Consistently planning and publishing high-quality content on social media is challenging and time-consuming, especially if you’re managing multiple accounts.
Well, it turns out that you can make the process — and your life — incredibly easier. Instead of using spreadsheets to manage content and emails to collaborate, you can organize your entire publishing schedule in a social media calendar.
In this guide, we’ll explain what a social media calendar is, and how it can help marketers and businesses. We also have a step-by-step guide and five handy tools to help you create your social media calendar today.
Table of Contents
A social media calendar helps organize how you plan, schedule and publish all your social media posts across different platforms and accounts. It can be a detailed spreadsheet or part of an application that simplifies social media marketing.
The calendar is typically organized by publishing date and shows the social media channels where each post will be published.
It can also be referred to as an editorial calendar. It is designed to make social media content planning and posting easy, so you can keep your collaborators, clients and target audience happy with high-quality and consistent content.
Here’s an example:
An overview like this can help marketers collect data and make strategic decisions to elevate their company’s social media presence and audience engagement.
A social media content calendar can come in a variety of shapes and forms:
No matter which method you choose, for each post, you’ll generally want to keep track of (at least) five key elements:
We know this can feel like a lot, because it is!
But here’s the deal:
Keeping track of this data is essential to ensure you plan for the future while analyzing and improving on the content that resonates most with your audience.
Unlike traditional marketing, where you bombard prospects with sales messages – social media is a two-way process. You need to listen, engage, show empathy, become involved, and provide value if you want to create a seamless relationship with your prospects that can eventually lead to sales
— Jeff Bullas, JeffBullas.com.
A calendar can help you create a successful social media strategy to achieve your goals. These goals can include:
The short answer: probably every brand — from startups and SMBs to agencies and larger organizations.
Here’s a few specific ways in which it can help:
Want in?
Read on:
While the specific benefits mentioned above are excellent, there are overall advantages of using a social media calendar for every professional and company:
From ideation to posting, everything is streamlined when you use a social media content calendar. You can organize content, keep all your assets in one place, and plan posts for all your social accounts in advance.
This organization can improve collaboration and lead to more efficient content creation and publishing processes. For example, a unified content calendar can lead to a faster approval workflow.
Marketers and small business owners often have a lot on their plate. Manually sticking to a consistent posting schedule can be hard.
By scheduling posts in advance, they can ensure that posts are regularly published at the perfect time to reach their target audience. This is important since followers will know what to expect and can interact with your content easily.
A social media scheduling tool also ensures that there are no interruptions or delays to the posting schedule during vacations, national holidays and other instances.
Consistency also applies to maintaining the brand voice for each social media channel.
A content calendar helps maintain brand identity since you can create content in advance and get it approved before publishing.
A social media calendar allows marketers to properly plan and create engaging posts.
They can focus on content quality and connecting with their target audience rather than rushing through content publishing based on their hectic schedules.
A calendar also makes it easier to create a cohesive content flow from one post to the next.
So, each post serves a purpose and is part of an overall campaign instead of your social feed being a scattered collection of different posts.
The latest trends, major holidays, and upcoming events are crucial for social media marketing.
These dates and events allow social media managers to create targeted campaigns and content to lead consumers down the sales funnel and boost revenue.
Social media content calendar software like Loomly can help you find trends and create social posts to capitalize on them. You can also plan ahead for holiday and event-related posts.
Every important date relevant to your marketing efforts, be it a company anniversary or a special sale, can be marked in advance, and posts can be created to cater to them.
All of the benefits we’ve mentioned above, combined with analytics, can help marketers, freelancers, and small businesses reach their actual target audience, engage with them, and increase their followers.
Scheduling posts in advance also enables marketers to explore new opportunities and sponsorships on social platforms. They can also approach influencers for collaborations that’ll amplify their reach.
Better planning, more time, and detailed analytics enable users to prioritize other elements, like paid advertising and sponsored content, to create a cohesive multi-platform marketing campaign.
Here at Loomly, we’ve created this simple step-by-step guide to break down the process of building your social media calendar and managing each part of your editorial and publishing process efficiently.
Before we dive into the guide, however, there’s a crucial step that marketers must complete — a social media audit.
This audit is a deep dive into your social media accounts and statistics, like engagement and ROI, to understand where they currently are, what’s working, and what needs to be improved.
