The Social Media Content Calendar Template Every Marketer Needs [Free Template]

Have you ever been on a time crunch to create social media content material?

Most of us have, and it’s a worrying place to be in as a result of creating content material proper earlier than it must be revealed is much less more likely to meet the wants of your viewers, and also you miss out on inventive particular matters and occasions you’ll be able to plan for prematurely.

Now…what if I mentioned you by no means needed to rush to make content material once more? On this information, I’ll share the perfect social media content material calendar template and a step-by-step information explaining learn how to use it.

Use the Above Template to Plan Out Your Social Media Posts

Why do I would like a social media calendar?

Flori Needle, a HubSpot Weblog author, was a social media supervisor earlier than working at HubSpot. She targeted on Instagram and struggled to create a schedule for herself. She informed me, “I discovered myself creating Instagram posts final minute as a result of I didn’t know learn how to plan my technique prematurely.”

After some testing, she found out a method however mentioned having a plan earlier than posting would’ve made all of the distinction and lessened the time she spent in trial and error.

That’s why a social media content material calendar is so useful — you’ll be able to hold monitor of deadlines, higher handle your particular person duties or content material creation staff, and create transparency with stakeholders who depend on your social media publishing schedule.

Creating a fantastic content material calendar is extra than simply including just a few Instagram put up concepts to your Google calendar. Let’s dive deeper into the advantages of getting a social media calendar.

1. Higher Group

A content material calendar retains you and your staff organized, which is crucial when managing a number of social media channels.

Fairly than developing with content material concepts on the fly, you’ll be able to plan your content material round your group’s wants. It may possibly additionally present extra time for creating content material about trending matters and upcoming holidays and occasions. For example, if your organization has a giant occasion developing, a content material calendar will aid you strategize learn how to market it prematurely.

Better of all, a social media calendar retains everybody in your staff knowledgeable on when content material can be revealed. After I know what’s going stay and when it avoids miscommunications and confusion down the street.

2. Simpler Scalability

One other profit to having a social media calendar is that it may possibly aid you scale your content material manufacturing with out overwhelming your advertising and marketing staff. By planning content material prematurely, you’ll be able to tempo manufacturing round your staff’s bandwidth and different duties your division is chargeable for.

As you scale, I like to recommend monitoring put up analytics to see how your content material performs. Maintaining a tally of your metrics will aid you and your groups decide what content material engages your viewers probably the most.

3. Increased High quality Content material

Lastly, utilizing a social media calendar ensures your staff has loads of time to do their greatest work.

Planning your posts prematurely additionally provides you time to test your work for typos or errors and helps your staff create a cohesive and constant model picture as a result of you might have extra time to strategize and work on invaluable campaigns.

Perfecting your social media content material calendar shouldn’t really feel like a chore. Beneath, I’ll stroll you thru the important elements of any social media content material calendar that offers you the muse to arrange your social media technique at a tactical stage.

Key

A simple-to-read key helps your stakeholders perceive the knowledge in your calendar.

So long as your key’s clear, nearly anybody in your group can view your social media content material calendar and perceive precisely what’s taking place on all platforms.

URLs and UTM Parameters

URLs and UTM parameters are comparable, however they are not the identical. URLs are the hyperlinks you will wish to share out of your web site (and even one other web site in case you are curating content material) in your social media platforms.

A UTM parameter is an extension of your URL. It is a string of monitoring code appended to the top of a URL, and it helps social media entrepreneurs monitor how properly their posts drive visitors to their web sites. By monitoring and analyzing UTM parameters, you will see what content material meets your conversion targets and what content material drives probably the most engagement on social media platforms. You should utilize a UTM generator to make this course of simpler.

Date and Time

Together with dates and instances in your social media calendar is useful in your planning but in addition for stakeholders and different groups that depend on your social media content material.

When teammates can view your calendar and determine precisely when a put up was or can be scheduled, they will shortly proceed with their workflow, which is helpful for you, too. AKA, you will not be interrupted to present standing updates about each Tweet on the docket for the day.

Message

Transparency and context are invaluable relating to social media content material calendars. Giving a quick synopsis of the message and even sharing the caption for a put up can go a great distance in serving to others inside and out of doors your staff perceive what the intent of the put up can be.

Professional tip: In the event you’re including a video to your social media content material calendar that is not completed, think about including a brief Loom video that offers an outline of what the video can be about. You solely need to make the Loom as soon as, so that you received’t need to re-record your clarification each time somebody has a query.

