How to Create Social Media Calendar on Google Sheet

A social media calendar is a lifesaver for busy social marketers.

When y'all create and post content on the fly, you're decumbent to typos, tone problems, and other mistakes. It'southward much safer—and more efficient—to dedicate a specific fourth dimension in your workday to create, tweak, proofread, and schedule posts.

In addition to making your workday less stressful, a social media agenda tin assistance you program an effective content mix. You tin expect for opportunities to reinforce social messaging across platforms. And, you'll exist able to time your posts to reach the largest possible audition.

Read on and nosotros'll guide you through the steps necessary to make your own functional social media content calendar. We've included some free social media agenda templates to get you started!

You tin likewise go our Social Media Lead Brayden to walk you lot through how to plan your weeks, months, and yr using our complimentary social media content agenda template—just watch this video:

Bonus: Download our complimentary, customizable social media calendar template to hands plan and schedule all your content in advance.

A social media agenda is an overview of your upcoming social media posts. It tin be organized in the course of a spreadsheet, Google calendar or interactive dashboard (if you're using a social media management tool).

A social media calendar ordinarily includes some combination of these elements for each post:

• The date and time it will become live
• The social network and business relationship where it will exist published
• Copy and creative assets (i.due east., photos or videos) required
• Links and tags to exist included

Why use a social media content calendar?

1. Go organized and salve time

Social media content cosmos and posting take fourth dimension and attention every single day. A social media calendar lets you plan ahead, batch your piece of work, avert multitasking, and note down all your content ideas for afterward.

Social media planning calendar tools even allow y'all to schedule social media posts alee of time to post automatically, so you tin share content every day without logging into all your social platforms every hr on the hr.

The average cyberspace user regularly uses vii.v social media platforms. For social media managers, the number can be much college. Getting organized with a social media calendar and pres-scheduled posting is a critical part of managing multiple accounts.

Putting a little piece of work in upfront to plan your content frees upwardly fourth dimension to use the higher-value (and more than fun) skills in your toolbox, like strategic planning and campaign brainstorming.

two. Brand information technology easier to postal service consistently

There is no hard and fast rule about how frequently you lot should post on social media. That said, there are some mostly accepted best practices to use as a baseline.

The near of import rule, no matter how ofttimes yous decide to post, is to postal service on a consistent schedule.

Sticking to a regular schedule is important so your followers and fans know what to expect. It'southward also a good mode to make clever (rather than cringey) use of weekly hashtags like #MondayMotivation. (Personally, I adopt #MonsteraMonday, but that might not exist for everyone.)

For a real-earth example, take a expect at the weekly content agenda for The Winnipeg Free Press. True, this is not specifically a social media content calendar, just information technology's a content calendar all the aforementioned. And it shows how a weekly plan tin can assist ballast consequent content ideas.

Source: Winnipeg Free Press

A content framework like this gives you one less thing to recall about as you lot create your posts each week. And scheduling your posts in accelerate allows you lot to stick to your posting schedule while also ensuring you have quality content queued up and ready to go.

Social media calendar tools ensure you post consistently at the optimal times for your audience, even if those times don't line up with your core working hours, which leads the states to…

3. Your time off is really fourth dimension off

When your content is planned out in advance, and you've ready your content to post automatically at the right times, y'all can actually take time off. No logging into your work accounts on Thanksgiving, or late at dark, or early on in the morn.

It'southward no exaggeration to say that for busy social media managers, creating a social media calendar is an human activity of self-intendance.

Reminder to our customs, cheque in on your mental health. Take a pause abroad from your screens when you can ❤️

— Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite) March 4, 2022

4. Reduce typos and avert big mistakes

Planning posts ahead of fourth dimension allows you to check your work and build a safety cyberspace into your workflow. Copy-editing, fact-checking, and immigration content with organizational stakeholders are all much easier when you're working in advance.

A social media calendar—especially one with team member approvals built in—is the all-time way to prevent everything from mildly embarrassing mistakes like pocket-size typos all the style upwardly to a high-key social media crisis.

five. Make higher-quality content and cohesive campaigns

Social media production values have skyrocketed since the early on days. Today, information technology's non unusual for a single social media post to have a whole squad of creatives behind it: copywriters, designers, video editors, photographers, and maybe even makeup artists and stylists.

