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Have you ever been on a time crunch to create social media content? Most of us have, especially when trying to hop on a trend before it passes. It’s a stressful position — but a social media calendar template can help.
Creating content right before the deadline risks overlooking important goals and making mistakes. Your content may have typos or fall short of the audience’s needs. You may even miss key holidays or events.
Now, what if I said you could minimize the risk? In this article, I’ll share the best social media calendar template options for marketers and some tips for getting the most out of them.
A social media calendar is a marketing planning document that organizes your social media posts by social platform, campaign, date, and more. This enables you to stay organized and see your social media publishing schedule across a wide variety of channels, campaigns, and formats. A social media calendar template is a pre-made document with all of these elements that marketers can simply fill in.
Flori Needle, a HubSpot Blog writer, was a social media manager before joining HubSpot. She focused on Instagram and struggled to create a schedule.
She shared with 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 developed a strategy, but she said having a plan before posting would’ve lessened her time spent on trial and error.
That’s why a social media content calendar is so helpful. You can keep track of deadlines, better manage your individual duties or content creation team, and create transparency with stakeholders.
Creating a great content calendar is more than just adding a few Instagram or LinkedIn post ideas to your Google calendar. Let’s explore the benefits of having a social media calendar.
A content calendar keeps you and your team organized, which is essential when managing multiple social media channels.
Rather than coming up with content ideas on the fly, you can plan your content around your organization’s needs. It can also provide more time for creating content about trending topics and upcoming holidays and events.
For instance, if your company has a big event coming up (like HubSpot’s INBOUND), a content calendar will help you strategize how to promote it in advance.
A social media calendar keeps everyone on your team informed on when content will be published. When you’re transparent about what’s going live, it can help avoid miscommunications and confusion.
Pro tip: I know good content ideas can’t always come on command — even if you set time aside specifically for this task. But a topic generator might be just enough to kickstart your creative juices.
Even better, you can take it a step further and use these topics to generate blog posts, which can be repurposed into a series of social media posts.
Another benefit to having a social media calendar is that it can help you scale your content production without overwhelming your marketing team.
By planning content in advance, you can pace production around your team’s bandwidth and other duties your department is responsible for.
Pro tip: As you scale, I recommend tracking post analytics to see how your content performs. Keeping an eye on your metrics will help you and your teams determine what content engages your audience the most.
Lastly, using a social media calendar ensures your team has plenty of time to do their best work. Planning your posts in advance allows you to check your work for typos or mistakes while ensuring everything is on-brand and optimized.
Perfecting your social media content calendar shouldn’t feel like a chore.
Below, I’ll walk you through the essential components of any social media content calendar that will give you the foundation to organize your social media strategy at a tactical level.
A key or legend is a section of a graphic that gives meaning to its symbols or colors. An easy-to-read key helps your stakeholders understand the information in your social media calendar
As long as your key is clear, just about anyone in your organization can view your social media content calendar and understand what’s happening on all platforms.
URLs and UTM parameters are similar, but they’re not the same. URLs are the links you want to share from your website (or another website if you are curating content) on your social media platforms.
A UTM parameter is an extension of your URL that is needed for data purposes. It’s a string of tracking code appended to the end of a URL, and it helps social media marketers track how well their posts drive traffic to their websites.
By tracking and analyzing UTM parameters, you’ll see what content meets your conversion goals and what drives the most engagement on social media platforms. You can use a UTM generator to make this process easier.
Including dates and times in your social media calendar is helpful for planning and for stakeholders who rely on your social media content.
Your social team can easily see when they should schedule posts (and continue with their workflow) while those outside the team can know when ti expect them.
Transparency and context are invaluable when it comes to social media content calendars.
Giving a brief synopsis of the message or even sharing the caption for a post can go a long way in helping others understand what the intent of the post will be.
Pro tip: If you‘re adding content to your social media content calendar that isn’t finished, consider adding a short Loom video to give an overview of what the design will look like.
It’s too late to start tracking metrics once your campaign is over. Instead, start tracking your social media campaigns in your content calendar.
You can make this prescriptive by having a dropdown list of predetermined campaign names. Or if your campaigns are few and far between, simply copy and paste the names next to the corresponding content.
Pro tip: Align your campaign name with the campaign section of your UTM parameter for seamless tracking.
Your social media content calendar will become just another spreadsheet without some imagery. Since much of your social media content will probably be visual, add a thumbnail-sized version of the image you’ll include in the published post.
Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar images will have a pretty good idea of what will be shared and when.
To make editing your images for each platform easier, check out this cheat sheet for ideal image dimensions on each platform.
Regardless of which social media calendar template you go with, here are a few steps to follow when using one.
To expedite the process of creating a social media content calendar, download this free template that’s ready for you to fill out.
Before creating a social media content calendar, I recommend a complete social media audit.
