Best Social Media Calendar Tools

You’ve posted a couple good things, gotten a few likes and gotten some more followers. But how do you know what to post next? Do you just post the same thing over and over again and hope for better results? What you want is a social media calendar tool or more specifically: best social media calendar tools.

Social media marketing can improve your brand, increase your audience and help engage your website visitors. It’s the best way to increase brand awareness and connect with potential customers. Social media calendar tools can make social media marketing easier for you by automating social media posting to the best times of day when people are more likely to be online.

HubSpot’s Downloadable Template for Excel

Content Calendar

Price: Free

Download This Template

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.

This free resource can be used to draft social media posts, or it can be bulk-uploaded into a publishing app to maximize efficiency. (HubSpot customers: You can use this spreadsheet to organize content and upload it directly into Social Inbox. For instructions on how to do this, check out the template’s cover sheet here.)

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

Content Calendar and Asset Organization

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.

Here’s an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track both their editorial and social media calendars to make sure they’re aligning posts with new blog content. 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.

ContentCal

ContentCal is a social media tool that provides you with a visual content calendar so you can effectively plan for multiple social networks. The easy-to-use interface makes this tool a great option for beginners right through to the most advanced social media managers out there. . Aside from planning your social media content, the tool also lets you publish and analyse your posts, collaborate with multiple teams, centralise the approval process and store content for future use..

ContentCal is an excellent tool for team collaboration, Not only does it integrate with tools like Slack and Trello – its inbuilt collaboration feature lets you extend ideation and feedback as far out of the marketing team and into the wider business as you wish. This enables team members to create, view, and approve posts in one place, as well as discuss ongoing projects.

Falcon

Falcon gives social media professionals access to a structured set of features that help you listen, engage, measure, and publish content. It supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and YouTube. 

Single users and small teams can opt for the Essentials plan, which features a content calendar and campaign planner, along with advanced analytics dashboards and a unified inbox for all your social interactions. Larger companies with multiple teams and markets are more likely to choose the Full Suite, which takes everything from the Essentials plan and adds unlimited use of channels, reports, and teams, social media advertising, and competitor benchmarking.

Your content calendar is one of the most important tools you’ll use in Falcon. It shows all your scheduled content. Your posts are scheduled by date, clearly identifiable by social platform. You can plan, schedule, edit, and post across your social networks. With Campaign Planner, you can map, create a brief, roll-out, and collaborate on your campaigns.

SocialPilot

$30

An extremely comprehensive platform for social media scheduling and posting, SocialPilot can be a great tool of choice. If you are looking for an easy-to-use social media calendar tools, here are the robust features it offers.

1. A macro-level view of your scheduled content: Gives you a bird’s eye view of how your social media plan for the entire month looks like. Once you have scheduled posts day-wise or week-wise for an extended period, you just need to revisit your plan and double-check.
2. Digging deeper into your plan with filters: This is quite useful if you handle multiple clients and create month-long social media campaigns for them. You can filter your calendar view to dig deeper into account specific or group-specific scheduled content..
3. Easy rescheduling of your social media posts: It may happen that when you run through your month-long plan for social media marketing, you find that you want to move some posts from the fourth to the third week. Or, you might feel like sending a post scheduled for 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm because your analytics show that the latter gets more engagement. That’s why the rescheduling feature is helpful. It’s super easy and super quick to use because you just need to dra
4. Easy resharing of evergreen content: Some posts keep bringing in the traffic, engagement, and conversions. Identify these and don’t forget to enable ‘resharing’ on such posts. Why waste time writing new content from scratch when you already have posts working the way you want? Of course, you can’t reuse your old content, but some new posts with some evergreen content make a superb mix.
5. Easy publishing: You can link blog feeds that automatically get shared on your social media accounts as soon as you publish blog posts. You can also queue them up if you want to modify the time at which they get posted. You can also enjoy Instagram’s direct publishing feature with SocialPilot.
6. Make it visually attractive: You can play with different types of visual posts by adding multiple images, interactive GIFS’, posting native videos, creating a new image with Canva integration, carousel posts, and much more.

Trello

$12.50

A popular tool that both individuals and companies use, Trello is typically a team management tool. It isn’t typically a social media content calendar tool but can be used as one. Managers can allocate and assign work to team members inside the Trello dashboard. This reduces the amount of ‘emailing’ required daily.

For example, you can create different columns: To-do, In review, Posted, To-repost, etc. So, once seniors have approved your ‘in review’ post, you can ‘post it’ and move it to the ‘Posted’ column. Or, you could create focused channels where you put in different cards under each and assign dates to these cards.

Once you’ve organized all your content on your Trello board, you can go to the calendar view, which gives a comprehensive insight into which post is scheduled to go out when.

Pros

1. A simple user interface that anyone can start using without any help.
2. The tool works on all devices: laptops, mobiles, and even tablets. That way, it helps you set your social media calendar even when you are on the go.
3. You can color-code your cards, making it easier to understand the status of workflow on different campaigns. Trello makes content planning and publishing an effortless job.

Cons

1. You will have to integrate Trello with a third-party social media tool to automate social media posting from Trello. This is additional work, which might make you rethink using Trello as a social media calendar tool.
2. It gets difficult to manage and organize your work when you have multiple clients. The tool is best suited for handling only three or four social media channels for four or five clients.

Conclusion:

Social media is a demanding thing. It’s not like you can turn it on when you want to and then turn it off when you don’t want to anymore. You need an actionable calendar that will help you schedule social media posts in advance, so it would be easier to manage.