Social Media Content Planner is a web application that helps you manage your social media content. Mark your content with hashtags to make it searchable by different social media sites.
Social media has become a business imperative, particularly for marketers and brands. Perhaps more than any other marketing channel, social media requires a lot of planning and careful execution. Our social media content calendar template offers a glimpse of how you can create a plan for your future social media marketing success.
Social Media Content Planner Templates; The only way of bringing the ideas to light is by the content created by you. Without the content, your idea will die a natural death. If you are not able to create your own content, then you should use content created by someone else. There are hundreds of contents available on social media that can be used for best results as per need and requirements.
HubSpot
Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis in their roles, but this multifaceted tool is perfect for social media content calendar organization, too. Excel can be customized according to the priorities and metrics your team is focused on, so it’s a great option for planning ahead.
The good news? We’ve already done the heavy lifting for you by creating a free, downloadable social media content calendar template using Microsoft Excel. Marketers can use this template to easily plan out individual social media posts — monthly or annually — while keeping an eye on bigger picture events, holidays, publications, and partnerships.
- Use the Monthly Planning Calendar Tab above to get a bird’s-eye view of what’s coming down the content pipeline in a given month.
- In the Content Repository tab, you can add the content you’ll be publishing on this tab to keep track of which pieces have been promoted already and to easily recall older content that can be re-promoted.
- On the Social Network Update tabs, you can draft and plan out social media posts in advance. These tabs are for organizational purposes, then you’ll manually upload the content of the posts to a social media publisher.
For more on how to use the templates, check out this in-depth guide from my colleague Lindsay Kolowich.
Why we like this social media tool:
Marketers with small teams and heavy workloads will love this intuitive template. It acts as a social media content planner, tracker, and archive. This makes it perfect for sharing your social plan with stakeholders and referring back to it when you need to repurpose old content.
Google Drive
Price: Free for personal use. Google Workspace plans for businesses start at $6 per month.
Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build out an effective content calendar. These calendars can be easily shared with multiple teams to avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure that campaigns are aligned.
Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members — all on the same platform as their calendar.
With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments all in one place and collaborate on different projects without emailing back-and-forth or having to schedule a meeting. This is a particularly useful feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.
Why we like this social media tool:
Google has several products that can be used together to create quick, seamless workflows. Whether you’re publishing dozens of posts per day across multiple platforms, or ramping up one channel for your freelance business, you’ll find value in the Google Drive system. The best part is that HubSpot customers can link their Google Drive accounts to the HubSpot portal to easily upload files from Drive into the HubSpot software.
Loomly
If you want more mileage out of your content calendar, you can turn to an all-in-one content planning and publishing platform such as Loomly.
Loomly offers tools beyond content scheduling and management. This tool goes further, providing inspiration and direction to help you create content. It also allows you to manage your content assets, schedule posts, view them as a list or a calendar, and analyze what posts are working vs which ones need work.
Loomly’s most robust feature set includes a collaboration and approval environment so that teams can submit mockups, provide comments, see version logs, and flag for approval. This can help you streamline processes for efficiency when there are “too many cooks in the kitchen” on a particular project.
Why we like this social media tool:
If your team is responsible for organic and paid social, this tool can do both. And for your team who wants to avoid using their personal account for social media duties, they can respond to comments and replies directly in Loomly — that means they won’t need to login to each native platform to engage with followers.
Trello
Looking for an organizational tool that’s highly effective for team collaboration? Try Trello. This platform offers a full calendar view which makes it easy to visualize what content is going out, and when. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello’s flexible assignment “cards” and customizable “boards” and “lists” to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and store brainstorm ideas.
You’re not limited to just one structure, though. Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week, on a specific platform, or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.
Why we like this social media tool:
Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize labels with different publication statuses so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they’re due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks that content is being published on.
SproutSocial
Sprout Social’s social media calendar and publishing tool make it easy for teams or individuals to plan and schedule all of their social posts. You can schedule content to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.
You can also tag each social post and add notes to better track and report on your posting strategy and campaigns. Additionally, their publishing suite includes a tool called Optimal Send Times which analyzes your social media data and automatically publishes at a time your audience is most engaged.
Why we like this social media tool:
Coming up with social media content ideas isn’t always easy. Sprout Social’s social listening tool lets marketers like you uncover niche conversations that your audience is interested in. From there, you can join the conversation for brand awareness or start your own conversation on the topic to grow your following.
Percolate
Percolate is an all-in-one content marketing platform that lets you manage every aspect of your marketing in one place. It comes with a content production workflow so every team member can keep track of how your campaigns are progressing. This means that social media teams can also keep an eye out for upcoming content to add to their posting calendars. It also integrates with popular publishing tools so you can easily schedule social posts for future delivery.
Hopper HQ
Hopper HQ is a social media planning tool for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The calendar planner simplifies the process of planning your social media posts for the coming weeks or months. You can easily manage your scheduled posts in one place and reorder them to make adjustments. The tool also gives you a preview of how your posts will look on mobile. This is an excellent feature if you’re creating content on desktop, so you can see whether it fits as desired into your feed.
It even comes with an image editor that lets you add filters, borders, and text overlays as well as change the orientation or other aspects of your images.
Iconosquare
Although Iconosquare is primarily an in-depth social analytics tool, you can also use it to schedule your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts, as well as monitoring, mentions on Facebook and Instagram. Although you can’t schedule your LinkedIn posts yet, you can attach your LinkedIn account to discover valuable analytics.
Iconosquare’s social publishing tool is versatile and easy to use. It leverages drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to order content. You can use it to schedule your Instagram posts, Carousels, and Stories, Facebook statuses, and tweets.
Iconosquare features a Media Library where you can upload images using Dropbox or OneDrive. You can categorize your content so you can easily search for images. It even tags your used images to stop the risk of you accidentally posting the same content twice.
It lets you preview your Instagram feed, so you can understand what your Instagram feed will look like before you post your content. You can even schedule your first comment in advance, including your hashtags, for improved reach and engagement.
Conclusion
It is often said that without a plan you are planning to fail. Social media is about being present, and it is hard to be present unless you have a clear plan. Business professionals undervalue the importance of a content schedule, especially when it comes to social media. A social media strategy that lacks content planning often takes shortcuts instead of implementing long-lasting solutions.