Ask yourself questions like:
Auditing your social media presence will help you decide how to move forward as you create your social media content calendar.
For instance, you may be on TikTok, but maybe it’s also the platform where you get the least engagement and even fewer leads. That may mean it’s time to de-prioritize TikTok from your lineup and invest more time in a better-fitting platform.
Spend some time perusing your social media analytics to answer these questions. It’s essential to back your conclusions with data instead of a gut instinct.
Pro tip: Our social media report template is an excellent way to keep track of your findings. It contains a variety of charts that will make it easy to organize and, in turn, review and analyze the data.
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Believe it or not, you don’t need to be on all the social media platforms to get a high social media ROI (return on investment).
Instead, you should focus on where your target audience is and the platforms with the highest ROI. This will save your team effort and time, resulting in a much more manageable social media content calendar.
I mean, imagine having to post on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr — that is… a lot.
Instead, choose the top three to five platforms that, based on your social media audit, yield the highest ROI for your business.
As you choose your platforms, you should also pay attention to trends and growing channels. Even if you’re a marketer at a small B2B business, it won’t hurt to test out a platform before all your competitors do.
If you’re a seasoned marketer or have a large team, you may find using all of the popular channels and even experimenting with a new one could benefit your goals.
However, if you‘re a team of one or your team is already stretched thin, it’s OK to start with a few social channels and work your way up to more.
Not sure where to start? Our Social Media Trends Report share insights and benchmarks you can start setting off.
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Pro tip: Remember, every social channel is different. The content you post on each one should appeal to the platform’s layout and the users who use it. Cross-posting the same image and copy may be easy, but it’s not necessarily effective.
You’re now armed with your social media platforms to pursue, but what social media content types will you post?
Will you post mainly short-form videos, images, or text-based updates? Will you post informative, relatable, or funny content?
As always, we recommend using a mix of content types to maximize your ROI.
Plus, it will ensure that you’re serving content that serves different segments of your audience while increasing your reach.
For example, my mom is addicted to Instagram Reels.
I once took a peek at her screen time report and was astonished. But a majority of her generation spends the most time engaging with images, photos, and infographics.
Most businesses have outliers like my mom, so a diversified strategy helps you meet varied preferences.
Pro tip: Account for your team’s resources. If you have dedicated social media managers who can create content in-house, you have more leeway with your choices.
But if you only have a team of one, consider what is most realistic regarding content creation. Or try asking for a budget to hire a freelance content creator.
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As you build out your content calendar (hopefully after downloading a free social media content calendar template!), remember that the purpose of your calendar is to make posting as easy and painless as possible.
In pursuit of that, take some time to create content templates, list the hashtags you’ll use most often, and even create “lazy” copy for you or your coworkers to use.
I find it helpful to store templates in an online bank, such as Google Drive or a tool like Canva, where I can quickly edit a template and adjust it to create a new post. Generally, you want to have various customizable image templates.
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Don’t forget to keep your most-used hashtags easily accessible for easy copying and pasting, along with lazy copy that only needs to be customized from post to post.
As you draft your templates, always keep your brand voice in mind. Whether you’re serious and corporate, or open and friendly, you want every post to embody your company’s branding.
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Pro tip: Consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). Consumers care, more than ever, that brands support diversity and inclusion.
Ensure your content reflects and respects the values and experiences of your audience.
Moreover, the faces, voices, and stories you share on social networks should be representative of your audience and the larger community where your business operates.
This isn‘t something that can happen by accident, so you’ll want to plan for diversity and inclusion as you develop your content calendar.
If you’d like some guidance on creating diverse and inclusive content, check out our original research on the topic.
What is a social media content calendar that doesn’t show your forethought and planning?
Well, it’s still a content calendar — just not a very useful one. As you build out your social media content calendar, identify the holidays and events you’ll be participating in and note any future campaigns you may have planned.
If you’re attending an event or a conference, you should plan to broadcast that on your social media channels. If you’re doing a virtual event like a webinar, you should plan a series of posts around that, too.
Or if you’d like to create a holiday post or a paid social campaign — the possibilities are endless.
You should plan for each upcoming event with at least a month’s advance notice.
Pro tip: You don’t need to create a campaign for every single holiday. Most marketers in the U.S. plan for three main seasons: Winter/end-of-year holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.
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It’s time to get into the most useful part of your content calendar: Determining your posting schedule. Your calendar should have a “Time” column that will allow you to proactively keep track of this information.
Different social media platforms require different posting times. You can easily fill in publish times by creating tabs for each platform or color-coding posts for different channels.
Consider also syncing publishing times to your calendar to get timely reminders.
We recently surveyed 1000+ social media marketers to get their take on the best times to post on social media.
Here’s a quick overview of the best times to post on each platform based on our findings:
But remember: there is no one-size-fits-all solution for posting times (sorry, wish I had better news).
