Are you having trouble posting your social media content in a timely manner? Create an organized system that allows you to automatically schedule your social posts! Our blog features a social media content calendar template, plus we have created our own calendar spreadsheets that you can download for the next three years.”
Whether you are a social media manager, blogger, or an individual that wants to keep track of your own personal and professional content, this free 3-month social media content calendar template will help you stay organized between now and the end of 2020!
What Exactly is a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media editorial content calendar is your secret weapon in your social media marketing plan. It’s used to plan and schedule your social media posts in advance. Your editorial calendar helps you to decide which content you plan on sharing and also helps track deadlines. It keeps you focused and takes a lot of the headache out of social media content planning. Rather than thinking about what you are going to post every day, you plan all your content in one go for the next two to three months.
With so many social media channels to stay on top of, a calendar could be just what you need to spread your message consistently. Typically, social media calendars are either built using spreadsheets or specific software. Spreadsheets are the more cost-effective option, however, software services can help save time and have powerful automation capabilities. Spreadsheets are definitely a workable solution when you’re first starting out but as your social media planning matures, software tools and services are extremely useful.
Why Should You Use a Social Media Content Calendar
A social media content calendar gives your team one place to focus on. Without it, it can leave your staff in the dark when it comes to your social media strategy. This can lead to frustration and confusion. It’s hard to effectively engage your audience and build your business with no strategy and content calendar in place.
Save Time and Stay Organized
There’s nothing worse than scrambling to put together a post five minutes before it needs to go live. With calendars, you can plan out weeks’ or even months’ worth of social media content in one go. This helps to free up your time in the future. Otherwise, you end up spending more time each day crafting posts and thinking about how it fits in with your overall strategy.
Customize Posts for Each Social Media Channel
Instead of pushing the same message across all your social channels, a content calendar lets you customize your post for each channel. You can craft a custom message for each channel that suits the platform and your audience. For example, you may use Instagram to push out a snippet of your latest video while using Facebook and YouTube to push out the full video.
Track Performance
Scheduling and planning content with a calendar allows you to track post performance more effectively. You have access to the bigger picture. Your team can look back at certain pieces of content and find out which one performed the best. This helps to improve your social media content and learn from both your successes and mistakes.
Boost Efficiency and Maintain Consistency
Inefficiency can impact the customer’s experience with your brand. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of B2B marketers consider the development of their content strategy a major factor in their success. When you have all the information you need in one place, it helps your team to maintain one consistent message across the board with a regular posting schedule.
The Feel Good Social Media Podcast has an excellent episode on content planning. The episode shares three tips on how to be more effective and efficient on social media and stop wasting time.
How to create a social media calendar
There are 8 steps to creating an effective social media calendar:
- Audit your social networks and content
- Choose your social channels
- Decide what your calendar needs to track
- Make a content library for your assets
- Establish a workflow
- Start crafting your posts
- Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve
- Start publishing/scheduling
Pro Tip: If this is your first time making a calendar for social, you might want to crack open our guide to creating a social media marketing strategy first. Your calendar will be all the better for having clear goals to underpin it.
1. Audit your social networks and content
Developing a clear picture of your current social media efforts will let you identify areas for improvement and opportunities for new efforts. An audit is key to fine-tuning your content strategy and maximizing your ROI.
Start with our social media audit template. This will result in precise, up-to-date data on:
- Impostor accounts and outdated profiles
- Account security and passwords
- Goals and KPIs for each branded account, by platform
- Your audience, their demographics and personas
- Who’s accountable for what work 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
Budget some dedicated time to go through all of your social assets. Then rest assured that you’ll be tackling your refreshed social strategy with the best information. That is, the information that’s unique to your audience, accounts and brand.
2. Choose your social channels
It seems like every social media manager we know got the same Slack message last year. Some random higher-up going Hey there! [sunglasses emoji] Why aren’t we on TikTok?
We’re not saying you have to go into freshman-year-organic-chemistry-exam mode and absorb it all at once. Just take some professional development reading breaks during that post-lunch lull, and you’ll be sparkling with new insights and ideas in no time.
3. Decide what data your social media content calendar needs to track
As you figure out what this beautiful beast is going to look like, (and where it’s going to live, a.k.a. a permanently-open Chrome tab between Gmail and Slack) you want to map out the information and functionality this tool is going to provide to you.
Maybe you’re starting fresh for, say, your side-hustle doing social for local indie rappers. In which case a simple spreadsheet might do.
But if you’re managing a seven-person team with a dozen different consumer-facing brands, you’re going to want something that can tell you who’s doing what, when it’s done, when it’s approved, and when it’s published—and then how successful it was.
(Spoiler: Sometimes a spreadsheet is not enough, which is why there’s a list of all our favourite tools at the end of this article.)
