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 annoying place to be in as a result of creating content material proper earlier than it must be revealed is much less more likely to meet the wants of your viewers, and also you miss out on artistic particular matters 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 the very best social media content material calendar template and a step-by-step information explaining tips on how to 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 found myself creating Instagram posts last minute because I didn’t know how to plan my strategy in advance.”

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 preserve monitor 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 excellent content material calendar is extra than simply including just a few Instagram publish 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 important when managing a number of social media channels.

Slightly than arising 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 matters and upcoming holidays and occasions. As an example, if your organization has an enormous occasion arising, a content material calendar will enable you to strategize tips on how to advertise upfront.

Better of all, a social media calendar retains everybody in your workforce knowledgeable on when content material shall be revealed. Once 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 at all times come on command — even in case you set time apart particularly for this process. However a subject generator may be simply sufficient to kickstart your artistic juices. Even higher, you possibly can take it a step additional and use these matters to generate weblog posts, which could 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 will probably enable 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 publish analytics to see how your content material performs. Keeping track of your metrics will enable you to and your groups decide what content material engages your viewers probably the most.

3. Increased High quality Content material

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

Planning your posts upfront additionally offers you time to examine your work for typos or errors and helps your workforce create a cohesive and constant model picture as a result of you’ve gotten extra time to strategize and work on helpful campaigns.

Perfecting your social media content material calendar shouldn’t really feel like a chore. Beneath, I’ll stroll you thru the important parts of any social media content material calendar that gives you 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 secret is 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 are not the identical. URLs are the hyperlinks you will wish to share out of your web site (and even one other web site in case you are curating content material) in your social media platforms.

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

Date and Time

Together with dates and occasions 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 publish was or shall be scheduled, they will shortly proceed with their workflow, which is helpful for you, too. AKA, you will not be interrupted to provide standing updates about each Tweet on the docket for the day.

Message

Transparency and context are invaluable in the case of social media content material calendars. Giving a short synopsis of the message and even sharing the caption for a publish can go a good distance in serving to others inside and out of doors your workforce perceive what the intent of the publish shall be.

Professional tip: If you happen to’re including a video to your social media content material calendar that is not completed, take into account including a brief Loom video that provides an outline of what the video shall be about. You solely should make the Loom as soon as, so that you received’t should 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 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 most likely be visible, add a thumbnail-sized model of the picture you will included within the revealed publish. Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar pictures may have a reasonably good thought of what is going to be shared and when.

To make enhancing your pictures for every platform simpler, try this cheat sheet for supreme 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 objectives.

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

If you happen to’re unsure the place to start out with establishing your social media objectives, we cowl that right here.

Step 2: Align your workforce.

Together with your objectives etched in stone, it is time to align your workforce towards these objectives. Social media content material creation is a tall order, particularly for lean advertising 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 will wish to have on-camera expertise devoted to producing video content material to fulfill the wants of your social media calendar.

If you happen to 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 shortly and stop bottlenecks.

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

Range, fairness, inclusion, and belonging are matters 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 may 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 needs to be consultant of your viewers and the bigger neighborhood the place what you are promoting operates.

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

Step 4: Arrange UTM monitoring.

One of the vital essential elements of a social media calendar is definitely the half you do not see — monitoring. And the best technique to monitor how your social media content material is performing is to make use of UTM parameters.

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

UTM codes are easy to arrange and use. As soon as you’ve got bought 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 nicely your social media content material is, create a tab that reveals clicks, views, engagements, and different metrics you propose to trace to deem your content material a hit. Monitoring analytics could be as easy or detailed as your workforce prefers.

For a full listing 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 opponents are?
• Which platforms get probably the most versus least engagement?
• Which content material codecs do you employ most frequently and least usually?
• Which sorts of posts get probably the most versus least engagement?

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

Spend a while perusing your social media analytics to reply these questions. It’s important to again your conclusions with knowledge as an alternative of a intestine intuition. Our social media report template is a wonderful technique 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 must 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 publish on every one ought to enchantment to the structure of the platform and the customers who use it. Think about having to publish on Fb, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr — that’s… rather a lot. As an alternative, select the highest three to 5 platforms that, primarily based in your social media audit, yield the very best ROI for what you are promoting.

As you select your platforms, you may also wish to take note of tendencies and rising channels. Even in case you’re a marketer at a small B2B enterprise, it received’t damage to check out a platform earlier than all of your opponents do.

Featured Useful resource: Social Media Traits Report

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If you happen to’re a seasoned marketer or have a big workforce, you could discover that utilizing the entire well-liked channels and even experimenting with a brand new one could possibly be useful to the objectives you set in the 1st step. Nonetheless, in case you’re a workforce of 1, or your workforce is already stretched skinny, it is OK to start out with just a few social channels and work your method as much as extra.

