The Social Media Content Calendar Template Every Marketer Needs [Free Template]

 "We have a 9 a.m. meeting? Hold on -- let me just click around the internet like a maniac to find something for the morning tweet." 

Sound familiar? Scrambling for social content is nothing new. We have meetings. We run late. Things come up. And it's really hard to get any meaningful amount of work done when you have the next social media update looming over your head every 30, 60, or 90 minutes. It all moves so fast that you might periodically feel a case of the vapors coming on, which is why pre-scheduled social media content should be your new best friend.

To make social media content easier for companies to plan and schedule across the accounts they manage, we created a social media content calendar template. And recently, we updated to be better, faster, stronger, and just generally prettier.

Copy of Memo Templates (4)

→ Free Download: Social Media Calendar Template [Access Now]

But first...

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar organizes your publishing schedule by date so that you can keep track of deadlines, better manage your content creation team, and create transparency with all parties.

What's in this content calendar template?

Every content calendar is different and should be adjusted for your unique process. However, in this one, you'll find a general schedule tab, your monthly planning calendar, a repository for website content, and updates for each of the top social media platforms:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest

This blog post will walk you through exactly how to use the template to stay on top of your social media content planning for each one.

Note: HubSpot customers can also schedule content through Social Inbox, or use this spreadsheet to organize their content and subsequently upload it to Social Inbox. Detailed instructions for doing this exist in the cover sheet of the template.

FREE TEMPLATE

The Social Media Content Calendar Template to Plan Your Content Schedule

When you open up the social media content calendar template, you'll notice the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet has several different tabs, most of which are dedicated to a specific social network.

content calendar excel tabs: schedule, monthly planning calendar, content repository, twitter updates, facebook updates, linkedin updates, instagram updates, pinterest updates

The reason you'll want a different worksheet for every social network is simply that every social network is a little bit different. You can't just craft one, single social media update and use it across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

You can certainly promote the same piece of content across those networks, but that doesn't mean you'll craft your update in the same way for every single one of them. (In fact, you may even want to add additional tabs if you're active on other networks, like Quora or YouTube.)

This following sub-sections will walk you through how to fill out each of the tabs you see in this template -- the updates for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. But before we get to that, let's just walk through the "Monthly Planning Calendar" so you know what that's for.

Monthly Social Media Schedule 

The tab "Monthly Planning Calendar" provides an overall snapshot of your monthly social media campaigns. It'll help you coordinate better with other stakeholders, not to mention keep all the moving parts straight in your own mind. Here's what it looks like:

social media content calendar month view with colored cells for each content type

There are three sections to take note of when you edit this template for your own purposes. First, the color-coding key: These are the types of content or campaigns around which you might coordinate, like ebooks, webinars, blog posts, product launches, and so on. Though only some of these might be relevant to you, they're there to indicate what you may want to put in there -- so be sure to edit these categories to align with your own campaigns.

The other two sections you'll need to edit are the Month and Year at the top of the calendar (duh), as well as the cells below each day of the week. In those cells, you should enter the type of content you'll be promoting that day and color-code it to align with the campaign it's supporting.

Instead of deleting all the content in this spreadsheet each month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times over, and creating a separate sheet for each month. (If that gets to be too overwhelming, you can always save those tabs as a separate file.)

Planning Your Twitter Content Calendar

Alright, now let's get to the social media content. This section will be the lengthiest, because all subsequent sections will draw on the instructions we go through here. So if you read one section in this whole post, make it this one.

Let's say you want to add some tweets to your scheduling template. Skip over to the "Twitter Updates" tab, where you'll see this:

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