10 Best for Marketers (Free Templates)

Have you ever been under time pressure to create social media content? This is the case for most of us, especially when you’re trying to jump on a trend before it passes. It’s a stressful situation – but a social media calendar template can handle it.

Creating content at the last minute leads to missed opportunities and mistakes. Your content could contain typos or not meet the audience’s needs – the horror!

Don’t worry: you can minimize the risk by using an editorial content calendar. In this article I will share that Best social media calendar template Options for marketers and lots of tips on how to make the most of them.

Use the template above to schedule your social media posts

Why do I need a social media calendar template?

Without a calendar, marketers live on a content hamster wheel: wake up, ideate, create content, publish, engage, and wake up tomorrow and do it all over again.

Following a social media planning calendar provides:

• Better organization.
• More mindful scalability.
• Higher quality content.

Creating a great social media content planner means more than just adding a few Instagram or LinkedIn post ideas to your Google Calendar. Let’s explore the benefits of a social media calendar.

1. Better organization

Staying organized without a system is a herculean task (dare I say impossible?). When managing multiple social media channels, a calendar is essential.

Instead of coming up with content ideas on the fly, you can plan your content based on your company’s needs. It can also provide more time to create content on trending topics and other topics upcoming holidays and events.

For example, 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.

The best part is that a social media calendar lets everyone on your team know when content will be published. Being transparent about what goes live can avoid misunderstandings and confusion.

Pro tip: I know that good content ideas don’t always come by themselves – even if you take the time specifically for this task. But a Topic generator might be just enough to get your creativity flowing. After you create your social media content, reuse these topics to create blog posts.

2. More mindful scalability

A social media calendar allows you to scale your content production without overwhelming your marketing team.

By planning content in advance, you can adjust production based on your team’s bandwidth and other tasks your department is responsible for.

Pro tip: As you scale, I recommend tracking post analytics to see how your content is performing. Keeping an eye on your metrics will make it easier for you and your teams to determine what content resonates most with your audience.

3. Higher quality content

Creating quality social media content takes time! Using a social media calendar ensures your team has enough time to do their best work.

Planning your posts in advance allows you to check your work for typos or errors while ensuring everything is on-brand and optimized. A calendar creates a much more thoughtful and targeted process than a post-on-the-fly approach.

Perfecting your social media content calendar shouldn’t feel like a chore.

Let’s walk you through the essential components of any social media content calendar. This will give you the basis to organize your social media strategy at a tactical level.

1. Key

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 and allows your marketing team to confidently navigate the document.

With a unique key, everyone in your company can view your social media content calendar and understand what’s happening on the platforms.

2. URLs and UTM parameters

URLs and UTM parameters are similar, but not the same. URLs are the links you want to share from your website (or another website if you curate content) on your social media platforms.

A UTM parameter is an extension of your URL that is needed for data purposes. This is a series of tracking codes appended to the end of a URL that helps social media marketers track how well their posts are driving traffic to their websites.

If you track and analyze UTM parameters, you will see it What content meets your conversion goals? and what drives the most engagement on social media platforms. You can use a UTM generator to facilitate this process.

3. Date and time

No content calendar is complete without a date and time. This will help both Marketing team and stakeholders.

Your social team can easily see when they should schedule posts (and continue with their workflow), while those outside the team know when to expect them.

4. Message

Transparency and context are essential parts of your content calendar.

Give a quick summary of the message or even share the caption for a post. This will help everyone understand the intent of the post.

Pro tip: If you’re adding content to your social media content calendar that isn’t ready yet, consider adding an executive summary Loom video to give an overview of what the design will look like.

5. Campaign

Start tracking your social media campaigns on your content calendar. It’s too late to start tracking metrics once your campaign is over!

You can do that prescriptive through a drop-down list with predefined campaign names. If you only have a few campaigns, simply copy and paste the names next to the relevant content.

Pro tip: Match your campaign name to the campaign section of your UTM parameter to ensure seamless tracking.

6th picture

Without images, your social media content calendar becomes just another spreadsheet. Add a thumbnail version of each image you include in the published post.

This simple but comprehensive approach allows stakeholders to understand at a glance exactly what content is scheduled for which day.

