Are you ever under a time crunch when it comes to creating social media content? We have all done it, especially when trying to get in on a trend before it passes. It can be a stressful position - but a social media calendar template can make it easier.
By creating content right before the deadline, you run the risk of overlooking important goals and making mistakes. There may be typos in your content or it may not meet the needs of your audience. You may even miss important holidays or events.
What if I told you you could minimize the risk? Using the best social media calendar template options for marketers and some tips for getting the most out of them, I'll share the best social media calendar template options for marketers.
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What is a social media calendar template?
Organize your social media posts by social platform, campaign, date, and more with a social media calendar. By doing this, you will be able to stay organized and see your social media publishing schedule across a wide range of channels, campaigns, and formats. Marketers can simply fill in these elements in a social media calendar template.
Why do I need a social media calendar template?
Flori Needle, a HubSpot Blog writer, was a social media manager before joining the company. In order to create a schedule, she focused on Instagram.
She shared with me, “I found myself creating Instagram posts last minute because I didn’t know how to plan my strategy in advance.”
In spite of some testing, she says she would have spent less time on trial and error if she'd had a plan prior to posting.
It's for this reason that social media content calendars are so useful. Keeping track of deadlines, managing your content creation team, and establishing transparency with stakeholders are all possible.
The process of creating a great content calendar goes beyond adding a few Instagram or LinkedIn post ideas to your Google calendar. Here are some benefits of having a social media calendar.
1. Better Organization
It is essential when managing multiple social media channels to have a content calendar to keep you and your team organized.
Plan your content around your organization's needs rather than coming up with ideas on the fly. In addition, it can provide more time to create content about trending topics and upcoming holidays.
A content calendar will help you strategize how to promote a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND) in advance.
The best part is that a social media calendar keeps your team updated on when content will be posted. Transparency can help avoid confusion and miscommunications when you tell people what's going live.
Despite putting aside time specifically for this task, good content ideas don't always appear on command. You might just need a topic generator to get your creative juices flowing.
It's even better if you use these topics to generate blog posts, which can be repurposed into social media posts.
2. More Mindful Scalability
Having a social media calendar can also help you scale your content production without overwhelming your marketing team.
Having content planned in advance allows you to pace production around your team's bandwidth and other responsibilities.
You should track post analytics as your content scales to see how it performs. Monitoring your metrics will help you and your teams determine what content engages your audience the most.
3. Higher Quality Content
Last but not least, social media calendars give your team plenty of time to do their best work. By planning your posts in advance, you can avoid typos and make sure everything is on-brand and optimized.
Parts of a Social Media Content Calendar Spreadsheet
Your social media content calendar shouldn't feel like a chore.
I'm going to walk you through the essential components of a social media content calendar that will help you organize your social media strategy tactically.
Key
A key or legend is a section of a graphic that explains its symbols or colors. Your stakeholders will be better able to understand your social media calendar if you provide an easy-to-read key.
If your key is clear, anyone in your organization can view your social media content calendar and understand what's happening.
URLs and UTM Parameters
There is a similarity between URLs and UTM parameters, but they are not the same. In social media, URLs are the links you share from your website (or another website if you curate content).
The UTM parameter is an extension of your URL that is needed for data collection. It's a string of tracking code that's appended to the end of a URL, and it's used by social media marketers to track their posts' effectiveness.
You can determine which content meets your conversion goals and drives the most engagement on social media platforms by tracking and analyzing UTM parameters. To simplify this process, you can use a UTM generator.
Date and Time
It is helpful to include dates and times in your social media calendar for planning and for stakeholders who rely on the content you share.
Social team members can easily schedule posts (and continue their workflow) while those outside the team know when to expect them.
Message
Social media content calendars require transparency and context.
The caption of a post or even a brief summary of what the message is can go a long way in helping others understand what the message is about.
If you are adding content to your social media content calendar that is not yet completed, consider adding a short Loom video to show how the design will look.
Campaign
Once your campaign is over, it's too late to track metrics. Start tracking your social media campaigns in your content calendar instead.
By having a dropdown list of predetermined campaign names, you can make this prescriptive. You can also copy and paste the names next to the corresponding content if your campaigns are few and far between.
To ensure seamless tracking, align your campaign name with the campaign section of your UTM parameter.
If you don't include some imagery in your social media content calendar, it will become just another spreadsheet. The majority of your social media content will likely be visual, so include a thumbnail version of the image you'll use.
In addition to the message, stakeholders viewing the calendar images will have a pretty good idea of what will be shared and when.
Check out this cheat sheet for ideal image dimensions on each platform to make editing your images easier.
