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 worrying place to be in as a result of creating content material proper earlier than it must be printed is much less prone to meet the wants of your viewers, and also you miss out on inventive particular subjects and occasions you’ll be able to 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 the very best social media content material calendar template and a step-by-step information explaining 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 centered 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 plan my technique upfront.”

After some testing, she found out 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’ll be able to preserve 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 an excellent content material calendar is extra than simply including a number of Instagram submit 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 important when managing a number of social media channels.

Quite than developing with content material concepts on the fly, you’ll be able to plan your content material round your group’s wants. It might probably additionally present extra time for creating content material about trending subjects and upcoming holidays and occasions. As an illustration, if your organization has a giant occasion developing, a content material calendar will make it easier to strategize put it up for sale upfront.

Better of all, a social media calendar retains everybody in your staff knowledgeable on when content material will probably be printed. Once I know what’s going dwell and when it avoids miscommunications and confusion down the highway.

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

2. Simpler Scalability

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

As you scale, I like to recommend monitoring submit analytics to see how your content material performs. Keeping track of your metrics will make it easier 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 staff has loads of time to do their greatest work.

Planning your posts upfront 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’ve got extra time to strategize and work on useful 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 provides you with the muse to arrange your social media technique at a tactical degree.

Key

A simple-to-read key helps your stakeholders perceive the data 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 occurring on all platforms.

URLs and UTM Parameters

URLs and UTM parameters are related, however they are not the identical. URLs are the hyperlinks you may need 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 monitor how properly their posts drive site 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 instances in your social media calendar is useful to your planning but additionally for stakeholders and different groups that depend on your social media content material.

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

Message

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

Professional tip: For those who’re including a video to your social media content material calendar that is not completed, contemplate including a brief Loom video that offers an outline of what the video will probably be about. You solely need to make the Loom as soon as, so that you gained’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 an alternative, begin monitoring your social media campaigns in your content material calendar. You can also make this prescriptive by having a dropdown listing 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 title 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 in all probability be visible, add a thumbnail-sized model of the picture you may included within the printed submit. Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar photographs may have a fairly good concept of what is going to be shared and when.

To make enhancing your photographs for every platform simpler, try this cheat sheet for superb 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: Determine your targets.

Step one to constructing your social media content material calendar is figuring out your targets, which is able to decide how typically you submit, who will probably be concerned within the content material creation course of, and which channels you’ll need to use.

For those who’re unsure the place to start out with establishing your social media targets, we cowl that right here.

Step 2: Align your staff.

Along 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 brief your self on assets — particularly expertise.

One factor we all know to be true at this time is that video content material is taking up nearly each main social platform. Meaning you may need to have on-camera expertise devoted to producing video content material to fulfill the wants of your social media calendar.

For those who 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 shifting rapidly and stop bottlenecks.

Step 3: Take into account variety, fairness, inclusion, and belonging.

Range, fairness, inclusion, and belonging are subjects to contemplate when growing your social calendar, particularly contemplating that customers care, greater than ever, that the manufacturers they assist are dedicated to variety and inclusion.

You will need 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 neighborhood the place your online business operates.

This is not one thing that may occur by chance, so you may need to plan for variety and inclusion as you develop your content material calendar. If you would like some steering on creating numerous and inclusive content material, try our authentic analysis on the subject.

Step 4: Arrange UTM monitoring.

One of the necessary components of a social media calendar is definitely the half you do not see — monitoring. And the simplest method 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 motive. Are you able to think about the nightmare of manually sorting by means of your marketing campaign site visitors to find out the place every viewer got here from or who engaged along with your content material? I don’t need 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 obtained them in place for every hyperlink in your social media posts, you’ll be able to evaluation your social media content material metrics.

Step 5: Create an evaluation tracker in your calendar.

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

For a full listing of metrics to trace and instruments to do it, check out this yr’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 utilize most frequently and least typically?
• Which kinds of posts get essentially the most versus least engagement?

Auditing your social media presence will make it easier to determine transfer ahead as you create your social media content material calendar. As an illustration, it’s possible you’ll be on TikTok, however perhaps 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 information as an alternative of a intestine intuition. Our social media report template is a wonderful method to preserve monitor of your findings.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Report Template

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

Imagine it or not, you don’t should be on all of the social media platforms to get a excessive social media ROI. As an alternative, you need to focus in your audience and people with the very best ROI — not solely as a result of this may save your staff time and effort, however it can lead to a way more manageable social media content material calendar.

Each social channel is totally different, and the content material you submit on every one ought to enchantment to the format of the platform and the customers who use it. Think about having to submit on Fb, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr — that’s… so much. As an alternative, select the highest three to 5 platforms that, primarily based in your social media audit, yield the very best ROI for your online business.

As you select your platforms, you may additionally need to take note of traits and rising channels. Even in the event you’re a marketer at a small B2B enterprise, it gained’t damage to check out a platform earlier than all of your rivals do.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Tendencies Report

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For those who’re a seasoned marketer or have a big staff, 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 1st step. Nonetheless, in the event you’re a staff of 1, or your staff is already stretched skinny, it is OK to start out with a number of social channels and work your manner as much as extra.

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3. Select your social media content material codecs and submit varieties.

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

As at all times, we suggest selecting a mix of content material varieties to maximise your ROI. Plus, it can make sure that you’re serving content material that addresses totally different segments of your viewers whereas growing your degree of attain.

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 era spends essentially the most time partaking with photographs, pictures, and infographics. Most companies have outliers like my mother, so a diversified technique helps you meet diverse preferences.