For example, Sprout Social says the best time to post on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM, and Hootsuite says 9 AM is the best time overall.
These differences don’t mean anyone is wrong; it just ties back to what I mentioned above about your audience: you should tailor the times you post content to your own business.
Pro tip: To determine your schedule, take a look at our research for each social media platform. This will give you a good sense of the best practices for posting. Then, compare that to the bandwidth on your team and the goals you want to achieve to come up with a schedule you can test.
The goal of a social media calendar is to create and publish a sustainable stream of content to your audience. It’s a marathon, not a race.
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One of the most important parts of a social media calendar is actually the part you don’t see — tracking. And the easiest way to track how your social media content is performing is to use UTM parameters.
Yes, this is the second time I’ve mentioned UTM parameters, but for good reason. Can you imagine the nightmare of manually sorting through your campaign traffic to determine where each viewer came from or who engaged with your content?
$I don’t want to do that, and I’d imagine you don’t either.
UTM codes are simple to set up and use. Once you’ve implemented them for each link on your social media posts, you can review your social media content metrics.
Pro tip: Are you a professional or enterprise user of HubSpot Marketing Hub or Content Hub? Take advantage of the UTM builder natively available on the platform.
Publishing updates on multiple platforms, with different campaigns and holidays, at different times and days, can quickly get overwhelming.
I recommend integrating your social media calendar template with a social media management tool. (We’ll go through a few options shortly.)
This will help you schedule posts well before publication, limiting manual work.
Many tools 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. Since each platform serves a specific audience segment, you want to ensure your posts are tailored to each one.
Pro tip: HubSpot’s social media management software allows you to schedule and publish posts to Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram and it’s free for everyone. Try it out!
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Once your social media posting schedule has matured and you have a backlog of posts to analyze, it’s time to delve deeply into your social media metrics. Learn what worked, what didn’t work, and what you should change moving forward.
Hopping from platform to platform and looking at their individual analytics dashboards can be a good place to start.
But as you continue scaling your marketing efforts, you should consider investing in social media analytics software to compile all of your engagement data for you.
Try HubSpot’s social media analytics software for free.
As you analyze your success, link it to your company’s bottom line.
How many leads did you earn? How many of those leads turned into sales? How much money did you spend on paid social media versus how much revenue did you generate?
Here’s a guide on measuring social media marketing ROI to help you answer these questions.
The bottom line: Know and align on your goals.
The first step to building your social media content calendar is identifying your goals, which will determine how often you post, who will be involved in the content creation process, and which channels you’ll want to use. Align your team on them.
If you’re not sure where to start with setting up your social media goals, we cover that here.
Pro tip: Create an analysis tracker in your calendar for stakeholders who want to stay abreast of how well your social media content is performing.
Add a tab that shows clicks, views, engagements, and other metrics you plan to track to deem your content a success. Tracking analytics can be as simple or detailed as your team prefers.
For a full list of metrics to track and tools to do it, take a look at this year’s Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics.
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Now that you know how to use a social media calendar template, here are 10 of the best options for marketers.
If you don‘t have time to create your social media content calendar from scratch, start with HubSpot’s free social media content calendar template.
This calendar has everything you need to plan your social media content, coordinate campaigns, grow reach and engagement, scale posting schedule, and boost productivity.
Our template includes everything you need to scale your social media marketing efforts. You’ll gain access to:
In the following subsections, I’ll show you how to fill out each of the tabs in this template — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The “Monthly Planning Calendar” tab is a snapshot of your monthly social media campaigns. It‘ll help you coordinate with other stakeholders and keep all the moving parts in order. Here’s what it looks like:
There are three sections to note when you edit this template.
First, the color-coding key. Each color represents a type of content or campaign you might coordinate, like ebooks, webinars, blog posts, or product launches.
Though only some of these might be relevant to you, they’re just the beginning of what you may want to include here — so be sure to add and remove categories that align with your own types of content.
The other two sections to edit are the “Month” and “Year” at the top of the calendar and the cells below each day of the week.
In those cells, you should enter the type of content you‘ll be promoting that day and color-code it to align with the campaign it’s supporting.
Instead of deleting all the content in this spreadsheet each month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times over to have a separate sheet for each month.
(If that gets too overwhelming, you can always save those tabs as a separate workbook.)
Now, let‘s get to the social media content part of the calendar.
For the sake of this blog post, we’ll use X as an example, but these steps will work for each social channel tab in the template.
Let‘s say you want to add some tweets to your scheduling template.
Scroll over to the Twitter (X) Updates tab in the content calendar spreadsheet, where you’ll see 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
Now, let‘s move over to the “Message” column. Here, input the copy you’d like to appear in your tweet. Bear in mind you should cap it at 217 characters to allow enough room for a link. (Read this blog post for a full character count guide.)