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

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

As at all times, we advocate selecting a combination of content material varieties to maximise your ROI. Plus, it’ll make 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 time report and was astonished. However, a majority of her technology spends probably the most time partaking with pictures, images, and infographics. Most companies have outliers like my mother, so a diversified technique helps you meet assorted 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’ve gotten extra leeway together with your selections. However in case you solely have a generalist marketer on employees (or in case you’re that generalist marketer!), take into account what’s most lifelike by way of content material creation, or ask for a price range 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!), do not forget that the aim of your calendar is to make posting as straightforward 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, comparable to Google Drive, or a device like Canva, the place I can shortly edit a template and regulate it to create a brand new publish. Usually, you wish to have numerous 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 straightforward copying and pasting, together with lazy copy that solely must be custom-made from publish to publish. As you draft your templates, at all times preserve your model voice in thoughts. Whether or not you’re severe and company, or open and pleasant, you need each publish 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? Properly, 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 notice any campaigns you could have deliberate for the long run.

If you happen to’re attending an occasion or a convention, you must plan to broadcast that in your social media channels. Or in case you’re doing a digital occasion like a webinar, you must plan a sequence of posts round that, too. Or in case you’d prefer to create a vacation publish or a paid social marketing campaign — the chances are countless. You need to plan for every upcoming occasion with at the very 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 3 major events: Winter/Finish of Yr holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.

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6. Decide a social media posting schedule.

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

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

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

Right here’s a fast of overview of the very best occasions to publish on every platform primarily based on our findings:

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

Needless to say there isn’t any one measurement suits all resolution (sorry, want I had higher information). For instance, SproutSocial says the very best time to publish 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 mistaken; it simply ties again to what I discussed above about your viewers: you must tailor the occasions you publish content material to your personal enterprise.

To select your schedule, check out our analysis for every social media platform you will use use to get a way of the posting cadence greatest practices. Then, evaluate that to the bandwidth in your workforce and the objectives you wish 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 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 enable you to schedule posts nicely 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 particularly helpful in case you’re a generalist or are the only real social media supervisor in your workforce.

Strive 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 would possibly work on LinkedIn may not work on Fb, and vice versa. Since every platform serves a selected viewers phase, you wish 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 must change shifting ahead.

Hopping from platform to platform and their particular person analytics dashboards could be a good place to start out. However as you proceed scaling your advertising efforts, you must take into account investing in social media analytics software program to compile your whole engagement knowledge for you. Strive 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 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 can assist 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 all the things that you must 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 all the things that you must 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: Listing out the entire content material you’ll be sharing together with your followers, from weblog posts to provides 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 tips on how to use the template.

Social Media Content material Calendar Template Tutorial

Within the following subsections, I am going to present you tips on how to 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 enable you to coordinate with different stakeholders and preserve all of the shifting elements so as. This is what it seems like:

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

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

As an alternative 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 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 publish, we’ll use Twitter for instance, however these steps will work for every social channel tab within the template.

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

Day, Date, & Time

The primary 4 columns, Day, Date, Time, and Date & Time, are there to your comfort, and in case 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 shall be helpful. For now, simply fill within the date for if you’ll publish 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 would like to look in your tweet, taking into consideration you must cap it at 217 characters to permit sufficient room for a hyperlink. (Learn this weblog publish 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 pink as you method 240 characters.

I discover this to be one of the crucial 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 attainable in your captions (to the good thing about your viewers).

Hyperlink

After you’ve got composed your tweet, paste the URL you would like to incorporate in your tweet within the Hyperlink column. Make sure you embrace UTM parameters so you will know whether or not these tweets are driving visitors, leads, and prospects. This is a vital step to recollect if you would like to show ROI from social media. It’s also possible to 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 (you probably have one). For Twitter, we advocate pictures which can be 1200 x 670 pixels.

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

If you happen to’re having hassle attaching your picture to the spreadsheet, observe these steps:

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

Step 2: Click on Insert within the prime 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 picture will come from. On this instance, we uploaded a picture from our pc.

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

Professional Tip: This course of is only for organizational functions. If you happen to resolve to add the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software program, it is not going to connect — you will have to try this manually. If you happen to’re a HubSpot buyer, you could find particulars on tips on how to bulk add your Twitter content material to the HubSpot Social Publishing Instrument within the downloaded template.

Do not Overlook to Work together With Your Followers

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

Developing with and scheduling your social media content material upfront is a big time-saver, nevertheless it 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 together with your social media publishing. This template offers publishing dates and occasions for every social community, however you could discover these are method too many updates so that you can fill, or maybe too rare to your booming social presence. If so, you must 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 notice: This publish was initially revealed in January 2020 and has been up to date for comprehensiveness.