It is also important to account to your staff’s assets. In case you have devoted social media managers who can create content material in-house, you’ve got extra leeway along with your selections. However in the event you solely have a generalist marketer on employees (or in the event you’re that generalist marketer!), contemplate what’s most real looking when it comes to content material creation, or ask for a funds to rent a contract content material creator.

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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!), keep in mind that the aim of your calendar is to make posting as simple and painless as attainable. In pursuit of that, take a while to create content material templates, listing 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, corresponding to Google Drive, or a instrument like Canva, the place I can rapidly edit a template and regulate it to create a brand new submit. Typically, you need to have varied customizable picture templates.

Featured Useful resource: 150+ Content material Creation Templates

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Don’t neglect to maintain your most-used hashtags simply accessible for simple copying and pasting, together with lazy copy that solely must be personalized from submit to submit. As you draft your templates, at all times preserve your model voice in thoughts. Whether or not you’re critical and company, or open and pleasant, you need each submit to embody your organization’s branding.

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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 taking part in and word any campaigns you might have deliberate for the long run.

For those who’re attending an occasion or a convention, you need to plan to broadcast that in your social media channels. Or in the event you’re doing a digital occasion like a webinar, you need to plan a sequence of posts round that, too. Or in the event you’d wish to create a vacation submit or a paid social marketing campaign — the probabilities are infinite. It’s best to plan for every upcoming occasion with no less than 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 predominant events: Winter/Finish of 12 months holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.

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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 may will let you proactively preserve monitor of this data.

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

We lately surveyed 1000+ social media entrepreneurs to get their tackle the very best instances to submit on social media.

Right here’s a fast of overview of the very best instances to submit 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

Take into account that there isn’t any one measurement suits all resolution (sorry, want I had higher information). For instance, SproutSocial says the very best time to submit on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM, and Hootsuite says 9 AM is the very best time total.

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 submit content material to your individual enterprise.

To choose 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, evaluate that to the bandwidth in your staff and the targets you need to obtain. Keep in mind: the aim 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.

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7. Schedule posts utilizing a social media instrument.

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

It will make it easier to schedule posts properly upfront of publication, limiting handbook 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 in the event you’re a generalist or are the only real social media supervisor in your staff.

Attempt HubSpot’s social media administration software program free of charge.

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

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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 study what labored, what didn’t work, and what you need to change shifting ahead.

Hopping from platform to platform and taking a look at their particular person analytics dashboards could be a good place to start out. However as you proceed scaling your advertising and marketing efforts, you need to contemplate investing in social media analytics software program to compile all your engagement information for you. Attempt HubSpot’s social media analytics software program free of charge.

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? Right here’s a information on measuring social media advertising and marketing ROI that will help you reply these questions.

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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 you could plan your social media content material, coordinate campaigns, develop attain and engagement, scale posting schedule, and enhance productiveness. Obtain it now, and observe together with the steps beneath.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Content material Calendar Template

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Our template consists of the whole lot you could scale your social media advertising and marketing efforts. You’ll achieve 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: Checklist out the entire content material you’ll be sharing along with your followers, from weblog posts to presents to web site pages.
• Platform-Particular Tabs: Plan out your updates for every particular platform, together with Twitter, Fb, LinkedIn, and extra.

Beneath, I am going to dive deeper into use the template.

Social Media Content material Calendar Template Tutorial

Within the following subsections, I am going to present you 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 will make it easier to coordinate with different stakeholders and preserve all of the shifting components so as. This is what it seems to be like:

There are three sections to notice whenever you edit this template. First, the color-coding key. Every shade 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 just the start of what it’s possible you’ll need to embody right here — so you’ll want to add and take away classes that align with your individual kinds of content material.

The opposite two sections to edit are the Month and 12 months 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 may be selling that day and color-code it to align with the marketing campaign it is supporting.

As an alternative 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 at all times 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 submit, we’ll use Twitter for example, however these steps will work for every social channel tab within the template.

As an example you need 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 in the event you 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 will probably be helpful. For now, simply fill within the date for whenever you’ll submit 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 look in your tweet, taking into consideration you need to cap it at 217 characters to permit sufficient room for a hyperlink. (Learn this weblog submit for a full character depend information.) This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the variety of characters you’ve got entered to maintain you on level, turning yellow and ultimately purple as you strategy 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 attainable in your captions (to the good thing about your viewers).

Hyperlink

After you’ve got composed your tweet, paste the URL you need to incorporate in your tweet within the Hyperlink column. You should definitely embody UTM parameters so you may know whether or not these tweets are driving site visitors, leads, and prospects. This is a vital step to recollect if you would like to exhibit ROI from social media. You may also 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 have one). For Twitter, we suggest photographs which are 1200 x 670 pixels.

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

For those who’re having bother attaching your picture to the spreadsheet, observe these steps:

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

Step 2: Click on Insert within the high row, then click on the Picture button, and at last, 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 laptop.

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

Professional Tip: This course of is only for organizational functions. For those who determine to add the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software program, it won’t connect — you may have to do this manually. For those who’re a HubSpot buyer, yow will discover particulars on bulk add your Twitter content material to the HubSpot Social Publishing Device within the downloaded template.

Do not Neglect to Work together With Your Followers

Whether or not you utilize 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 fascinating? Give it a retweet with some commentary. Acquired a captivating touch upon one among your updates? Reply with a “thanks” for his or her interplay.

Developing with and scheduling your social media content material upfront is a large 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 gives publishing dates and instances 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 so, you need to regulate your social media publishing frequency as wanted.

Now that you have the ins and outs of a social media content material calendar, obtain the one beneath free of charge and begin planning your content material.

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