The Social Media Content material Calendar Template Each Marketer Wants [Free Template]

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

Most of us have, and it’s a traumatic place to be in as a result of creating content material proper earlier than it must be printed is much less more likely to meet the wants of your viewers, and also you miss out on inventive particular subjects and occasions you possibly can plan for upfront.

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

Use the Above Template to Plan Out Your Social Media Posts

Why do I want 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 advised me, “I discovered myself creating Instagram posts final minute as a result of I didn’t know how you can plan my technique upfront.”

After some testing, she discovered a technique however stated 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 possibly can hold observe of deadlines, higher handle your particular person duties or content material creation workforce, and create transparency with stakeholders who depend on your social media publishing schedule.

Creating an amazing content material calendar is extra than simply including a number of 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 workforce organized, which is crucial when managing a number of social media channels.

Somewhat than developing with content material concepts on the fly, you possibly can plan your content material round your group’s wants. It could possibly additionally present extra time for creating content material about trending subjects and upcoming holidays and occasions. For example, if your organization has a giant occasion developing, a content material calendar will assist you to strategize how you can put it on the market upfront.

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

Professional tip: I do know good content material concepts can’t all the time come on command — even for those who set time apart particularly for this activity. However a subject generator could be simply sufficient to kickstart your inventive juices. Even higher, you possibly can take it a step additional and use these subjects to generate weblog posts, which might be repurposed right into a collection of social media posts. 

2. Simpler Scalability

One other profit to having a social media calendar is that it might assist you to scale your content material manufacturing with out overwhelming your advertising workforce. By planning content material upfront, you possibly can tempo manufacturing round your workforce’s bandwidth and different duties your division is accountable for.

As you scale, I like to recommend monitoring put up analytics to see how your content material performs. Keeping track of your metrics will assist you to and your groups decide what content material engages your viewers essentially the most.

3. Increased High quality Content material

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

Planning your posts upfront additionally offers you time to verify your work for typos or errors and helps your workforce create a cohesive and constant model picture as a result of you will have extra time to strategize and work on beneficial campaigns.

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

Key

A straightforward-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 related, however they don’t seem to be the identical. URLs are the hyperlinks you may 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 tip of a URL, and it helps social media entrepreneurs observe how properly their posts drive visitors to their web sites. By monitoring and analyzing UTM parameters, you may see what content material meets your conversion targets and what content material drives essentially the most engagement on social media platforms. You need to use a UTM generator to make this course of simpler.

Date and Time

Together with dates and occasions in your social media calendar is useful to 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 establish precisely when a put up was or can be scheduled, they’ll 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 on the subject of social media content material calendars. Giving a short synopsis of the message and even sharing the caption for a put up can go a good distance in serving to others inside and out of doors your workforce 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, take into account including a brief Loom video that offers an summary of what the video can be about. You solely must make the Loom as soon as, so that you gained’t must re-record your rationalization 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 can also 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 marketing campaign identify with the marketing campaign part of your UTM parameter for seamless monitoring.

Picture

Your social media content material calendar will turn out to be 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 may included within the printed put up. Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar photos could have a fairly good concept of what’s going to be shared and when.

To make modifying your photos for every platform simpler, take a look at this cheat sheet for ultimate picture 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: Establish your targets.

Step one to constructing your social media content material calendar is figuring out your targets, which can decide how typically 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 unsure the place to start out with establishing your social media targets, we cowl that right here.

Step 2: Align your workforce.

Together with your targets etched in stone, it is time to align your workforce towards these targets. Social media content material creation is a tall order, particularly for lean advertising 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 material is taking up nearly each main social platform. Which means you may 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: Think about range, fairness, inclusion, and belonging.

Range, fairness, inclusion, and belonging are subjects to think about when creating your social calendar, particularly contemplating that buyers care, greater than ever, that the manufacturers they help are dedicated to range 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 ought to be consultant of your viewers and the bigger group the place your corporation operates.

This is not one thing that may occur accidentally, so you may wish to plan for range and inclusion as you develop your content material calendar. If you would like some steerage on creating various and inclusive content material, take a look at our authentic analysis on the subject.

Step 4: Arrange UTM monitoring.