This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the number of characters you’ve entered to keep you on point, turning yellow and eventually red as you approach 240 characters.
I find this to be one of the most useful parts of the template because it helps you make edits in real-time. Plus,this ensures you’re being as clear and concise as possible in your captions (to the benefit of your audience).
Link
After you‘ve composed your tweet, paste the URL you’d like to include in your tweet in the Link column. Be sure to include UTM parameters so you’ll know whether these tweets are driving traffic and leads.
This is an important step to remember if you’d like to demonstrate ROI from social media. You can also use the Campaign column to add an associated campaign which helps with more detailed tracking and reporting.
Image
Finally, in the Image column, attach the tweet’s image (if you have one). For Twitter, we recommend images that are 1200 x 670 pixels.
(Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.)
If you’re having trouble attaching your image to the spreadsheet, follow these steps:
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.
Pro tip: This process is just for organizational purposes. If you decide to upload the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software, it will not attach — you’ll have to do that manually.
If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can find details on how to bulk upload your Twitter content to the HubSpot Social Publishing Tool in the downloaded template.
Another option is the social media posting schedule template from HootSuite.
This free template incorporates five popular platforms:
However, it can be easily edited to add or remove items as needed as a Google Doc.
What I like: Besides helping you plan your social media publishing, this template includes a helpful “strategy” tab. This makes your goals and content plan easy to refer to as you work through the rest of the document.
It also has a tab dedicated to “evergreen content,” where you can house timeless pieces you can plug into your calendar at any time.
Sprout Social’s social media calendar template is broken down into four weekly tabs and designed to be used per month.
Each tab has columns for key information, including:
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.
If you use ClickUp for your project management, this template may be the one for you.
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.”
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What I like: 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.
SocialBee’s Social Media Content Calendar is another fully editable Google Doc on our list, but one of few that covers a full year.
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The calendar has a tab for every month and includes dozens of fun and unique post ideas.
What I like: SocialBee really goes above and beyond with making its social media calendar value. In addition to the post ideas in the monthly tabs, it also has a number of extra tabs full of post examples to help get marketers’ creative juices flowing.
The bonus post example tabs include: fun, educational, inspirational, promotional, and interactive — just to name a view.
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 comes as an actual calendar view. While handy, it can only be used in Notion or Google Calendar, limiting its audience.
What I like: Iconosquare’s calendar has many global celebrations and “fun” holidays (i.e. World Chocolate Day) pre-populated. This is a unique and effective way to spark and inspire ideas in users as they are planning their content.
Semrush’s social media calendar is another built as an easy-to-edit spreadsheet.
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It provides all the information needed to schedule or publish a post:
It also includes color-coding that allows users to get an idea of what content is coming up at a glance.
What I like: I love that this covers a full calendar year, allowing marketers to jot down ideas or important dates as they come up. And that the first tab shows an example of a great social media content calendar which gives newer marketers something to aim for.
Later’s free social media content calendar template is an editable spreadsheet that can be used to plan for a week.
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It includes a tab with instructions and resources to teach new users how to use the template successfully and also shares an example of a well-planned day.
What I like: While every brand on our list has education on social media marketing available on its website, Later makes its users’ lives easy by linking to those someone would need right in its template.
This is a small but smart move that dramatically improves the user experience.
Is Monday your digital planning tool of choice? If so, they’ve got a social media calendar template to add to your workflow.
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This template is built specifically for use in the Monday software and houses essential information like post copy, date and time of publish, and visual assets.
It also uses color coding to differentiate content categories making it easier to see and audit your content mix.
What I like: I’m a big fan of any tool that lets you see all the conversation surrounding a project in one place. With comments, user tags, and file uploads, Monday makes that possible.
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.
How do you get started? Try these weekly or monthly templates created by the team at Buffer, or navigate to Canva’s Calendar templates gallery and play around with making your own.
What I like: Canva is a Godsend when it comes to design and data presentation. I like this option because you get to customize the information included in your social media calendar as you like and give the design a little extra flair.
Whether you use this spreadsheet to plan your content or upload it to a third-party app, you’ll still need to supplement these updates with on-the-fly content.
Breaking news hits? Whip up a quick update to share it with your network. Did someone in your network tweet something interesting? Give it a retweet with some commentary.
Got a fascinating comment on one of your updates? Respond with a “thank you” for their interaction.
Coming up with and scheduling your social media content in advance is a huge time-saver. But it should go without saying that you still need to monitor and add to your social presence throughout the day.
I encourage you to experiment with your social media publishing. This template provides publishing dates and times for each social network, but perhaps you need more or less.
If this is the case, you should adjust your social media publishing frequency as needed.
Now that you’ve got the ins and outs of a social media content calendar, download the one below for free and start planning your content.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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