A 5-Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Calendar (+ Free Template)

Taking a spray-and-pray approach to your social media marketing plan wastes time and investment. It can feel like you spend all your time on these channels without results. 

Fortunately, there’s a way out for busy marketers and business owners: a social media content calendar.

It streamlines your content production and maintains a steady stream of content that gets your brand's message out. It lets you plan posts, so you won't be scrambling to get a timely promotional post out for your next marketing campaign.

In this article, we’ll go through the benefits of creating a social media content calendar and a 5-step process to create one that fits your workflow. Plus, you can access a free calendar template you can customize for your needs.

What is a social media content calendar?

A social media content calendar is a planner made on a spreadsheet or similar tool that contains all your social media posts. It lets businesses plan and publish a steady flow of posts to keep their audience engaged with their brands.

Marketers feel a constant pressure to engage their audience with fresh content. And most social media channels are extremely demanding in that sense. You need a strong content production foundation that lets you feed the content creation cycle. 

This is where a calendar comes in handy.

As your social media strategy dictates the “why” of your marketing goals, a calendar dictates the “how” and “when” of your goals. Essentially, it sets your content strategy in motion.

Why do small businesses need social media calendars?

There are several benefits of creating an editorial calendar for social media:

1. Create multi-channel campaigns with ease

Many companies start on one social channel like Facebook or LinkedIn, then branch out to expand their reach over time. When this happens, creating content for different social media accounts gets overwhelming. A social media calendar allows you to avoid that.

It provides an overview of all the channels and content that's going to be posted and has been posted. You can also find and address gaps in your social media campaigns before it goes live. 

This coordinated approach maximizes the impact of your campaign as your audience encounters your brand message on multiple fronts, reinforcing brand recall and engagement.

“We get a lot of leads who find us via our social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram),” says Jordan McSweeney, Marketing Manager at Excellence Property. “What attracts them to our business is our content, which is carefully planned using a calendar and posted for maximum effect.”

McSweeney continued, saying that if it wasn't for their social media and online presence, which brought in a record number of leads over the past few months, they'd be relying on nothing but referrals, which isn’t good enough in the modern age.

2. Streamline your production process and save time

Instead of hoping for an idea to strike you right before posting, a calendar consists of everything you need to maintain your social media posting schedule. You're not ideating daily—leaving more time for creative and business-critical work.

It gives you a roadmap of what needs to be created, when it needs to be done, and where it’ll be posted.

This allows you to plan, curate assets, and schedule posts using automated calendar tools—saving you time in the long run. 

Social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer provide automation capabilities to maintain a steady posting frequency. So spend time on these channels to learn the ropes.

3. Stay consistent without burning out

Burnout is common for marketers and content creators. There are several reasons why this happens:

• Constant strategy changes lead to inconsistent posting

• Getting overwhelmed with the number of channels to handle

• Creating fresh and high quality content for every social channel 

• Posting multiple times each day on each channel

The sheer volume makes it hard to stay consistent, but it's necessary for growth on such channels. Using a content calendar prevents periods of inactivity, since everything is planned in bulk beforehand. Conduct brainstorming sessions to generate content ideas for new content or to repurpose old ones.

The quality remains consistent and in line with brand messaging and tone. It prevents unnecessary typos or factual errors that could damage your reputation.

4. Plan and create seasonal content beforehand 

If you’re targeting users in specific countries—especially if you’re a global brand— keeping a tab on seasonal events and holidays is important. These are excellent opportunities to create localized promotional offers or entertaining content that draws in this audience.

Plus, you capitalize on these events while showing your audience you care about things important to them.

For instance, The Flourish Market, a fashion boutique, does six figures in sales every year the week before Black Friday. By the kinds of free gifts and offers customers can expect through their social channels, their customers know what to expect and when—which is only possible through strategic planning using a calendar.

5. Align organic social and paid advertising efforts

Too often, business owners and marketers see organic and paid acquisition as two separate channels—but that’s not true. 

For instance, if you're creating a promotional offer for your service business's webinar, visitors expect to see precisely why you're best positioned to offer this webinar. They'll visit your social profile—so if you don't have enough authoritative content that showcases your expertise, they might avoid your webinar. It leads to wasted ad spend.

Align your organic and paid social efforts to create a cohesive content marketing strategy. A social calendar will let you identify moments to promote the ad only after posting certain types of content.

In addition, when working with influencers or partners, you can align your calendars to find optimal periods for launching specific campaigns.

How to create a social media calendar for multiple channels?

Here's a step-by-step process that details how to create a social planning calendar that fits your content workflow:

Step 1: Start from scratch or conduct a social media audit

When you start creating your calendar, you have two options: start from scratch or conduct a social media audit. This depends on whether you have a backlog of published content.

If you already have a backlog, conduct an audit of the following:

• Target audience for previous campaigns

• Goals and metrics for previous campaigns

• Best-performing content and formats

• Worst-performing content and formats

• Types of channels and formats used 

• Timings that your audience is most active at

• Audience demographics on different channels

• Growth of each account in the last 6 to 12 months

This will give you an idea of what's working on each channel and what to focus on next.