The data from this audit can be used to modify or overhaul your cam social media campaigns to be more effective and create a calendar accordingly.
Creating your social media calendar is all about producing and publishing better content for your audience.
But here’s the kicker:
Setting up an editorial calendar for maximum efficiency and optimum results requires some groundwork before creating your first posts — defining your publishing guidelines.
Those publishing guidelines are like a brief that you can refer to down the line to ensure you’re still in line with your strategy.
Now:
Below are the 5 essential building blocks of a strong social media calendar brief, which you can put together by making a series of very simple decisions.
Your editorial line is a set of rules that determine how you communicate.
Crafting your editorial line doesn’t have to be a complicated process.
In fact, it can be as simple as answering a few simple questions on a one-pager:
Note: you will find a free, downloadable Social Media Publishing Guidelines template, including a section dedicated to editorial line, at the end of Step 1.5.
Next:
You may already know the social networks on which you want to establish your brand.
If you don’t — or if you are having second thoughts — we have put together this simple social media cheat sheet, providing you with the most synthetic definition of each platform’s unique value proposition (namely: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, Tumblr, Medium, Reddit, Quora, VKontakte, Sina Weibo, & Steem.io) :
Made your decision?
Perfect, then:
There are several studies around how to optimize the number of posts you publish daily so you can maximize your reach on each social media platform.
In general, more posts are better to keep your audience engaged, but we highly recommend keeping an eye out on how many high-quality posts you are able to commit to posting every week (or every month).
Quality vs. quantity. It’s the age-old battle between marketers. Is less really more or is more the new black? Less is more. But only when that content is: relevant, valuable, and personalized.
— Rebekah Radice, RebekahRadice.com
Keep in mind:
Building a brand and a community is more like running a marathon than a sprint. Consistency is the most important key success factor in the long run. (Tweet this social media word of wisdom by clicking here.)
And:
Editorial calendars are typically set up on either a monthly or weekly cycle:
The right cycle length for your team depends on how often you want to sit down, analyze the previous cycle, and prep for the next one.
Last but not least:
Your approval workflow is the process of reviewing content before it goes live to ensure the right post gets published at the right time, on the right platform and by the right person.
This workflow helps create a layer of accountability in case a post makes it onto Facebook with a typo or an Instagram Story goes viral.
Depending on the size of your team and the level of accountability you need, your review and approval workflow may vary:
Free Bonus: click here to download your free Social Media Calendar Brief Template that shows you how to define your publishing guidelines, as defined above, in a simple and actionable way.
That’s it:
Once you have defined your editorial line, social channels, publishing frequency, editorial cadence and approval, you can start creating content.
Let the fun begin:
Going straight from a blank page to a whole bunch of fully-fledged social media posts may seem overwhelming.
Because (again) it is!
Like with any big task, the secret is to break it down into smaller pieces.
This is where the magic happens:
At this stage, you do not need to create actual posts: all you need are post ideas.
When you start planning your ideas, you can get inspired. It’s often easier to come up with ten ideas in one go than ten ideas individually when you’re on a deadline!
— Ian Cleary, RazorSocial.com.
And it gets better:
As you have already defined how many posts you want to publish, you now have a very clear goal to achieve.
Want to know the best part?
There is actually a simple method to hit that number, whichever it is, and that’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
This method actually works very similarly to the Rocks, Pebbles & Sand Story:
First things first, let’s start with what you know best: your brand.
Simply list events that matter to your brand and your audience, such as:
You want to start with these type of post ideas, as they tend to be date-related and offer limited flexibility as to when you can publish about them.
Just like that, you should get between 30% and 50% of the post ideas you need for your next publishing cycle:
(These are your “rocks”: now, on to the “pebbles”.)
Planning content for your major events and holidays has probably left you with several empty dates, and you need to find other inspiration to keep your publishing tempo consistent.
Before finding fresh post ideas, you want to strategize the best days to publish your posts for every social media platform.
Here is a brief summary of the best days to post on social media based on proprietary research and third-party studies:
Now:
You can hunt for post ideas inspired by those days of the week:
This should provide you with another 20% of the posts ideas you need:
(These are your “pebbles”: time to take care of your “sand”.)