Marketing campaign

It is too late to start out monitoring metrics as soon as your marketing campaign is over. As a substitute, begin monitoring your social media campaigns in your content material calendar. You may make this prescriptive by having a dropdown checklist of predetermined marketing campaign names, or in case your campaigns are few and much between, merely copy and paste the names subsequent to the corresponding content material.

Professional tip: Align your campaign name with the marketing campaign part of your UTM parameter for seamless monitoring.

Picture

Your social media content material calendar will turn into simply one other spreadsheet with out some imagery. Since a lot of your social media content material will most likely be visible, add a thumbnail-sized model of the picture you will included within the revealed put up. Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar photographs could have a fairly good thought of what is going to be shared and when.

To make modifying your photographs for every platform simpler, try this cheat sheet for ideal image dimensions on every platform.

Earlier than creating your social media content material calendar, it’s important to take a step again, have a look at the massive image, and plan. Right here’s how.

Step 1: Determine your targets.

Step one to constructing your social media content material calendar is figuring out your targets, which can decide how usually you put up, who can be concerned within the content material creation course of, and which channels you’ll wish to use.

In the event you’re undecided the place to start out with organising your social media targets, we cowl that here.

Step 2: Align your staff.

Together with your targets etched in stone, it is time to align your staff towards these targets. Social media content material creation is a tall order, particularly for lean advertising and marketing groups, so do not quick your self on assets — particularly expertise.

One factor we all know to be true at the moment is that video content is taking on nearly each main social platform. Which means you will wish to have on-camera expertise devoted to producing video content material to satisfy the wants of your social media calendar.

In the event you can, discover a content material creator who’s well-versed in short-form written content material, video content material, and audio content material to maintain your content material manufacturing transferring shortly and stop bottlenecks.

Step 3: Contemplate range, fairness, inclusion, and belonging.

Variety, fairness, inclusion, and belonging are matters to think about when growing your social calendar, particularly contemplating that customers care, greater than ever, that the manufacturers they help are committed to diversity and inclusion.

You will wish to guarantee your content material displays and respects the values and experiences of your viewers. Furthermore, the faces, voices, and tales you share on social networks must be consultant of your viewers and the bigger group the place your small business operates.

This is not one thing that may occur by chance, so you will wish to plan for range and inclusion as you develop your content material calendar. If you would like some steerage on creating numerous and inclusive content material, try our original research on the topic.

Step 4: Arrange UTM monitoring.

Some of the necessary components of a social media calendar is definitely the half you do not see — monitoring. And the simplest technique to monitor how your social media content material is performing is to make use of UTM parameters.

Sure, this is the second time I’ve talked about UTM parameters, however for good cause. Are you able to think about the nightmare of manually sorting by way of your marketing campaign visitors to find out the place every viewer got here from or who engaged along with your content material? I don’t wish to try this, and I’d think about you don’t both.

UTM codes are simple to set up and use. As soon as you have received them in place for every hyperlink in your social media posts, you’ll be able to overview your social media content material metrics.

Step 5: Create an evaluation tracker in your calendar.

For stakeholders who wish to keep abreast of how properly your social media content material is, create a tab that reveals clicks, views, engagements, and different metrics you propose to trace to deem your content material successful. Monitoring analytics could be as easy or detailed as your staff prefers.

For a full checklist of metrics to trace and instruments to do it, check out this 12 months’s Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics.

To expedite the process of creating a social media content calendar, download this free template that’s ready for you to fill out.

1. Full a social media audit throughout all platforms.

Earlier than making a social media content material calendar, I like to recommend a whole social media audit. Ask your self questions like:

• Which social media platforms are you on?
• Which platforms are you not on, however your rivals are?
• Which platforms get probably the most versus least engagement?
• Which content material codecs do you employ most frequently and least usually?
• Which forms of posts get probably the most versus least engagement?

Auditing your social media presence will aid you determine learn how to transfer ahead as you create your social media content material calendar. For example, you might be on TikTok, however perhaps you discover it’s the platform the place you get the least engagement and even fewer leads. That will imply it’s time to de-prioritize TikTok out of your lineup and make investments extra time in a better-fitting platform.

