite, you can use the built-in analytics tools to capture a complete picture of all your social media efforts, so you don’t have to check each platform individually.
Beautiful reports. Clear data. Actionable insights to help you grow faster.
Start free 30-day trialSocial media content calendar tools for 2024
There are probably as many different social media content calendar tools as there are social media managers. These are our favorites.
1. Google Sheets
Sure, Google Sheets isn’t fancy. But this free, cloud-based spreadsheet tool certainly makes life easier. A simple Google Sheet is a good home for your social media calendar, especially if you use one (or both) of our templates as your starting point.
It’s easy to share with team members and stakeholders, it’s free, and it works.
2. Hootsuite
We’d never knock a spreadsheet. But if you’re looking for an even simpler solution, Hootsuite Planner takes your social media content calendar to the next level.
You can use Hootsuite to draft, preview, schedule and publish all your social media posts. You can even use Hootsuite’s Bulk Composer to schedule hundreds of posts across multiple social profiles.
Unlike a static spreadsheet, the social media calendar you can build with Hootsuite’s Planner is flexible and interactive. If you want a post to go out at 3PM on Wednesday instead of 9AM on Saturday? Just drag and drop it to the new time slot, and you’re good to go.
Hootsuite even suggests the best time to post for each social media account.
Hootsuite supports scheduling to the following social networks. (Click on each link for more specific details on how to schedule content for each platform.)
Hootsuite has the added bonus of offering detailed analytics that help inform your social media scheduling, as well as powerful content creation tools (including an AI post writer).
3. Canva
You already know Canva is the design-savvy social media manager’s best friend. The easy-to-use graphic design tool has revolutionized the way we create content, which is why we permanently added Canva to the Hootsuite dashboard. (No joke, there are Canva templates built right into Hootsuite Composer).
Source: Canva
But did you know that Canva Pro also includes a social media scheduler and planner? It currently comes with posting capabilities for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin. Within the Canva Pro dashboard, you can also track engagement, likes, clicks, impressions, and more to see how you’re performing.
4. HubSpot
Although it’s perhaps best known as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, HubSpot also offers its own social media management software that may serve your needs.
Like many of the aforementioned tools, HubSpot’s social media scheduler is designed to help you manage all your campaigns from one place. It allows you to publish content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and schedule your content to go live at the best possible time.
Source: Hubspot
5. Buffer
Buffer is another social media scheduler that comes with tools to help you build your presence on social media. It allows you to schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Mastodon. You can also use it to reply to comments on Facebook Pages and Instagram business accounts.
Source: Buffer
When it comes to all-in-one platforms, Buffer is relatively light on features. It doesn’t offer analytics for all platforms and doesn’t come with any social listening capabilities. However, Buffer’s user-friendly dashboard is simple and straightforward, making it great for social media managers who just want to get in, schedule, and get out.
Be sure to read our guide to Hootsuite vs. Buffer for more on how these platforms compare.
Once you’ve planned your social media content calendar, use Hootsuite Planner to manage your social media posts, engage with your followers, and track the success of your efforts. Sign up for a free trial today.
Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.
Free 30-Day TrialThe post How to Build a Social Media Calendar: 4 Steps + Free Template appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.
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