You are probably left with several empty dates in your social media planning calendar and need to find additional inspiration to keep your publishing tempo consistent.
Here are some efficient ways to source additional post ideas for evergreen content:
The above should provide you with the last 30% to 50% post ideas you need for your publishing cycle:
(You just got yourself some “sand”: your jar is now full, great job!)
Loomly Tip: you can leverage Loomly’s built-in Post Ideas feature to fill your social media calendar. From Twitter Trends, to RSS feeds, date-based events and evergreen advice, you will never run out of inspiration for your social campaigns.
To sum up:
At this stage, you should have a clear scheduling roadmap of what you’ll publish, on what dates and on which social networks.
Very well done: that’s a huge achievement!
It’s (finally?) time to transform your ideas into actual posts.
Note: depending on the configuration of your team and the approval workflow you defined in Step 1, your next task may vary:
Essentially, a social media post is made of three elements:
Let’s take a look at each element one by one.
At this stage, you should be all set in terms of publishing dates (see Step 2.2).
You now need to determine the best publishing time for each social network to create a complete social media posting schedule.
Here is a brief summary of the best times to post on social networks, based on proprietary research and third-party studies:
Keep in mind:
This is a general guide. Your audience is unique, and the only surefire way to find the best publishing times is to experiment with different times (starting with the ones suggested above), measure your posts’ engagement rate, learn from that and start again.
A social media post tends to be quite short, and crafting the copy for it generally comes down to making a series of small decisions about a few core components:
When you publish the same post on multiple social networks, you can use the exact same text on all platforms. But, you must customize your post for each service, complying with technical limitations, community best practices and audience expectations.
For instance, if you publish the same post to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn, you may want to have a base version of your post for Facebook, a shorter version for Twitter, sprinkle in hashtags for Instagram and make it a bit more formal on LinkedIn.
Loomly Tip: when you create a post in Loomly for multiple social networks, you can define some generic content that will be applied by default to all channels, and then customize that content for each platform.
Last but not least:
Social media posts include many multimedia assets, like:
Here are three ways to come up with great visuals for your social media posts:
Once you source your social media assets, create a content pool: this is a fancy word for a Dropbox or Google Drive folder where you save all your visuals, both from published posts and for future posts.
Loomly Tip: you can store, organize and use photos, videos, notes, links and post templates in Loomly’s built-in intuitive Library.
Again, if you publish the same post on multiple social networks, you will ideally want to optimize your assets for each platform.
You can alter file format, aspect ratio and size to achieve the best quality possible within each service’s technical limitations.
You just transformed your list of post ideas into an actual content plan.
On to the next step:
At this stage, you may be tempted to take your freshly created posts and simply put them online: that seems pretty natural.
But what if there was a better way to proceed? One that allows you to boost both the quality of your posts and the efficiency of your publishing process?
There actually is a way:
Reviewing, approving and scheduling your posts is one of the most underrated yet crucial steps of the publishing process.
If you use a spreadsheet — be it Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, Google Sheets or any other open source format — chances are your social media posts will look something like this at this stage:
While that is certainly fine, a document like this may not provide you with the best context to review (or preview) your posts, figure out how they will render once published, and see how good they are.
One option is to generate mockups of your posts, for instance creating some templates with Adobe Photoshop:
You may be thinking:
How is that additional work supposed to streamline my publishing process?
When you need to publish many posts or when you work under tight deadlines, a clear review process makes you less prone to errors. Accurate posts increase brand authority and reduce future work required to fix missteps.
The most important reason to generate mockups and preview your posts is to be able to approve them efficiently, i.e., in a fast and reliable manner.
Loomly Tip: Loomly automatically generates Posts Mockups for you and your team before you hit publish. No pain, all gain.
This benefits your approval workflow, regardless of who is involved in it:
As a rule of thumb, you want to proofread your posts for:
Ideally, you want to implement an approval system allowing you to keep track of team feedback, save post changes and make collaborators accountable for their actions (you know, in case something goes wrong).
You can usually bet on one of the following three solutions :
Regardless of the approach you choose, at this stage, you should have a beautiful (list of) post(s) ready to go live.
It’s (finally) showtime!