One of the vital elements of a social media calendar is definitely the half you do not see — monitoring. And the best solution to observe 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 purpose. Are you able to think about the nightmare of manually sorting by 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 easy to arrange and use. As soon as you’ve got acquired them in place for every hyperlink in your social media posts, you possibly can evaluation 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 exhibits clicks, views, engagements, and different metrics you intend to trace to deem your content material successful. Monitoring analytics might be as easy or detailed as your workforce prefers.

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

To expedite the method of making a social media content material calendar, obtain this free template that’s prepared so that you can fill out.

1. Full a social media audit throughout all platforms.

Earlier than making a social media content material calendar, I like to recommend an entire 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 essentially the most versus least engagement?
• Which content material codecs do you employ most frequently and least typically?
• Which varieties of posts get essentially the most versus least engagement?

Auditing your social media presence will assist you to resolve how you can transfer ahead as you create your social media content material calendar. For example, it’s possible you’ll be on TikTok, however possibly you discover it’s the platform the place you get the least engagement and even fewer leads. Which 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 knowledge as an alternative of a intestine intuition. Our social media report template is a wonderful solution to hold observe of your findings.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Report Template

Obtain Now

Really useful Reads

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

Imagine 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 target market and people with the very best ROI — not solely as a result of it will save your workforce time and effort, however it’ll lead to a way more manageable social media content material calendar.

Each social channel is totally different, and the content material you put up on every one ought to attraction to the format 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… lots. 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 corporation.

As you select your platforms, you may also wish to take note of developments and rising channels. Even for those who’re a marketer at a small B2B enterprise, it gained’t harm to check out a platform earlier than all of your rivals do.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Tendencies Report

Obtain Now

In the event you’re a seasoned marketer or have a big workforce, it’s possible you’ll discover that utilizing the entire well-liked channels and even experimenting with a brand new one may very well be useful to the targets you set in the first step. Nevertheless, for those who’re a workforce of 1, or your workforce is already stretched skinny, it is OK to start out with a number of social channels and work your manner 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 material varieties will you put up? Will you put up primarily movies, photos, or text-based updates? Will you put up informative, relatable, or humorous content material?

As all the time, we suggest selecting a combination of content material varieties to maximise your ROI. Plus, it’ll be sure that you’re serving content material that addresses totally different segments of your viewers whereas rising your degree of attain.

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

It is also important to account to your workforce’s assets. You probably have devoted social media managers who can create content material in-house, you will have extra leeway along with your decisions. However for those who solely have a generalist marketer on workers (or for those who’re that generalist marketer!), take into account what’s most real looking 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 material calendar template!), do not forget 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 a web-based financial institution, equivalent to Google Drive, or a device like Canva, the place I can shortly edit a template and regulate it to create a brand new put up. Typically, you wish to have numerous customizable picture templates.

Featured Useful resource: 150+ Content material Creation Templates

Obtain Now

Don’t overlook to maintain your most-used hashtags simply accessible for simple copying and pasting, together with lazy copy that solely must be personalized from put up to put up. As you draft your templates, all the time hold your model voice in thoughts. Whether or not you’re critical 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? Properly, it’s nonetheless a content material calendar — simply not a really helpful one! As you construct out your social media content material calendar, establish the vacations and occasions you’ll be taking part in and notice any campaigns you will have deliberate for the longer term.

In the event you’re attending an occasion or a convention, you need to plan to broadcast that in your social media channels. Or for those who’re doing a digital occasion like a webinar, you need to plan a collection of posts round that, too. Or for those who’d prefer to create a vacation put up or a paid social marketing campaign — the probabilities are limitless. You need 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 important events: 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 essentially 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 assist you to proactively hold observe of this data.

Completely different social media platforms require numerous posting occasions. By creating totally different tabs for every platform or colour coding posts for various channels, you possibly can simply fill in publish occasions. Think about additionally syncing publishing occasions to your calendar to get well timed reminders.

We not too long ago surveyed 1000+ social media entrepreneurs to get their tackle one of the best occasions to put up on social media.

Right here’s a fast of overview of one of the best occasions 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 is no such thing as a one measurement suits all resolution (sorry, want I had higher information). For instance, SproutSocial says one of the best time to put up on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM, and Hootsuite says 9 AM is one of the best time general.

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

To select your schedule, check out our analysis for every social media platform you may use use to get a way of the posting cadence greatest practices. Then, examine that to the bandwidth in your workforce 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 device.