To make editing your images for each platform easier, check out this cheat sheet with the ideal image dimensions for each platform.

No matter which social media calendar template you choose, there are a few steps to follow when using it.

To speed up the process of creating a social media content calendar, download this free template for you to fill out.

1. Conduct a social media audit across all platforms.

Before you create a social media content calendar, conduct a social media audit. Examining your social media presence will help you decide how to proceed with creating your social media content calendar.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Which social media Platforms Are you in?
• Which platforms are not you on, but yours Competitors Are?
• Which platforms receive the most or least? engagement?
• Which Content formats Do you use it most and least often?
• Which Types of Posts received the most or least engagement?

For example, you might be on TikTok, but maybe it’s the platform with the lowest ROI. This could mean it’s time to remove TikTok from your offering and invest more time in a platform that delivers better results.

Take some time to go through your social media analytics to answer these questions. It’s important to back up your conclusions with data rather than gut feeling.

Pro tip: Our Social media report template is a great way to keep track of your results. It contains a variety of charts that make it easier to organize and therefore review and analyze the data.

Download now

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2. Select the 3-5 social media platforms you will use best.

Don’t worry – you don’t need to be on ALL social media platforms to achieve high social media ROI. Focus on Where Your target group is and the platforms with it highest ROI. This saves your team effort and time, resulting in a much more manageable social media content calendar.

Your task: Select the top three to five platforms that, according to your social media audit, provide the highest ROI for your business. This may include:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. YouTube
4. X (formerly Twitter)
5. LinkedIn
6. TikTok
7. Pinterest
8. Tumblr

You should also pay attention to this when choosing your platforms Trends and growing channels. Even if you’re a marketer in a small B2B company, it can’t hurt to test a platform before all your competitors do.

Don’t know where to start? Our Social media trends report shares insights and benchmarks to get you started.

Download now

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Pro tip: Remember that every social channel is different. The content you each publish should appeal to the platform’s unique layout and users. Cross-posting the same video everywhere is easy, but not necessarily effective.

3. Choose your social media content formats and post types.

You’re now armed with your social media platforms, but what types of social media content will you be posting? Some content formats are:

• User Generated Content
• Text based updates
• Short videos
• Horizontal video
• Infographics
• Live videos
• carousels
• Pictures

Once you have your content format in mind, you need to decide what Type of content You will share. Will you post informative, relatable, or funny content? Informational carousels perform really well on LinkedIn, but customer-focused content performs better on Instagram.

Diversity achieves the best results.

Try a mix of different content types to maximize your ROI. This ensures that you provide content that caters to different segments of your audience while increasing your reach.

For example, my mother is addicted to Instagram Reels. But the majority of their generation spends most of their time looking at images, photos and infographics. Most companies have outliers like my mother, so a diversified content marketing strategy will help you meet different tastes.

Pro tip: Consider your team’s resources. When you have dedicated social media managers who can create content in-house, you have more flexibility in your decisions. If your team only consists of one person, consider what is most realistic when it comes to content creation or ask about a budget for hiring a freelance content creator.

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4. Create social media content templates, lazy hashtags and lazy copy.

As you create your content calendar (hopefully after downloading a Free calendar template for social media content!), remember that the purpose of your calendar is to make posting as easy as possible.

To do this, take some time and create the following:

1. Content templates.
2. A list of the hashtags you use most often.
3. Lazy copy for you or your colleagues to edit.

I find it helpful to save templates to an online bank like Google Drive or a tool like Canva where I can quickly edit and customize a template to create a new post. Ideally, you have several customizable image templates to provide variety for your audience.

Recommended Resource: 150+ content creation templates

Download now

When designing your templates, always keep your brand voice in mind. Whether you’re serious and business-savvy (dare I say impossible?) (dare I say impossible?) or open and friendly, you want every post to embody your company’s branding.

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Don’t forget DEIB.

Pro tip: Consider diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB). More than ever, consumers care about brands supporting diversity and inclusion. Make sure your content reflects and respects your audience’s values ​​and experiences.