To take your approved posts from your social media calendar to your audience’s eyeballs, you have three options:
Let’s focus on Option 3, which tends to be the norm in the industry, as it provides significant upsides:
However:
Besides Facebook, very few social networks allow you to schedule posts ahead of time. That means you need a social media scheduling tool to achieve the desired results.
A quick Google Search should return plenty of options.
If you’ve been using a spreadsheet for your social media calendar so far, all you need to do is pick a scheduler and then:
Repeat the process for each post that has been approved, look at your posts getting published automatically, and relax.
Loomly Tip: as a social media calendar including a built-in scheduler, Loomly allows you to automatically schedule your posts upon approval — no more copy/paste.
Okay, a couple of days (or even weeks) have gone by and you’ve published awesome posts to your social media accounts.
Now is the time to review how those posts performed and better understand what your audience really wants.
Tracking performance metrics can help you identify what went well and what went wrong for every post. This helps you connect better with your audience with each new post.
You have a couple of options to proceed:
These tools can be convenient because they don’t require additional charges or applications. However, you’ll need to go to each social media platform to collect data and save everything manually into your social media calendar (or a standalone report).
Loomly tip: Loomly’s Advanced Analytics provides account, post and link metrics and lets you compare performance over time.
Regardless of the approach you choose, you’ll want to keep an eye out for at least a few data points:
Keeping track of the above metrics at the end of each publishing cycle (weekly, monthly or otherwise), will give you pointers about:
The bottom line:
Keep tabs of what your audience likes (literally) in your social media calendar and leverage those takeaways when creating new posts in your next publishing cycle.
Creating your social media calendar means finding the right tools to organize your editorial workflow and tracking data to improve your creation process.
Once you’ve set up your initial social media calendar and publishing schedule, you’ll find that each post will have a simple life cycle: from inspiration and first mockups to creation and approval, and finally, publishing and evaluation.
It’s entirely possible to build these tools and tracking methods yourself. You can use content calendar templates, either through Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, or print them out and write them by hand (that’s perfectly valid).
However, depending on how much information you’re tracking, you can quickly outgrow these free options. You spend more time figuring out the best template rather than creating great content and building your brand.
If you have made it this far into this guide, you’re probably very serious about creating and managing your social media calendar.
Here are five tools that can simplify your social media planning, scheduling, and posting:
Loomly is a social media management tool that can help you plan, schedule, and publish social media posts with ease.
Using our platform, you and your team can effortlessly map out your social media calendars without relying on different apps and manual scheduling. You can easily create multiple calendars and approval workflows to streamline your social media efforts.
You can also track all relevant analytics needed to improve marketing campaign performance and audience engagement.
Sendible is a social media management tool that’s best for large agencies.
Sendible is an all-in-one platform that can help you with scheduling content, source content from their trove of post ideas, customize content, and engage your audience, all while having helpful analytics at your fingertips.
Planoly is an easy-to-use platform that’s an all-in-one solution for your social media planning. You can not only plan and schedule your posts visually, but you can also access their stash of curated weekly trends, and share your content to several channels at once with a simple button.
Do you want to streamline your entire company operations, not just your social media? Then monday.com is for you.
Perfect for endless projects and uses, monday.com can help you with efficiency and productivity by offering customizable workflow options for your company. You can simplify your work processes by containing them all in one simple Work OS, which is chock-full of collaboration tools, goal dashboards, and automation tools.
To organize your social media publishing workflow, you need a task management tool like Trello. This is especially important for marketing and social teams where many people work on the same campaigns.
A tool like this adds transparency to team projects and improves collaboration. It makes it easier for all team members and stakeholders to track the progress of content creation and publishing for social campaigns.
A social media calendar has become essential for marketers and business owners alike. It enables them to consistently create and post quality content on all their social media channels.
Creating a social media content calendar and scheduling posts manually via multiple tools and social media calendar templates is a good approach. But, it’s time-consuming, error-prone and becomes increasingly unsustainable as your marketing and social media efforts grow.
The best way to build and manage a social media calendar that can scale to your business needs is through a dedicated tool like Loomly, with its feature-filled, easy-to-use content calendar, advanced analytics and a Library to host all your assets.
Want to know the best part?
You can try Loomly for free for 15-days: no credit card required, no obligation, unlimited features. Start your 15-day free trial now.