So we advise you to start with basic details:
- Platform
- Date
- Time (and time zone)
- Copy
- Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)
- Link to assets
- Link to published post
Also, add more advanced details that you might potentially find helpful. (You can always nix them later if they’re redundant.) Details like:
- Platform-specific format (eg., feed post, IGTV, Story, poll, live stream, ads, shoppable posts, etc.)
- The vertical or campaign it’s affiliated with (eg., product launch, event, contests, annual giving, general brand awareness, customer service, etc.)
- Geo-targeting (i.e., is it global, North American, etc.)
- Value (i.e., Is it a short-lived topical post or a big-budget evergreen showpiece that could be recycled or cannibalized for parts down the line?)
- Paid or organic? (If paid, then additional budget details might be helpful)
- Has it been approved?
- Has it been posted? (If so, do you want to include the link with its UTM?)
- Analytics and results (Generally at this level of complexity you probably rely on your analytics reports to contain and explain this information.)
4. Make a content library for your assets
Some people like to call these content repositories or media resource databases or digital asset banks.
Regardless of what you call it, your supply of visual content should not be living on your iPhone, or in a bunch of desktop folders marked “misc social.” (Ok, ok, at least don’t keep them there permanently.)
You can use Dropbox, Google Drive, your company’s internal network, or made-to-purpose database software. A social media content library has a few key features:
- It’s spacious enough for large files;
- It’s accessible from your phone as well as your computer (trust me on this one);
- It’s easily shareable with team members, but you can trust its privacy features;
- It provides links to individual files so that you can plunk them into your calendar (or perhaps it interfaces with your calendar natively).
The way you set up your content library is almost as important as your social media calendar. The less searching around for assets that you have to do, the better.
5. Establish a workflow
Ok, now that you’ve gathered all possible information, it’s time to start sketching in the bones of your daily, weekly and monthly social media cadence.
You’ll want to think about:
- How often you want to post to each channel;
- The best time to post to each channel (based on your analytics; or else check out our full breakdown here);
- What your content ratio will look like (an easy starting point is the rule of thirds, which is #8 on our list of social media best practices);
- Who needs to approve posts (e.g., your copy-editor, your legal team, your CEO) and how communication will work there;
- What the process is for brainstorming new content, not to mention assigning and creating it.
Pro Tip: Once you have a social media workflow outlined, consider documenting it in an easy-to-access place (say, a separate tab in your social media calendar spreadsheet). The more complex your team, the more helpful it is to break down definitions and processes so that you’re not answering texts from colleagues when you’re supposed to be chomping beignets in the French Quarter, or getting a root canal.
This example from social innovation NGO Digital Opportunity Trust shows how their communications team keeps a “guidelines” tab in their calendar, with helpful resources like branding and official visuals linked.
6. Start crafting your posts
At this point you’re probably raging with ideas, right? Take some time to go through that old “misc social” folder and start pulling together some discrete posts.
Bonus: Download our free, customizable social media calendar template to easily plan and schedule all your content in advance.Get the template now!
As you work, evaluate how your calendar feels. If it’s onerous and finicky, maybe you want to dial back some of the detail. Or maybe it’s not detailed enough and you need to add a few columns. (Or maybe it’s just… kinda ugly, in which case check out our beautiful free templates, in the next section.)
On the other hand, if you’re feeling stumped for posts that go beyond next Tuesday, we have a social media content ideas cheat sheet right here.
7. Invite your team to review, and use their feedback to improve
Now that you’ve sculpted the foundations of your organizational empire, it’s time to reveal your work to the world, or at least to your colleagues.
You want your calendar to be moderately intuitive, so send an invite around to the people who’ll need to use it every day (or every day you’re on vacation).
Ask them to put it through its paces, and schedule a meeting for everyone to connect on findings. You’ll probably find some gaps.
- Does everyone have the passwords they need?
- Do people understand UTM parameters?
- Do you have an unrepentant hashtag abuser on your team?
- Does everyone know how to find, download and upload the high-res infographic the designer made for the Jan 18th thought leadership piece for LinkedIn? If not, can they figure it out easily?
At the end of this step, you should have an airtight document that even the newest team member can understand.
8. Start publishing (or scheduling)
As Rafiki says to Simba: it is time. Your social media calendar is up and ready to run.
As you start publishing consistently, you may realize that it’s still taking time to sit down and manually publish your posts. This is especially true if you’re working with some high-volume feeds.
In that case, using a calendar that also has a scheduling function is your best bet.
Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging
1. HubSpot’s Downloadable Template for Excel
Content Calendar
Price: Free
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.
2. 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.
3. Loomly
Content Planning, Creation, Publishing, and Calendar
Price: 15-day free trial. The Base plan is $25 per month for 2 users and 10 accounts when you choose the annual agreement.
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.
Conclusion
This article will show you how to effectively use a social media content calendar template. We’ll walk you through the steps of planning and scheduling your posts, then provide a simple template for download. Whether you run your own business or are managing social media for a large brand, the tips in this article are sure help streamline your workflow and save you time .