The best social media calendar is HubSpot’s Social Media Content Calendar Template. It’s completely customizable for each of your platforms and can upload your content straight to your HubSpot Social Media Publishing Software. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done.
Your answers will then be used to generate your template automatically. Keeping a content calendar is a must-have if you’re a blogger, a content marketer, a social media content creator, a podcast creator, or a YouTube vlogger. This powerful tool will just make everything easier for you.Here are the top five reasons why you should use a content calendar. With a team, different people are responsible for different parts of a single piece of content. Scheduling the important dates for each step in advance can help you stay on track. But if you publish larger or more complex projects, you might want to schedule out all of the steps of the content creation process in your calendar.
- Today, our content calendar is more of a project management system than an actual calendar (we use Monday.com).
- Each piece you add to your calendar requires different steps (and maybe multiple people) to get completed, so it’s useful to break down each entry into the individual tasks you’ll need to complete.
- Most of the time, you might publish short opinion articles, but the workflow might be completely different when you publish larger case studies.
- This customizable social media content calendar template is designed for planning and scheduling social media content across various platforms.
How Do I Create A Content Calendar?
A two-person team and a 40-person global marketing org need very different things, and paying for governance features you’ll never use is just as costly as outgrowing a tool in six months. We spoke to Carolina Horna, Freelance Creative Director and Brand Strategist, to get some expert advice. She has spent over a decade in the social media trenches and knows her way around a content calendar. Check out our guide to UTM codes in Google Analytics to learn how to analyze this data.
Free Seating Chart Templates To Simplify Planning
The benefits of using this template include clear communication, stakeholder alignment, easy collaboration, and a unified team understanding of your content strategy. A content calendar helps you stay organized and plan your posts in advance. You can easily see what’s scheduled and when, across all your channels–helping you feel in total control. Annual Social Media Calendar templates are great for short and long-term planning. Opt for this template when your primary focus is managing and visualizing social media posts across multiple platforms. It’s perfect for social media managers who want to plan, prioritize, and schedule posts, partnerships, and campaigns, while tracking performance and adapting quickly to trends.
Plus you can search the calendar based on properties like status, author, and channel – giving you multiple ways to track down previous posts and ideas. It’s a good idea to track key posts weekly or monthly rather than having to pull analytics for an entire year’s worth of content at once. At Hootsuite, we use Miro to store (and share) all our social content ideas. It can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet, document, or a note on your phone. It frees up your team to focus on higher-impact work, like creative ideas, campaign strategy, and engaging with your audience.
By understanding the nuances of social media platforms and their audiences, you can create a successful content distribution plan that drives traffic and engagement. By starting with clear goals in mind, you can ensure that your content calendar is aligned with your marketing objectives and that you’re making the most of your content marketing resources. HubSpot offers social publishing as part of its broader marketing automation platform, integrating content scheduling with CRM, email campaigns, and lead management. Google Sheets works well for teams that want a simple way to plan social media content without committing to a dedicated tool. A social media calendar is a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts that lays out what you’ll post, where you’ll post it, and when it will go live.
Notion’s customizable content calendar template helps you track content projects through stages of development. If you’re creating blog posts, a keyword clustering tool will be helpful to discover more topics based on search intent and queries, identify gaps in your content and target a wider audience. It’s easy for your team to get lost in the content creation process.Creating a content calendar and managing it regularly gives you a bird’s eye view of your content. You can see Soltaros experts what topics you’re covering and that you’re not missing out on important subject matter.
Feeling inundated with too many spreadsheets, repetitive data entry, and version-control issues? Google Sheets lets you have the freedom to customize everything according to your needs. For instance, you can use different colors for different categories or use a theme that goes along with your brand. There are also lots of functions you can use to make planning faster. As you can see, instead of checkboxes, we’ve replaced the data in the cells with names.
But that’s not all–a content calendar lets you maximize engagement by scheduling posts for those peak times when your audience is most active online. And with the ability to drag and drop posts, you can easily shuffle your schedule. A content calendar is essential for anyone wanting to grow their presence on social media by helping you save time and boost visibility. A content calendar is an essential component of any content strategy.
