Planning out your business’s content in a social media calendar is part of building a social media marketing strategy that actually works. Unfortunately, content planning often gets pushed to the back burner for many business owners.
But, if you dedicate just a few hours at the start of every month to creating a social media calendar for your business, you’ll be able to grow your social presence without constantly worrying about what to share next.
What is a social media calendar?
A social media calendar is a detailed schedule of your upcoming social media posts, organized by date and time. It allows you to see what content needs to be posted and when so you have ample time to create the necessary assets and see how each post fits into the bigger picture.
If you regularly find yourself rushing to share an article on Facebook or trying to think up a clever holiday greeting to post on Instagram, you might benefit from a social media calendar.
A calendar allows you to take a strategic approach to your social media presence, so you can see how your actions fit into your overarching business goals.
How to create a social media calendar
Building a social media calendar for an entire month in one shot sounds daunting, but it’s much easier if you know which steps to take to effectively promote your brand and make money on your social channels.
1. Identify your audience
Start by figuring out who you want to reach on social media. This will help you decide which channels to focus on and what type of content to post. You can create buyer personas for each segment of your target audience, which lists out core demographic information, like age and location, as well as psychographic tendencies, such as interests, fears, lifestyle, and goals.
For example, Facebook’s biggest user base is 25 to 34 year olds, whereas TikTok has a much younger user base of 18 to 24 year olds.
When you know who your audience is, you can create content that resonates with them and ensure you’re posting on channels they’re already active on.
2. Audit your social channels and content
An audit of your existing social media platforms and accounts helps you understand where you currently stand. Pay attention to content that performs—meaning it earns lots of engagement in the form of likes, comments, saves, views, shares, and/or clicks—as well as to under-performing posts. This gives you insight into your social media marketing efforts.
After your data analysis of each platform, determine which types of content are most popular with your audience. Look for posts with the highest levels of engagement and the most click-throughs.
Take note of trends and themes. For example, maybe your Instagram video posts earn tons of engagement while photo-based posts don’t garner the same results. As such, you might plan for more video-based posts in your social media calendar over text-based ones.
Once you’ve identified your best pieces of content, segment your calendar to create a diverse content output.
3. Set long- and short-term goals
Everything you post should support a business goal, even indirectly. Think of your business goals and then develop social media marketing goals to support them. These goals give you goal posts against which to measure progress and success.
As with most marketing, social media requires a lot of trial and error. But if every post has a reason for existing, you’ll always learn something—even if the post doesn’t perform well.
Here are some goals you might consider for your social media calendar:
- Drive brand awareness. Measure this with impressions/reach, likes, shares, mentions, or any signal that shows a person has seen your content.
- Create demand for your products. Analyze click-throughs to your site, products added to cart, and comments or messages from interested buyers.
- Acquire leads and customers. These are paying customers, who you can nurture into sales.
- Form partnerships. Engage with influencers or like-minded brands for collaborations or co-marketing campaigns.
- Build a loyal following. Measure this by followers gained or lost in a certain time frame, or by your engagement rate (total engagement divided by number of followers).
- Establish social proof. Source positive testimonials or user-generated content (UGC) to promote your products.
- Provide customer service. Social media is a common support channel. One of your goals may be to provide this support to customers through social media or to direct it to another preferred channel. Measure this through your response time for direct messages. (This is displayed as a badge on your Facebook page, for example.)
- Become a thought leader to your target audience. Measure this with post views, audience following, and impressions.
Keep these broad objectives in mind as you build your social media calendar. Every post should support at least one of these goals in some way. You could even include a section on your calendar template to note which result is relevant for each post to make sure it stays top of mind.
4. Decide on content posts and categories for each channel
It’s also important to remember every social media platform is unique. Each caters to different audiences, has different content formats, and offers different ways to interact with content and users. Consider the nuances of each channel as you plan your social media calendar.
For example, your TikTok audience prefers short-form videos while your YouTube subscribers may want to watch longer, more in-depth videos. TikTok may be more appropriate for sharing influencer unboxing videos, while YouTube is a great channel to publish tutorial videos about using your product.