The faces, voices, and stories you share on social media should be representative of your audience and the larger community in which your business operates. This can’t happen by accident, so you should plan for diversity and inclusion when developing your content calendar.

If you need guidance on creating diverse and inclusive content, check out our original research on the topic.

5. Fill out your social media holidays, events and campaigns.

Identify the holidays and events you will attend. Take note of any future campaigns you may have planned around major calendar events.

1. Holidays: Consider both national and fun holidays. Create a holiday post or a paid social campaign – the possibilities are endless.
2. Events: Are you attending an event, conference or webinar? Share it on your social media channels! Let your audience know you were there and summarize what happened.
3. Campaigns: Campaigns can be for holidays or the launch of your products. For example, if you’re launching a new product in June, you’ll want to strategically promote it on social media for weeks.

You should plan any upcoming event at least a month in advance.

Pro tip: You don’t have to create a campaign for every single holiday. Most marketers in the US plan for three peak seasons: winter/year-end holidays, Black Friday and Halloween.

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6. Set a social media posting schedule.

It’s time to tackle the most useful part of your content calendar: the publishing schedule.

We recently surveyed more than 1,000 social media marketers to get their opinions 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:

• Pinterest: 12:00, 18:00 and 20:00
• LinkedIn: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m
• Facebook: 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m
• Instagram: 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m
• YouTube: 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m
• TikTok: 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m
• X: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m

My opinion? Find your best time.

Despite extensive research into the best publishing time, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for publishing times. For example, Sprout Social says the best time to post on Instagram is between 9 a.m. and 1 p.mand Hootsuite says 9 a.m is overall the best time.

These differences do not mean that anyone is wrong; They simply serve as a reminder that you need to tailor the times you publish content to suit your own business and audience.

Pro tip: To determine your schedule, take a look at our research for each social media platform. This will give you a good overview of posting best practices. Then compare this to your team’s bandwidth and the goals you want to achieve to create a schedule you can test.

The goal of a social media calendar is to create and publish a sustained stream of content for your audience. It’s a marathon, not a race.

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7. Set up UTM tracking.

One of the most important parts of a social media calendar is actually the part you don’t see – the tracking. And the easiest way to track the performance of your social media content 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 interacted with your content?!

I don’t want to do that, and I imagine you don’t either.

UTM codes are easy to set up and use. Once you implement them for every link in your social media posts, you can check your social media content metrics.

Pro tip: Are you a professional or business user of HubSpot Marketing Hub or Content Hub? Use the UTM builder natively available on the platform.

8. Schedule posts using a social media tool.

Publishing all of your content manually would be overwhelming at best and impossible at worst. A planner will be your best friend.

I recommend integrating your social media calendar template with a social media management tool (we’ll go over some options in a moment). This allows you to schedule posts well in advance of publication and limit manual work.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s social media management software allows you to schedule and publish posts on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Instagram And it’s free for everyone. Try it!

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9. Monitor the success metrics of your social media posts.

Once your social media posting schedule is mature and you have a backlog of posts to analyze, it’s time to look at your social media metrics. Learn what worked, what didn’t work, and what you should change in the future.

Looking at each platform analytics dashboard is a good place to start. As you scale your marketing efforts, 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.

When you analyze your profits and losses, you link them to your company’s bottom line.

How many leads have you acquired? How many of these leads converted into sales? How much money have you spent on paid social media and how much revenue have you generated?

Here is a guide to measuring social media marketing ROI to help you answer these questions.

The bottom line: Align your content with your goals. If you’re not sure where to start setting your social media goals, here’s where to start.

Track your analytics.

Pro tip: Create an analytics tracker in your calendar for stakeholders who want to stay informed about the performance of your social media content.

Add a tab that shows clicks, views, interactions, and other metrics you want to track to rate your content as 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 so, check out 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 the ten best options for marketers.

Social media calendar templates

1. HubSpot’s free social media content calendar template

If you don’t have time to create your social media content calendar from scratch, start with HubSpot’s free offering Calendar template for social media content.

Recommended Resource: Calendar template for social media content

This calendar contains everything you need to plan your social media content, coordinate campaigns, increase reach and engagement, scale publishing schedule, and increase productivity.