Spend a while perusing your social media analytics to reply these questions. It’s important to again your conclusions with information as an alternative of a intestine intuition. Our social media report template is a superb technique to hold monitor of your findings.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Report Template

Download Now

Really useful Reads

2. Choose the highest 3-5 social media platforms you’ll use.

Consider it or not, you don’t have to be on all of the social media platforms to get a excessive social media ROI. As a substitute, you need to focus in your audience and people with the very best ROI — not solely as a result of it will save your staff time and effort, however it is going to lead to a way more manageable social media content material calendar.

Each social channel is completely different, and the content material you put up on each ought to attraction to the structure of the platform and the customers who use it. Think about having to put up on Fb, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr — that’s… loads. As a substitute, select the highest three to 5 platforms that, primarily based in your social media audit, yield the very best ROI for your small business.

As you select your platforms, you may additionally wish to take note of traits and rising channels. Even if you happen to’re a marketer at a small B2B business, it received’t damage to check out a platform earlier than all of your rivals do.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Trends Report

Download Now

In the event you’re a seasoned marketer or have a big staff, you might discover that utilizing all the common channels and even experimenting with a brand new one might be helpful to the targets you set in the first step. Nevertheless, if you happen to’re a staff of 1, or your staff is already stretched skinny, it is OK to start out with just a few social channels and work your approach as much as extra.

Really useful Reads

3. Select your social media content material codecs and put up varieties.

You’re now armed with the social media platforms to pursue. However which social media content types will you put up? Will you put up primarily movies, photographs, or text-based updates? Will you put up informative, relatable, or humorous content material?

As all the time, we suggest selecting a mix of content material varieties to maximise your ROI. Plus, it is going to be certain that you’re serving content material that addresses different segments of your audience whereas growing your stage of reach.

For instance, my mother is hooked on Instagram Reels. I as soon as took a peek at her display time report and was astonished. However, a majority of her technology spends probably the most time partaking with photographs, images, and infographics. Most companies have outliers like my mother, so a diversified technique helps you meet different preferences.

It is also important to account in your staff’s assets. You probably have devoted social media managers who can create content material in-house, you might have extra leeway along with your decisions. However if you happen to solely have a generalist marketer on employees (or if you happen to’re that generalist marketer!), think about what’s most reasonable by way of content material creation, or ask for a finances to rent a contract content material creator.

Really useful Reads

4. Create social media content material templates, lazy hashtags, and lazy copy.

As you construct out your content material calendar (hopefully after downloading a free social media content calendar template!), keep in mind that the aim of your calendar is to make posting as simple and painless as doable. In pursuit of that, take a while to create content material templates, checklist the hashtags you’ll use most frequently, and even create “lazy” copy for you or your coworkers to make use of.

I discover it useful to retailer templates in an internet financial institution, akin to Google Drive, or a instrument like Canva, the place I can shortly edit a template and regulate it to create a brand new put up. Usually, you wish to have varied customizable picture templates.

Featured Useful resource: 150+ Content Creation Templates

Download Now

Don’t neglect to maintain your most-used hashtags simply accessible for simple copying and pasting, together with lazy copy that solely must be custom-made from put up to put up. As you draft your templates, all the time hold your brand voice in thoughts. Whether or not you’re severe and company, or open and pleasant, you need each put up to embody your organization’s branding.

Really useful Reads

5. Fill in your social media holidays, occasions, and campaigns.

What’s a social media content material calendar that doesn’t present your forethought and planning? Nicely, it’s nonetheless a content material calendar — simply not a really helpful one! As you construct out your social media content material calendar, determine the vacations and occasions you’ll be collaborating in and notice any campaigns you could have deliberate for the long run.

In the event you’re attending an occasion or a convention, you need to plan to broadcast that in your social media channels. Or if you happen to’re doing a digital occasion like a webinar, you need to plan a collection of posts round that, too. Or if you happen to’d wish to create a vacation put up or a paid social campaign — the chances are infinite. It is best to plan for every upcoming occasion with at the least a month’s advance discover.

Professional tip: You don’t have to create a marketing campaign for each single vacation. Most entrepreneurs plan for three main occasions: Winter/Finish of Yr holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.

Really useful Reads

6. Decide a social media posting schedule.

It’s time to get into probably the most helpful a part of your content material calendar: Figuring out your posting schedule. Your calendar ought to have a “Time” column that can help you proactively hold monitor of this info.

Totally different social media platforms require varied posting instances. By creating completely different tabs for every platform or colour coding posts for various channels, you’ll be able to simply fill in publish instances. Contemplate additionally syncing publishing instances to your calendar to get well timed reminders.