You’ll also want to diversify your content. If unboxing videos perform well, you’ll still want to mix in some other topics and content formats. Your audience is likely to get bored if you only post unboxing videos.
An easy way to make sure your calendar contains an appropriate mix of content is by bucketing your posts into your own categories. For instance, if you’re an athletics company, maybe you share motivational quotes, workout tips, and healthy recipes in your content mix. Get creative and don’t be afraid to test and refine your ideas.
5. Create your social media content calendar using a template
To build a social media planning calendar, it’s a good idea to use a template to help visualize what your monthly content output will look like. Templates also ensure consistency, making it easier to work with others.
Go with options that allow for collaboration and sharing with your social media team, as well as the inclusion of details like the timing of posts and labels for content categories.
6. Fill in your calendar with content ideas
When brainstorming social media content ideas, it’s helpful to think of your posts in two ways: timely and evergreen. Timely posts are about events, holidays, and other temporary occurrences. Evergreen posts are relevant year-round. If you sell cleaning products, for example, an evergreen post could offer tips to clean kitchen counters anytime, while a seasonal post about spring cleaning tips is only appropriate once a year.
During a brainstorm, every idea is a good idea. You’ll refine them later, evaluating each to see if it supports your long- and/or short-term goals.
Once you’ve decided on a few posts, you can slot them into your calendar. Start with your timely ideas and fill in the rest with your evergreen posts. Ensure you space out your categories—you don’t want to post five recipes back to back if you also have influencer posts, behind-the-scenes content, and event recaps to share.
7. Create and schedule your posts across all your social media platforms
Once you have your post ideas, you’ll need to build the creative. This means copy and visuals. Each channel has its own parameters, so you’ll need to ensure your content meets those requirements. While you can use the same content on different channels, you’ll still need to make some tweaks to optimize it for each use case.
Then it’s time to upload the content to your respective channels and get ready to publish posts. Scheduling ahead of time, rather than logging in each day to post manually, is a more efficient way of doing this. Many social media channels offer native post-scheduling features, and you can also use social media scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Later to assist with this.
8. Review and adjust
Regularly reviewing your calendar’s performance and making necessary adjustments will ensure your strategy remains effective as your business and audience evolve.
As well as getting feedback from the teams who use your social media calendar, you can also dig into your analytics to find out which posts perform best. Track your metrics on each social platform to identify posts that get the most likes, shares, saves, and comments, and adjust your calendar to include more posts like these.
Why use a social media calendar?
A content calendar is the foundation of every successful social media marketing strategy. Beyond strategic benefits, a posting calendar helps you optimize your time and stay authentic to your brand.
If you run your own business, you probably already know there aren’t enough hours in the day to take care of everything you need to.
By working in advance with a content calendar, you can clear one more thing off your daily to-do list and focus your energy on the many other aspects of running your business. Think of it as a time-management technique.
Finding something to post on social media at the last minute can be time-consuming, but if you’ve already collected a batch of high-quality articles that align with your brand, you’re covered.
Best social media calendar tools
Social media calendar tools provide an interactive digital way to plot your monthly posts and collaborate with multiple team members. Here are some of the best tools to use.
Notion
Notion’s comprehensive template database lets you create a content calendar from scratch or use a premade template to get started quicker. You can share your dashboard with relevant stakeholders and allow multiple people to add and edit content. Notion lets you link a page to an entry in your social media calendar where you can add extra information about an upcoming post and toggle between different views, including a calendar view and a Kanban board view.
Google Calendar
If you’re after something simple and free, Google Calendar is an easy way to create your social media calendar. Add dates and times for your posts, set reminders, and invite multiple stakeholders to get involved.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool, but you can also use it to plan your content calendar. When you add a new piece of content to your schedule, it shows up in a calendar format so you can see all your upcoming posts in one window.
Hootsuite
Similarly to Buffer, Hootsuite was created to schedule posts, but you can see all your scheduled posts in a calendar format.