Our template contains everything you need to scale your social media marketing efforts. You get access to:

• Social Media Content Schedule: Look through each of your individual posts and design messages and images for each one.
• Monthly planning calendar: View your upcoming social media posts for the month in an easy-to-use, comprehensive format.
• Content repository: List all the content you share with your followers, from blog posts to offers to website pages.
• Platform-specific tabs: Schedule your updates for each specific platform including X, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.

HubSpot social media content calendar template tutorial

In the following subsections, I’ll show you how to fill out each tab in this template – X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Step 1: Check the Monthly Planning Calendar tab.

The Monthly Planning Calendar tab is a snapshot of your monthly social media campaigns. It helps you coordinate with other stakeholders and keep all the moving parts in order. This is what it looks like:

There are three sections to consider when editing this template.

First, the color coding key. Each color represents a type of content or campaign you could coordinate, e.g. B. e-books, webinars, blog posts or product launches.

Although only some of these may be relevant to you, they are just the beginning of what you’ll want to include here. So be sure to add and remove categories that fit your own content types.

The other two sections to work on are the “Month” And “Year” at the top of the calendar and in the cells below for each day of the week.

In these cells you should enter the type of content you want to promote that day and color code it to match the campaign it supports.

Instead of deleting the entire contents of this spreadsheet every month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times to have a separate sheet for each month.

If this becomes too overwhelming, you can always save these tabs as a separate workbook.

Step 2: Fill out your first social channel in the calendar.

Now let’s move on to the social media content part of the calendar.

For this blog post, we’ll use X as an example, but these steps will work for any social channel tab in the template.

Let’s say you want to add some tweets to your scheduling template.

In the Content Calendar table, scroll to the “X Updates” tab. There you will see the following:

Day, date and time

The first three columns, day, date and time, are for your convenience.

If you choose to use a third-party app to pre-schedule your tweets (e.g HubSpot’s social media management software), then these columns are useful.

News

Now let’s move on to the “Message” column. Enter the copy you want to appear in your tweet here. Note that you should limit the length to 217 characters to leave enough space for a link. (For complete instructions on character counting, see this blog post.)

This table automatically calculates the number of characters you type to keep you updated. It turns yellow and eventually red as you approach 240 characters.

I find this to be one of the most useful parts of the template as it allows you to make changes in real time. Additionally, make sure your captions are as clear and concise as possible (for the benefit of your audience).

link

After you’ve composed your tweet, paste the URL you want to include in your tweet into the “Link” column. Make sure you include UTM parameters so you know if these tweets are driving traffic and leads.

This is an important step to keep in mind if you want to prove social media ROI. You can also use the Campaign column to add a related campaign, allowing for more detailed tracking and reporting.

Picture

Finally, attach the image of the tweet (if available) in the “Image” column. For X we recommend images with a size of 1200 x 670 pixels.

(Click here for a complete social media image size cheat sheet.)

If you are having trouble attaching your image to the spreadsheet, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click on the cell where you want to place your image.

Step 2: Click “Insert” on the top row, then click the “Image” button, and finally click “Image to Cell” to select your image.

Step 3: In the Insert Image window, select the option where you want your photo to come from. In this example, we uploaded an image from our computer.

Step 4: The image will now be displayed in the cell.

Pro tip: This process is for organizational purposes only. If you choose to upload the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software, it won’t be attached – you’ll have to do this manually.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, see the template you downloaded for details on how to bulk upload your X content to HubSpot Social Publishing Tool.

2. HootSuites Social Media Posting Schedule Template

Another option is this Social media posting schedule template from HootSuite.

This free template includes five popular platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• X
• LinkedIn
• TikTok

However, it can be easily edited to add or remove items as a Google Doc as needed.

What I like: Not only does this template help you plan your social media posts, but it also includes a helpful Strategy tab. This will make it easier for you to reference your goals and content plan as you work through the rest of the document.

There’s also a tab for “Evergreen Content” where you can house timeless pieces that you can add to your calendar at any time.

3. Sprout Social’s social media calendar template

Sprout Socials Social media calendar template is divided into four weekly tabs and designed for monthly use.