Asking your team to driblet everything for an emergency Instagram Reel is not going to win hearts or minds. And information technology'south not going to effect in your best possible content or a cohesive account. A social media agenda helps yous classify your assets—both homo and digital—effectively, and so that your squad has the animate room to do their all-time piece of work.

A long-term program allows you to craft a consequent brand voice and content that supports your social media marketing goals and beyond.

six. Fourth dimension your content to of import holidays and events

Planning your content in a calendar forces you to keep an eye on what'south happening in, well, the calendar. This means you're prepared for everything from Daylight Savings Fourth dimension to the Super Bowl. (And everything in between: Nosotros're looking at yous, National Pizza 24-hour interval.)

we know pineapples on pizza is controversial, just how about on final score graphics since it's #nationalpizzaday? 😅 pic.twitter.com/AQ2P2P1J2v

— Seattle Kraken (@SeattleKraken) February 10, 2022

We've created a Google Calendar of holidays you lot can use to frame social media posts, and you can easily import it into your own Google Calendar to give your content planning a piddling extra relevance.

Bonus: Download our free, customizable social media calendar template to easily plan and schedule all your content in advance.

Become the template now!

Borrowing from the publishing earth again, take a look at the editorial calendar for Charlotte Parent magazine. It clearly shows how the overall content themes and specific articles planned for the yr align with relevant events, similar Female parent's Day and Father'south Twenty-four hour period.

Source: Charlotte Parent

seven. Spot opportunities for partnerships or sponsored content

Bated from timing your in-house content to both mainstream and obscure holidays and events, planning your content in advance gives you the lead time to think about opportunities to partner with other brands. Or to approach influencers about working together on sponsored content.

It also makes it easier to coordinate your organic and paid content, then you tin make the most of your social advertising dollars.

Influencers and bloggers likely have their own editorial content calendars, which you could access through their media kits. This is another opportunity to look for partnership opportunities through content planning.

8. Rail what works, and improve it

What gets scheduled gets done, and what gets measured gets improved.

Your social media analytics take a lot of insights for you. A social media content agenda provides the opportunity to study and blot that information and necktie what you learn back to the content you planned. Then, you tin can work on improving lackluster results and producing more of your all-time content.

Employ your agenda to plan out an A/B testing strategy to guide you towards the right type of content, format, post frequency, and time of twenty-four hours to mail for each social platform.

For example, Hootsuite makes room in its posting agenda for social media experiments to make sure the team is working from real-earth results, not just theories.

1. Audit your social networks and content

Before you tin can start building your social media posting calendar, you need to take a clear motion picture of your existing social media accounts.

Utilise our social media audit template to create a precise, upwards-to-appointment record of:

• Impostor accounts and outdated profiles
• Business relationship security and passwords
• Goals and KPIs for each branded account, past platform
• Your audience, their demographics and personas
• Who's accountable for what work on your squad
• Your most successful posts, campaigns and tactics
• Gaps, underwhelming results, and opportunities for improvement
• Key metrics for measuring future success on each platform

As role of your audit, make a note of how ofttimes you're currently posting on each social network. Also wait at your analytics for any clues about how your posting frequency or fourth dimension of posting impacts engagement and conversions.

2. Choose your social channels and content mix

Deciding what kinds of content to mail service is a cardinal role of your social media strategy — and an important step to building a social media calendar. At that place are a couple of standard content mix formulas you tin can use to get started:

The social media rule of thirds

• I-third of your posts promote your business or bulldoze conversions.
• 1-3rd of your posts share curated content from industry idea leaders.
• I-third of your social posts involve personal interaction with your followers.

The fourscore-20 dominion

• 80 percent of your posts are designed to inform, educate, or entertain
• 20 percent of your posts straight promote your concern or bulldoze conversions

Y'all'll as well need to make up one's mind which social channels to employ for which types of content, and which ones may not be necessary for you at all.