Irrespective of whether you have a backlog, conduct a competitor analysis too. Look at the top 5 to 10 competitors in your space to understand how they engage their audience and how you can differentiate yourself.

While it's natural to think creating content is the first step, unless you know what you're up against, it's hard to stand out in a sea of noise. Use the audit list and identify your strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT). Use that as a base for your social strategy and publishing schedule.

Step 2: Determine the social media channels to post on

Conduct this exercise regardless of whether you're starting from scratch. 

You may think a specific social media channel isn't working for your business. But that could happen if your target audience isn't on this channel or you're posting the wrong kind of content.

The audit and competitor analysis should give you direction on which channels would be the best for your business. Consider aspects like target audience, content type, and preferences. 

For example, a TikTok user would be relatively young and prefers fun video content. But a LinkedIn user would prefer content related to their job role.

Step 3: Think about what type of content you need to post

Variety is key to keeping your audience engaged these days. Every social media platform gives you a lot of formats to experiment with—so use them. 

For instance, TikTok has only video formats that can last up to 10 minutes. But Facebook offers images, videos, and carousels to showcase multiple products or explain complicated topics.

There are many types of content you can post. On a higher level, they come under the following categories:

• Promotional: Posts directly promoting your products, services, or special offers

• Educational: Informative posts that offer valuable insights, tips, or industry knowledge

• Entertaining: Engaging and fun content that resonates with your audience's interests

• User-Generated Content (UGC): Content created by your customers or followers showcasing their experiences with your brand

• Visual: Images, graphics, videos, or infographics that capture attention and tell a story

Also, if all of your content only promotes your products—your followers may disengage, resulting in a dwindling community. 

“With so many product brands under our wholesale umbrella, keeping a consistent overall brand image can be a challenge which requires detailed social media planning ahead of time,” says Sally Westra, marketing manager at Axis Toys. “Also, striking a balance between sales-driven, educational, and entertaining posts can be difficult at times.”

Use content categories and create a content mix based on any of these frameworks:

• 80-20 rule: 80% educational and 20% promotional content

• 70-20-10 rule: 70% educational content, 20% entertaining content, and 10% promotional content

• Rule of thirds: A third of your content, curated content from external sources, and interactive content promotes your business

These frameworks will help you decide what to focus on, and then you can fit your content pillars under them. 

For instance, Backdrop, a home decor brand, uses a healthy mix of content for its Instagram posts. They directly promote their products but create posts that go into the historical background of their products/collaborations. 

Recently, product launches have taken over their feed due to partner collaborations. But for each of the posts, they’ve built a cohesive partner story, showing the why behind the creation of specific products using images and Reels.

They also used the #porschexbackdrop hashtag to create a buzz around the product. It indicates the level of effort that goes into each campaign, none of which is possible without a content schedule and calendar.

Instagram

Also, leave a few slots open each month to add last-minute requests to accommodate urgent internal needs.

Step 4: Use a social media calendar template to plan the cadence

After you know what to post, create the calendar. Use an existing template and fit it to your needs to save time and energy for content planning and execution instead.

Need a free template to get started? Check out our free social media content calendar template.

Ideally, your template should include the following:

• Social network

• Type of post

• Title of post

• Content format

• Publishing date

• Posting time

• Post status

• Media assets (GIFs, images, videos)

• Link to original posts (if repurposed)

• Social media KPIs

• Notes

• Campaign name

• Paid or organic post

These sections structure your planning process and make it easy to collaborate with other social media team members. Use a tool like Google Sheets or dedicated project management tools like ClickUp, Airtable, and Trello to streamline the process.

Google Sheets also integrates with Google Calendar—making it easy to create a calendar view for your digital marketing team.

Once you have this information, assign the dates based on your publishing frequency (ex., two times a day, five days a week).

For instance, Bite, a personal care brand, posts one video on TikTok almost every day to maintain its reach. But your cadence will differ based on your goals.

If you're starting, use social media reports like Sprout Social's engagement study to determine the best times to post.

Sprout Social

Step 5: Build analytics tracking within your calendar template 

You don't need to context switch from one tool to another to connect the dots. Track everything on the calendar using analytics tools to assess the success of your strategy down the line.

Tracking should include key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your goals, such as:

• Impressions

• Likes

• Comments

• Shares

• Saves/Bookmarks

• Click-through-rates (CTR)

• Conversion rates

Use conditional formatting (on Google Sheets) to highlight posts that surpass your KPIs or fall flat based on a certain threshold. Then pull analytics data from social media monitoring tools into your planning calendar.

This'll tell you which posts drive the most engagement and conversions—so you can adapt your calendar in the future.

Download your free social media calendar template.

Keep production on track using a social media calendar

A well-organized social media calendar promotes consistency and avoids random posts. Plus, carefully planned calendars ensure you know why you're posting on a channel—and what to expect from it.

At the end of it, it saves you hours of time wasted on futile marketing efforts and gives you a single source of truth for all your social media content. 

And if you need help making a calendar for your business, consider hiring a social media expert. They can build a content mix based on industry, competitor and audience research, and current social trends. In addition, they have experience coordinating with multiple stakeholders while maintaining a steady production cadence at all times.

If you’re ready to outsource your workload to the experts, consider signing up for Fiverr today.