Asana
Asana is a project management tool, but you can set the display to a calendar view to see your posts mapped out over the month. Like the other tools, you can invite multiple team members to collaborate on your calendar and get a handy top-level view of your upcoming posts.
Trello
Trello takes a Kanban approach to content planning, but you can switch to a calendar view to get a visual insight into your monthly social media content. You can assign each post to its own “board,” where you can add captions, images, hashtags, and other relevant information.
Social media calendars build an identity for your brand
Not only do content calendars free up your schedule, they also help you build an identity and community around your brand.
Sharing a constant stream of content can capture the attention of new audiences who hadn’t previously heard of your online store, but might share common interests with your ideal customers. By blending curated content from third-party sources with your own original content, you can create a larger identity and lifestyle for your brand that extends beyond your products and services.
Building a social media content calendar ahead of time will help you make sure you always have content to post and, more importantly, content that your community will enjoy and identify with.
Free social media calendar templates
Building your own social media calendar template from scratch can be intimidating. Luckily, there are free options available online that you can use or customize to suit your needs.
Here are some free templates to check out:
- Hootsuite social media content calendar template, available for free download
- HubSpot social media content calendar template, also available for free download
- Asana social media calendar template, ideal for use on the project management platform
- Buffer social media content calendar template, ideal for using with Notion
- Notion social media content calendar template, which you can duplicate and add to your own Notion account
The role of analytics in a social media calendar
Your social media calendar shouldn’t be based on guesswork. It should be based on solid data and metrics from your social media channels.
Understanding which posts perform best, what days and times produce the most engagement, and where your audience predominantly spends time online will help you plan and optimize your content calendar. For example, you might find that Instagram feed posts perform really well on a Tuesday lunchtime but not so well on a Saturday evening. Or, you might find that short videos generate more engagement on TikTok than on YouTube.
Set aside time each month to dig into the analytics on each of your chosen social media platforms to identify any patterns. Use this information to adjust your posting schedule for next month, either by reducing the type of posts that don’t perform well, increasing your output on your most popular channels, or scheduling Instagram posts if you get the most engagement there.
Here’s a rundown of the most important analytics:
- Engagement. How many people liked, shared, saved, and commented on your posts?
- Click-throughs. How many people clicked on a link in one of your posts?
- Impressions. How many people saw your posts?
- Conversions. How many people went on to take a desired action, like buying a product or joining your mailing list?
- Follower count. How many new followers did you get from each post?
Keep an eye on your audience analytics too. Each social media platform will break down who your most engaged followers are, which can provide valuable insights into who your brand resonates with the most.
Using trends and seasonality in your social media calendar
The easiest way to kickstart your social media calendar is by highlighting important dates in the diary. This includes annual holidays, like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Mother’s Day, as well as seasonal events, like the Super Bowl or awards season.
Having these key dates mapped ahead of time will ensure you’re not scrambling around at the last minute trying to find a funny meme about a turkey to post two days before Thanksgiving.
You can also incorporate trending topics. To do this, you need to keep some semblance of flexibility in your social media calendar. Jumping on trends is all about timing it right, and if you leave it too late you’ll miss the boat.
Here’s how to ensure you include all seasonal events, trends, and evergreen topics on your social media calendar:
- Mark out annual holidays and seasonal events. Block out those days and earmark some time leading up to them so you can post about them beforehand.
- Add in your evergreen, product-focused content. Plot your evergreen, non-seasonal content around the holidays and events.
- Save some space. Keep some slots available for trending content so you can jump on the bandwagon early.
Plan for tomorrow, today with your social media calendar
For your social media strategy to be successful, you need to look forward and think about the future. As you now know, that doesn’t mean planning only for the next five or 10 years. Sometimes thinking about the future means just considering what you’re going to do next month. With these free resources and templates, you can build a calendar on your own and improve your social media efforts.
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Social media calendar FAQ
Is there a free social media scheduling tool?
What should be on a social media content calendar?
- Content category
- Channel
- Content format
- Post copy
- Image files
- Goal
- Post date/time