Publishing updates on a number of platforms, with totally different campaigns and holidays, at totally different occasions and days, can shortly get overwhelming. I like to recommend integrating your social media calendar template with a social media administration device.

It’s going to assist you to schedule posts properly upfront of publication, limiting guide work. Paired with the social media templates you’ve already created, you’ll take pleasure in a way more expedited publishing course of, which is very helpful for those who’re a generalist or are the only real social media supervisor in your workforce.

Strive HubSpot’s social media administration software program totally free.

Many instruments assist you to cross-post throughout totally 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 section, 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 investigate, it’s time to delve deeply into your social media metrics and be taught what labored, what didn’t work, and what you need to change transferring ahead.

Hopping from platform to platform and their particular person analytics dashboards is usually a good place to start out. However as you proceed scaling your advertising efforts, you need to take into account investing in social media analytics software program to compile all your engagement knowledge for you. Strive HubSpot’s social media analytics software program totally 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 became gross sales? How a lot cash did you spend on paid social media versus how a lot income did you generate? Right here’s a information on measuring social media advertising ROI that will help you reply 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 the whole lot it’s essential to plan your social media content material, coordinate campaigns, develop attain and engagement, scale posting schedule, and increase productiveness. Obtain it now, and comply with together with the steps under.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Content material Calendar Template

Obtain Now

Our template contains the whole lot it’s essential to scale your social media advertising 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 every one.
• 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 the entire content material you’ll be sharing along with your followers, from weblog posts to affords to web site pages.
• Platform-Particular Tabs: Plan out your updates for every particular platform, together with Twitter, Fb, LinkedIn, and extra.

Under, I will dive deeper into how you can use the template.

Social Media Content material Calendar Template Tutorial

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

Step 1: Evaluate 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 assist you to coordinate with different stakeholders and hold all of the transferring elements so as. Here is what it appears to be like like:

There are three sections to notice once 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 could be related to you, they’re only the start of what it’s possible you’ll wish to embody right here — so remember to add and take away classes that align with your personal varieties of content material.

The opposite two sections to edit are the Month and Yr on the high of the calendar, and the cells under every day of the week. In these cells, you need to enter the kind of content material you may 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 occasions over to have a separate sheet for every month. (If that will get too overwhelming, you possibly can 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 instance, however these steps will work for every social channel tab within the template.

As an instance 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 may see this:

Day, Date, & Time

The primary 4 columns, Day, Date, Time, and Date & Time, are there to your comfort, and for those who select to make use of a third-party app for pre-scheduling your tweets (like HubSpot’s Social Media Administration Software program), then these columns can be helpful. For now, simply fill within the date for once you’ll put up on Twitter, and the occasions you need them to exit. The Date & Time column will routinely 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 want to seem in your tweet, taking into consideration you need to cap it at 217 characters to permit sufficient room for a hyperlink. (Learn this weblog put up for a full character rely information.) This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the variety of characters you’ve got entered to maintain you on level, turning yellow and finally crimson as you strategy 240 characters.

I discover this to be one of the vital helpful elements 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 advantage of your viewers).

Hyperlink

After you’ve got composed your tweet, paste the URL you want to incorporate in your tweet within the Hyperlink column. You’ll want to embody UTM parameters so you may know whether or not these tweets are driving visitors, leads, and clients. This is a vital step to recollect if you would like to display ROI from social media. You can even 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 (when you’ve got one). For Twitter, we suggest photos which can be 1200 x 670 pixels.

(Click on right here for a full cheat sheet of social media picture sizes.)

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

Step 1: Click on on the cell the place you want to position 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 picture will come from. On this instance, we uploaded a picture from our laptop.

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 resolve to add the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software program, it is not going to connect — you may have to do this manually. In the event you’re a HubSpot buyer, yow will discover particulars on how you can bulk add your Twitter content material to the HubSpot Social Publishing Software within the downloaded template.

Do not Neglect 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 may 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 attention-grabbing? Give it a retweet with some commentary. Obtained an enchanting touch upon one in every of your updates? Reply with a “thanks” for his or her interplay.

Arising with and scheduling your social media content material upfront is a large time-saver, nevertheless it ought to go with out saying that you simply nonetheless want to watch 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 occasions for every social community, however it’s possible you’ll discover these are manner too many updates so that you can fill, or maybe too rare to 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 under totally free and begin planning your content material.

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