We not too long ago surveyed 1000+ social media marketersto get their tackle the perfect instances to put up on social media.

Right here’s a fast of overview of the perfect instances to put up on every platform primarily based on our findings:

• Instagram: 6 PM – 9 PM, 12 PM – 3 PM, and three PM – 6 PM
• Fb: 6 PM – 9 PM and 12 PM – 3 PM
• X (previously Twitter): 9 AM – 12 PM and 12 PM – 3 PM
• LinkedIn: 9 AM – 12 PM, 12 – 3 PM, or 3 – 6 PM
• YouTube: 6 PM – 9 PM
• TikTok: 6 PM – 9 PM, 3 PM – 6 PM, and 12 PM – 3 PM

Needless to say there isn’t a one measurement matches all answer (sorry, want I had higher information). For instance, SproutSocial says the perfect time to put up on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM, and Hootsuite says 9 AM is the perfect time general.

These variations don’t imply anybody is improper; it simply ties again to what I discussed above about your viewers: you need to tailor the instances you put up content material to your individual enterprise.

To choose your schedule, check out our research for every social media platform you will use use to get a way of the posting cadence greatest practices. Then, evaluate that to the bandwidth in your staff and the targets you wish to obtain. Keep in mind: the objective of a social media calendar is to create and publish a sustainable stream of content material to your viewers — it is a marathon, not a race.

Really useful Reads

7. Schedule posts utilizing a social media instrument.

Publishing updates on a number of platforms, with completely different campaigns and holidays, at completely different instances and days, can shortly get overwhelming. I like to recommend integrating your social media calendar template with a social media management tool.

It’s going to aid you schedule posts properly prematurely of publication, limiting handbook work. Paired with the social media templates you’ve already created, you’ll get pleasure from a way more expedited publishing course of, which is very helpful if you happen to’re a generalist or are the only real social media supervisor in your staff.

Try HubSpot’s social media management software for free.

Many instruments help you cross-post throughout completely different social media channels. This may be helpful, however I like to recommend being cautious: what may work on LinkedIn may not work on Fb, and vice versa. Since every platform serves a particular viewers phase, you wish to guarantee your posts are tailor-made to every one.

Really useful Reads

8. Monitor your social media posts’ success metrics.

As soon as your social media posting schedule has matured and you’ve got a backlog of posts to research, it’s time to delve deeply into your social media metrics and study what labored, what didn’t work, and what you need to change transferring ahead.

Hopping from platform to platform and taking a look at their particular person analytics dashboards is usually a good place to start out. However as you proceed scaling your advertising and marketing efforts, you need to think about investing in social media analytics software to compile your entire engagement information for you.Try HubSpot’s social media analytics software for free.

As you analyze your success, hyperlink it to your organization’s backside line. What number of leads did you earn? What number of of these leads was gross sales? How a lot cash did you spend on paid social media versus how a lot income did you generate? Here’s a guide on measuring social media marketing ROI to help you answer these questions.

Really useful Reads

Social Media Content material Calendar

If you do not have time to create your social media content material calendar from scratch, begin with HubSpot’s free social media content material calendar template.

This calendar has every little thing you could plan your social media content material, coordinate campaigns, develop attain and engagement, scale posting schedule, and enhance productiveness. Obtain it now, and comply with together with the steps beneath.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Content Calendar Template

Download Now

Our template contains every little thing you could scale your social media advertising and marketing efforts. You’ll acquire entry to:

• Social Media Content material Schedule: See every of your particular person posts and draft particular person messages and pictures for each.
• Month-to-month Planning Calendar: See your upcoming social posts for the month in a user-friendly, big-picture format.
• Content material Repository: Record out all the content material you’ll be sharing along with your followers, from weblog posts to gives to web site pages.
• Platform-Particular Tabs: Plan out your updates for every particular platform, together with Twitter, Fb, LinkedIn, and extra.

Beneath, I will dive deeper into learn how to use the template.

Social Media Content material Calendar Template Tutorial

Within the following subsections, I will present you learn how to fill out every of the tabs on this template — Twitter, Fb, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Step 1: Assessment the Month-to-month Planning Calendar tab.