How to Use a Social Media Calendar Template
Here are a few steps to follow when using a social media calendar template, no matter which one you choose.
1. Conduct a social media audit across all platforms
I recommend conducting a complete social media audit before creating a social media content calendar.
Consider the following questions:
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What social media platforms do you use?
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What platforms do you not use, but your competitors do?
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What platforms get the most and least engagement?
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What is the most frequently used and least frequently used content format?
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What types of posts get the most engagement and what types get the least?
Creating your social media content calendar will be easier if you audit your social media presence.
You may be on TikTok, but it may also be the platform where you get the least engagement and even fewer leads. You may need to de-prioritize TikTok and invest more time in a better-fitting platform instead.
Take a look at your social media analytics to answer these questions. Rather than relying solely on gut instinct, it's crucial to back up your conclusions with data.
Here's a pro tip: Our social media report template will help you stay on top of your findings. Data can be organized and analyzed using a variety of charts.
2. Choose the top 3-5 social media platforms you'll use
If you want a high social media ROI (return on investment), you don't need to be on every social media platform.
Instead, you should focus on where your target audience is and which platforms have the highest return on investment. In this way, your team will save time and effort, resulting in a much more manageable social media content calendar.
Having to post on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr - that's a lot.
Select the top three to five platforms that will yield the highest ROI for your business based on your social media audit.
You should also consider trends and growing channels when choosing your platforms. Testing out a platform before all your competitors does won't hurt you even if you're a marketer at a small B2B business.
Using all of the popular channels, and even experimenting with a new one, may be beneficial if you're an experienced marketer with a large team.
Nevertheless, if you're a one-person team or your team is already stretched thin, you can start with a few social channels and work your way up from there.
Remember that every social channel is different. Your content should be tailored to the platform's layout and users. It may be easy to cross-post the same image and copy, but it isn't always effective.
3. Pick your social media content formats and post types
Now that you've identified your social media platforms, what type of content will you post?
Are you going to post mostly short-form videos, images, or text-based updates? What kind of content are you planning to post? Will it be informative, relatable, or funny?
The best way to maximize your ROI is to use a variety of content types.
Additionally, you'll be able to serve different segments of your audience while increasing your reach.
Make sure you account for the resources of your team. Your choices are more flexible if you have dedicated social media managers who can create content in-house.
It is important to consider what is realistic in terms of content creation if you only have one person on your team. Hire a freelance content creator if you have a budget.
4. Layout social media content templates, create lazy hashtags, and write lazy copy
The purpose of your content calendar (hopefully after downloading a free social media content calendar template!) is to make posting easy and painless.
Create content templates, list the hashtags you'll use most often, and even create "lazy" copy for you or your colleagues.
I find it helpful to store templates in an online bank, such as Google Drive or Canva, so I can quickly edit the template and adjust it for each new post. In general, you should have a variety of image templates that can be customized. Be sure to keep your most-used hashtags accessible for easy copy/pasting as well as lazy copy that only needs to be customized from post to post.
Keep your brand voice in mind as you draft your templates. Every post should reflect your company's brand, whether it's serious and corporate or open and friendly.
5. Fill in your social media holidays, events, and campaigns
Without forethought and planning, what's the point of a social media content calendar?
It's still a content calendar - just not very useful. Build your social media content calendar by identifying the holidays, events, and future campaigns you'll be participating in.
If you're attending an event or conference, you should broadcast it on your social media channels. In the case of virtual events like webinars, you should also plan a series of posts to go along with them.
The possibilities are endless, whether you want to create a holiday post or a paid social campaign.
Whenever possible, you should plan at least one month in advance for upcoming events.
It's not necessary to create a campaign for every holiday. There are three main seasons for marketers in the U.S.: Winter/end-of-year holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.
6. Establish a schedule for social media postings
The most important part of your content calendar is determining your posting schedule. Keep track of this information proactively by adding a "Time" column to your calendar.
There are different posting times for different social media platforms. Create tabs for each platform or color-code posts for different channels to easily fill in publish times. Sync your calendar with publishing times to get timely reminders.
Based on our research, here are the best times to post on each platform:
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Instagram: 6 PM - 9 PM, 12 PM - 3 PM, and 3 PM - 6 PM
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Facebook: 6 PM - 9 PM and 12 PM - 3 PM
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X (formerly Twitter): 9 AM - 12 PM and 12 PM - 3 PM
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LinkedIn: 9 AM - 12 PM, 12 - 3 PM, or 3 - 6 PM
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YouTube: 6 PM - 9 PM
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TikTok: 6 PM - 9 PM, 3 PM - 6 PM, and 12 PM - 3 PM
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for posting times (sorry, wish I had better news).