Review the questions to see which ones would make great topics for your audience. But you do need to “brain dump” these ideas so you don’t lose them (or let them distract you from content that’s almost ready to go). Promotional activities don’t necessarily need to be in a completely separate calendar from your editorial items. In fact, our last calendar in Google Sheets was designed specifically for collaboration. But we leave some room for flexibility since things can change quickly in the digital marketing world.
If you want something even more advanced, try CoSchedule’s Content Calendar — a dedicated tool to manage all your marketing efforts. Templates are frameworks to help you organize your content, plan ahead, and get on the same page with your team and stakeholders. Attach relevant files directly to tasks for seamless collaboration. Whether it’s content drafts, design assets, or other documents, having everything in one place allows your team to work efficiently and access resources as needed. Other teams (or individual people) might prefer a list view of the calendar like this one in Airtable.
This package includes a spreadsheet for scheduling, monthly planning, Twitter updates, Facebook updates, LinkedIn updates, Instagram Updates, and Pinterest updates. Staying organized and consistent with your content strategy is crucial for success. After all, our research into content marketing trends suggests a focus on quality over quantity. One way to ensure quality with your content efforts is to use content calendars.
Inside, you’ll have access to various courses on content marketing, personal branding, and other marketing strategies. You’ll also be able to ask the team specific questions and receive feedback on your content. These marketers are the team behind Copyblogger and have plenty of experience building content marketing programs. The use of tools like Creately can elevate your content calendar management with its visual collaboration features, real-time updates, and integrated performance tracking.
Google Sheets Vs Google Calendar
Use your calendar to align your email content with your overall marketing strategy. This ensures that your email messages complement and reinforce content shared across other channels, creating a more cohesive brand experience. Keyword research helps you identify the search terms that your target audience is using. This information can be used to optimize your content for search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract more organic traffic.
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. This template is built specifically for use in the Monday software and houses essential information like post copy, date and time of publication, and visual assets. The calendar has a tab for every month and includes dozens of fun and unique post ideas.
By repurposing content, you save time and effort while still delivering valuable information to your audience. For example, you might turn a blog post into an infographic, or create a video based on a popular social media post. In addition, repurposing content can help you reach new audiences, as you can share the same content in different formats or on different platforms. Starting with the calendar year ensures that your content is timely and relevant.
If you’re a social media marketer managing various accounts, the social media content calendar template is perfect for you. It’s suitable for managing both — a small or big social media presence. The whole process can be a timesuck from content creation and other valuable business activities. Evergreen content refers to content that remains relevant and valuable over time, rather than being tied to a specific event, trend, or season.
This is more than a planner—it’s a strategy companion, built to align your posting habits with audience behavior. Use this template if you want a visually appealing, minimalist calendar that’s easy to customize and perfect for presenting your monthly social media plan. It’s great for design-focused brands or creators who value aesthetics and need a high-level, stylish overview. Fully customizable in Canva, it’s perfect for social media managers who want a clean, high-level view of their publishing strategy without the clutter of spreadsheets.
Another important factor to consider when selecting the content channels to pursue is your own ability to sustainably publish that content format. For example, even if video content produces the best results, it’s probably not worth pursuing if you don’t enjoy making video content and you won’t produce it consistently. Yet consistently publishing outstanding content for every channel is unrealistic for most brands. Copyblogger Academy is where business owners learn how to turn content into a growth asset.
If consistency is your goal but time is tight, these platforms help you keep showing up without being constantly online. A content calendar template ensures that all your content is organized in a consistent and easy-to-follow format. This streamlines your content creation workflow and distribution efforts, saving you time and improving the overall effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. Overall, making a template is an essential step in creating a social media calendar that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll need to sign up for Miro to use this template, but you can create a single workspace with three editable boards (and unlimited team members) free of charge. Fully editable and exportable, the calendar is packed with events, hashtags, holidays, and other special days. To use it, simply duplicate the Notion template, add it to your Google Calendar, or download it as a PDF, HTML file, or Markdown. Last year, we completed a detailed, per-post review which was well worth the time spent. We learned what works and what doesn’t by sorting posts into low, mid, and high-performing categories. Most teams won’t need every field from day one, but the more you track, the easier it is to report, optimize, and repurpose down the line.