The Month-to-month Planning Calendar tab is a snapshot of your month-to-month social media campaigns. It’s going to aid you coordinate with different stakeholders and hold all of the transferring components so as. Here is what it seems like:

There are three sections to notice whenever you edit this template. First, the color-coding key. Every colour represents a sort of content material or marketing campaign you may coordinate, like ebooks, webinars, weblog posts, product launches, and many others. Although solely a few of these may be related to you, they’re just the start of what you might wish to embrace right here — so be sure you add and take away classes that align with your individual forms of content material.

The opposite two sections to edit are the Month and Yr on the high of the calendar, and the cells beneath every day of the week. In these cells, you need to enter the kind of content material you will be selling that day and color-code it to align with the marketing campaign it is supporting.

As a substitute of deleting all of the content material on this spreadsheet every month, I like to recommend copying this worksheet twelve instances over to have a separate sheet for every month. (If that will get too overwhelming, you’ll be able to all the time save these tabs as a separate workbook.)

Step 2: Populate your first social channel within the calendar.

Now, let’s get to the social media content material a part of the calendar. For the sake of this weblog put up, we’ll use Twitter for example, however these steps will work for every social channel tab within the template.

For example you wish to add some tweets to your scheduling template. Scroll over to the Twitter Updates tab within the content material calendar spreadsheet, the place you will see this:

Day, Date, & Time

The primary 4 columns, Day, Date, Time, and Date & Time, are there in your comfort, and if you happen to select to make use of a third-party app for pre-scheduling your tweets (like HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software), then these columns can be helpful. For now, simply fill within the date for whenever you’ll put up on Twitter, and the instances you need them to exit. The Date & Time column will robotically change primarily based on what you sort within the earlier two columns.

Message

Now, let’s transfer over to the Message column. Right here, enter the copy you need to seem in your tweet, taking into account you need to cap it at 217 characters to permit sufficient room for a hyperlink. (Read this blog post for a full character count guide.) This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the variety of characters you have entered to maintain you on level, turning yellow and finally crimson as you method 240 characters.

I discover this to be one of the vital helpful components of the template as a result of it helps you make edits in real-time and ensures you’re being as clear and concise as doable in your captions (to the good thing about your viewers).

Hyperlink

After you have composed your tweet, paste the URL you need to incorporate in your tweet within the Hyperlink column. Make sure to embrace UTM parameters so you will know whether or not these tweets are driving visitors, leads, and clients. This is a vital step to recollect if you would like to reveal ROI from social media. You may as well use the Marketing campaign column so as to add an related marketing campaign which helps with extra detailed monitoring and reporting.

Picture

Lastly, within the Picture column, connect the tweet’s picture (if in case you have one). For Twitter, we suggest photographs which can be 1200 x 670 pixels.

(Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.)

In the event you’re having hassle attaching your picture to the spreadsheet, comply with these steps:

Step 1: Click on on the cell the place you need to put your picture.

Step 2: Click on Insert within the high row, then click on the Picture button, and eventually, click on Picture in cell to decide on your picture.

Step 3: Within the Insert picture window, select the choice your photograph will come from. On this instance, we uploaded a picture from our pc.

Step 4: You will now see the picture seem within the cell.

Professional Tip: This course of is only for organizational functions. In the event you determine to add the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software program, it won’t connect — you will have to try this manually. In the event you’re a HubSpot buyer, yow will discover particulars on how to bulk upload your Twitter content to the HubSpot Social Publishing Tool within the downloaded template.

Do not Overlook to Work together With Your Followers

Whether or not you employ this spreadsheet to plan your content material or add it to a third-party app, you will nonetheless have to complement these updates with on-the-fly content material. Breaking information hits? Whip up a fast replace to share it along with your community. Did somebody in your community tweet one thing fascinating? Give it a retweet with some commentary. Obtained an enchanting touch upon considered one of your updates? Reply with a “thanks” for his or her interplay.

Developing with and scheduling your social media content in advance is a big time-saver, but it surely ought to go with out saying that you simply nonetheless want to observe and add to your social presence all through the day.

I encourage you to experiment along with your social media publishing. This template supplies publishing dates and instances for every social community, however you might discover these are approach too many updates so that you can fill, or maybe too rare in your booming social presence. If that is so, you need to regulate your social media publishing frequency as wanted.

Now that you’ve the ins and outs of a social media content material calendar, obtain the one beneath without cost and begin planning your content material.

Editor’s notice: This put up was initially revealed in January 2020 and has been up to date for comprehensiveness.