According to Sprout Social, the best time to post on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM.
It just relates back to what I mentioned above about your audience: you should tailor the times you post content to your own business.
7. Set up UTM tracking
A social media calendar's most important component is actually the one you don't see - tracking. UTM parameters are the easiest way to track the performance of your social media content.
It's the second time I've mentioned UTM parameters, but for good reason. Imagine trying to figure out where each viewer came from or who engaged with your content by manually sorting through your campaign traffic?
No, I don't want to do that, and I’d imagine you don’t either. UTM codes are easy to set up and use. Review your social media content metrics once you've implemented them for each link on your social media posts.
8. Schedule posts using a social media tool
Keeping up with multiple platforms, different campaigns and holidays, at different times and days, can quickly become overwhelming.
Your social media calendar template should be integrated with a social media management tool. (We'll discuss a few options shortly.)
You can schedule posts well before publication, reducing manual work.
There are many tools available that allow you to cross-post across different social media channels. This can be useful, but, again, I recommend being cautious.
What might work on LinkedIn might not work on Facebook, and vice versa. Each platform caters to a different audience segment, so make sure your posts are tailored accordingly.
9. Monitor your social media posts’ success metrics
After your social media posting schedule has matured and you have a backlog of posts to analyze, it's time to dig deeper into your social media metrics. Find out what worked, what didn't work, and what needs to be changed.
The best place to begin is to hop from platform to platform and look at their analytics dashboards.
You should consider investing in social media analytics software to compile all of your engagement data as you scale your marketing efforts.
Analyze your success in relation to the bottom line of your company.
How many leads did you earn? What percentage of those leads resulted in sales? In relation to the revenue you generated, how much did you spend on paid social media?
Identify and align your goals. Identifying your goals is the first step to building your social media content calendar, which will determine how often you post, who will be involved in the content creation process, and which channels to use. Make sure your team is aligned with them.
Social Media Calendar Templates
1. HubSpot’s Free Social Media Content Calendar Template
With this calendar, you can plan your social media content, coordinate campaigns, grow reach and engagement, scale posting schedules, and boost productivity.
Everything you need to scale your social media marketing efforts is included in our template. Here are some of the things you'll gain access to:
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Social Media Content Schedule: See each of your individual posts and draft individual messages and images for each one.
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Monthly Planning Calendar: See your upcoming social posts for the month in a user-friendly, big-picture format.
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Content Repository: List out all of the content you’ll be sharing with your followers, from blog posts to offers to website pages.
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Platform-Specific Tabs: Plan out your updates for each specific platform, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
HubSpot Social Media Content Calendar Template Tutorial
I will show you how to fill out each tab in this template - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Step 1: Review the “Monthly Planning Calendar” tab.
You can view your monthly social media campaigns under the "Monthly Planning Calendar" tab. You'll be able to coordinate with other stakeholders and keep all the moving parts in order. Here's how it looks:
When editing this template, you need to pay attention to three sections.
Let's begin with the color-coding key. Depending on the color, you might coordinate ebooks, webinars, blog posts, or product launches.
These are just the beginning of what you may want to include here - so be sure to add and remove categories aligned with your own content types.
Other sections to edit are the "Month" and "Year" at the top of the calendar, and the cells below each day. You should enter the type of content you'll be promoting that day in those cells, and color-code it according to the campaign it supports.
Rather than deleting all the content in this spreadsheet every month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times. If that gets too overwhelming, you can always save those tabs separately.
Step 2: Populate your first social channel in the calendar.
On to the social media content part of the calendar.
The steps in this blog post apply to all social channels tabs in the template, but we'll use X as an example.
Consider adding some tweets to your scheduling template.
The Twitter (X) Updates tab in the content calendar spreadsheet looks like this:
Day, Date, & Time
The first three columns, Day, Date, and Time, are there for your convenience.
If you choose to use a third-party app for pre-scheduling your tweets (like HubSpot's Social Media Management Software), then these columns will be useful.
Message
Let's move on to the "Message" column. The copy you'd like to appear in your tweet can be entered here. It should be capped at 217 characters to allow room for a link.
Once you reach 240 characters, the spreadsheet will auto-calculate the number of characters you've entered, turning yellow and eventually red.
This feature is one of the most useful parts of the template because it allows you to make edits in real-time. Additionally, this ensures your captions are clear and concise (to the benefit of your audience).
Link
In the Link column, paste the URL you'd like to include in your tweet. Use UTM parameters to determine whether these tweets are driving traffic and leads.
If you want to demonstrate ROI from social media, you should remember this step. In addition, the Campaign column can be used to track and report on associated campaigns.