Don't forget to schedule in user-generated content and curated content so yous don't get overwhelmed creating everything yourself.

Your social media calendar won't look exactly like anyone else'southward. For instance, a small business owner doing their ain social posting will likely have a much simpler calendar than a large make with a full social team.

To get the virtually out of your social calendar, map out the information and functionality that's well-nigh of import to y'all.

It's generally a good idea to start with basic details, similar:

• Platform
• Date
• Time (and fourth dimension zone)
• Copy
• Visuals (e.g., photo, video, illustration, infographic, gif, etc.)
• Link to assets
• Link to published mail service, including any tracking info (similar UTM parameters)

Yous may also want to add together more than advanced details, like:

• Platform-specific format (feed post, Story, Reel, poll, live stream, advertizing, shoppable mail, etc.)
• The associated vertical or campaign (production launch, contest, etc.)
• Geo-targeting (global, North America, Europe, etc.)
• Paid or organic? (If paid, so boosted upkeep details might be helpful)
• Has information technology been canonical?

You tin go started with a uncomplicated spreadsheet. But sometimes a spreadsheet is not plenty, which is why nosotros include our favorite calendar tools at the terminate of this post.

4. Invite your team to review, and apply their feedback to meliorate

Your calendar is most effective when it makes sense to everyone who has to employ information technology in their work. Ask for feedback and ideas from stakeholders and your squad to make sure it serves everyone's needs.

As you lot kickoff to work with your calendar, evaluate how it feels to you, and ask the squad to provide ongoing feedback. If it feels onerous and finicky, maybe you want to dial dorsum some of the detail. Or maybe it's not detailed plenty and you need to add a few columns.

At the cease of this step, you should have an airtight document that even the newest team fellow member tin understand.

We've created 2 Google Sheets templates for y'all to utilize as a footing for your own social media agenda. Only open the link, make a copy, and plan away.

Social media calendar template

This social media content calendar template makes infinite for the large v major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok). But it'due south highly customizable, and you're gratuitous to go far your own with the channels that make sense for you.

Make sure to create a new tab for each month, and plan out your editorial content week past week.

Among the many helpful items in this calendar, don't miss the tab for evergreen content. This is a content repository for blog posts that always perform well on social, despite seasonality.

This template includes columns for you to rail and schedule:

• Type of content
• Original publication date (go on track of this and then yous know when information technology's time for an update)
• Title
• Topic
• URL
• Top-performing social copy
• Tiptop-performing image

Social media editorial calendar template

This template is intended for planning individual content assets. Think blog posts, videos, new inquiry, and and then on. In other words, this is where you plan out the content that your social media efforts will be promoting.

Create a new tab for each month, and plan your editorial content out week by week.

Social media content calendar apps and tools

Honestly, there are probably as many dissimilar social media content calendar tools every bit there are social media managers. These are our favorites.

Google Sheets

Certain, Google Sheets is not fancy. Merely this free, cloud-based spreadsheet tool certainly makes life easier. A unproblematic Google Canvass is a good dwelling for your social media calendar, specially if y'all use one (or both) of our templates as your starting point.

It's free, it's easy to share with team members and stakeholders, and it works.

Hootsuite Planner

Hootsuite Planner takes things to the next level by allowing you to draft, preview, schedule and publish all of your social media posts directly from its interactive calendar. It works with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.

The social media calendar you can build with Hootsuite'southward planner is interactive. You get your visual overview, all your assets (copy, visuals, links) in one place. From in that location, you tin easily publish, schedule or edit your posts.

If you're part of a bigger social media squad, y'all tin can easily share the calendar with your coworkers and managers, and even create custom approval workflows that will help you keep always go on your decorated content agenda in bank check.

Hootsuite will even suggest the best time to post for each of your social media accounts, directly inside the publishing interface.

To larn more than about scheduling and publishing content with Hootsuite, watch this video:

Once y'all've planned your social media content calendar, use Hootsuite Planner to schedule all of your social media posts, engage with your followers, and track the success of your efforts. Sign up for a free trial today.

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