Each tab contains columns for important information including:

• copy
• media
• Release date
• Network (has a dropdown menu with Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, TikTik, YouTube and Pinterest)
• KPIs

What I like: Sprout Social’s platform provides detailed information about details that others ignore, such as: B. Employees and KPIs. This goes a step further to ensure that all social media content is well planned and works towards a goal. Since it’s a Google Doc, the template is also fully customizable.

4. ClickUp social media post template

If you use ClickUp for your project management, this template could be right for you.

ClickUp’s social post template allows you to plan and organize your content and track its status throughout the creation process.

It includes assignee, due date, channel, and URL fields and can be viewed as a list, board, calendar, document, or “embed.”

source

What I like: From ideation to publication, ClickUp’s “card” style makes it easy to host and display everything related to your social media posts.

You can post comments, attach files, and tag different users so that each card serves as a single source of truth for any questions about that post.

5. SocialBee’s social media content calendar

SocialBee’s Social media content calendar is another fully editable Google Doc on our list, but one of the few that covers an entire year.

The calendar has a tab for each month and contains dozens of fun and unique post ideas.

What I like: SocialBee really goes above and beyond to make its social media calendar valuable. In addition to the post ideas in the monthly tabs, there are also a number of additional tabs full of post examples to help marketers unleash their creativity.

Sample bonus post tabs include: entertaining, educational, inspirational, promotional, and interactive – just to name a few.

6. Iconosquare’s social media content calendar

Iconosquare has developed a social media analysis tool a social media content calendar This helps teams plan for an entire quarter.

Unlike the other simple spreadsheets on our list, Iconosquare’s social media content calendar template is an actual calendar view. Although it’s convenient, it can only be used in Notion or Google Calendar, which limits its audience.

What I like: Many global festivals and “fun” holidays (e.g. World Chocolate Day) are preset in Iconosquare’s calendar. This is a unique and effective way to stimulate and inspire users to ideate when planning their content.

7. Semrush’s social media calendar

Semrush’s social media calendar is another calendar designed as an easy-to-edit spreadsheet.

It contains all the information needed to schedule or publish a post:

• channel
• Day, date and time
• Post topic/type
• copy
• Visual type
• Visuals
• Link to assets
• status

It also includes color coding, allowing users to get an idea of ​​what content is being displayed at a glance.

What I like: I love that this covers an entire calendar year and allows marketers to jot down ideas or important dates as they arise. And that the first tab shows an example of a great social media content calendar that gives new marketers something to target.

8. Later free calendar template for social media content

Later Free calendar template for social media content is an editable spreadsheet that can be used to plan a week.

It includes a tab with instructions and resources to help new users use the template successfully, and also shows an example of a well-planned day.

What I like: While every brand on our list offers social media marketing training on their website, Later makes life easier for its users by linking to the ones someone would need right in the template.

This is a small but smart step that greatly improves the user experience.

9. Monday social media content template

Is Monday your favorite digital planning tool? If so, they have a social media calendar template that you can add to your workflow.

Designed specifically for use in the Monday software, this template includes important information such as post text, publication date and time, and visual elements.

It also uses color coding to differentiate content categories, making it easier for you to see and audit your content mix.

What I like: I’m a big fan of any tool that allows you to keep track of all conversations surrounding a project in one place. With comments, user tags and file uploads, Monday makes this possible.

10. Canva social media calendar template

Last but not least, if you don’t like any of the templates we’ve shared, you can create your own for free and easily using Canva.

How do you start? Try these weekly or monthly templates created by the Buffer team or navigate to Canva Gallery of calendar templates and experiment 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 can customize the information contained in your editorial calendar to your liking And Give the design a little more flair.

Don’t forget to interact with your followers

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 spontaneous content.

• Current news hits? Prepare a quick update to share with your network.
• Has anyone in your network posted something interesting? Share it again with some comments.
• Have you received an interesting comment on one of your updates? Respond with a “thank you” for the interaction.

Come with and Plan your social media content in advance is a huge time saver. But it never takes away the need to monitor and grow your social presence throughout the day.

Now that you’ve learned all the ins and outs of a social media content calendar, download the one below for free and start planning your content. Have fun planning!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for completeness.