Image
In the Image column, attach the tweet's image (if you have one). Images with a resolution of 1200 x 670 pixels are recommended for Twitter.
Follow these steps if you have trouble attaching your image to the spreadsheet:
Step 1: Click on the cell where you'd like to place your image
Step 2: Click Insert in the top row, then click the Image button, and finally, click Image in cell to choose your image
Step 3: In the Insert image window, choose the option your photo will come from. In this example, we uploaded an image from our computer
Step 4: You'll now see the image appear in the cell
2. HootSuite’s Social Media Posting Schedule Template
Another option is the social media posting schedule template from HootSuite.
This free template incorporates five popular platforms:
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Facebook
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Instagram
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X (still referred to as Twitter in the document)
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LinkedIn
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TikTok
As a Google Doc, it can easily be edited to add or remove items.
It includes a helpful "strategy" tab in addition to helping you plan your social media publishing. In this way, your goals and content plan are easy to refer to as you go through the rest of the document.
You can also add timeless pieces to your calendar at any time using a tab dedicated to "evergreen content."
3. Sprout Social’s Social Media Calendar Template
Sprout Social's social media calendar template is divided into four weekly tabs.
Each tab has columns for key information, including:
- Copy
- Media
- Publish Date
- Network (has a dropdown with Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, TikTik, YouTube, and Pinterest)
- KPIs
What I like: Sprout Social’s platform gets granular about details that others ignore, such as collaborators and KPIs. This goes the extra mile to ensure all social media content is well-planned and working toward a goal. As a Google Doc, the template is also fully customizable.
4. ClickUp’s Social Media Posts Template
ClickUp's social post template lets you plan and organize your content and track its status throughout the creation process.
It includes fields for the assignee, due date, channel, and URL and can be viewed as a list, board, calendar, doc, or “embed.”
From idea to publishing, the “card” style of ClickUp makes it easy to host and see everything related to your social media posts.
You can make comments, attach files, and tag different users so each card serves as a single source of truth for any questions related to that post.
5. SocialBee’s Social Media Content Calendar
SocialBee’s Social Media Content Calendar is another fully editable Google Doc on our list, but one of few that covers a full year.
It contains dozens of fun and unique post ideas for every month.
My favorite thing about SocialBee is that it goes above and beyond when it comes to making its social media calendar useful. In addition to the post ideas in the monthly tabs, it also has a number of extra tabs full of post examples to help marketers come up with ideas.
Examples of bonus posts include: fun, educational, inspirational, promotional, and interactive.
6. Iconosquare’s Social Media Content Calendar
Social media analytics tool, Iconosquare, has created a social media content that helps teams plan for an entire quarter.
Unlike the other simple spreadsheets on our list, Iconosquare's social media content calendar template actually looks like a calendar. However, it is only compatible with Notion or Google Calendar, which limits its use.
What I like: Iconosquare's calendar has many global celebrations and "fun" holidays prepopulated (e.g. World Chocolate Day). As users plan their content, this is a unique and effective way to spark their ideas.
7. Semrush’s Social Media Calendar
Semrush’s social media calendar is another built as an easy-to-edit spreadsheet.
It provides all the information needed to schedule or publish a post:
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Channel
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Day, Date, and Time
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Post Topic/Type
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Copy
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Visual Type
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Visuals
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Link to Assets
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Status
Additionally, color coding allows users to see what content is coming up at a glance.
The calendar covers a full year, allowing marketers to note down ideas or important dates as they arise. It shows an example of a great social media content calendar, giving newer marketers something to aim for.
8. Canva Social Media Calendar Template
Last but not least, if you don’t like any of the templates we shared, Canva makes it free and easy to create your own.
What is the first step? You can use these weekly or monthly templates designed by Buffer, or you can go to Canva's Calendar templates gallery and create your own.
Canva is a godsend when it comes to design and data presentation. This option is good because it allows you to customize the information included in your social media calendar as you like.
Engage your followers by interacting with them
You'll still need to supplement these updates with on-the-fly content, regardless of whether you use this spreadsheet or upload it to a third-party app.
Is there breaking news? Share a quick update with your network. Is there anything interesting that someone in your network tweeted? Retweet it with some commentary.
Have you received a fascinating comment on one of your updates? Respond with a “thank you” for their interaction. Creating and scheduling your social media content in advance will save you a lot of time. However, you will still need to monitor and maintain your social presence throughout the day.
Try experimenting with your social media publishing. This template provides publishing dates and times for each social network, but perhaps you need more or less. Depending on your situation, you should adjust the frequency of your social media posts.