For example, Facebook’s organic reach has slowed for a lot of accounts, but paid ads continue to perform well. Here, you can change everything from the publish date to the content itself. To see the details of each post in your calendar, hover over the card. Hit Delete to remove the post entirely, or Share Now to publish it immediately. You’ll be taken to a similar pop-up window as mentioned in the Create Post section of Create where you can add text and media, get help from Buffer’s AI assistant, and more.
A scheduling tool with a calendar removes the copy-paste between plan and publish. Look for month and week views, drag to reschedule, and captions per platform. Many multi-client managers run a sheet or Notion board for planning and a scheduler for the approved month. Three half-maintained calendars that disagree with each other is not. However, AI cannot define your strategy, develop your brand voice, or understand your specific audience. The calendar, the content pillars, the posting schedule, and the creative direction all still need a human behind them, which we all must use every time.
Canva Social Media Calendar Templates
Even if something can’t be used immediately, you can save it for future use. Mixing new ideas with evergreen content can be a good way to make sure your calendar is always updated. You likely have a solid idea of the kind of content you’re creating thanks to your strategy work in Step 1. Now, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work on the actual content creation. Twenty separate messages is twenty chances for the client to go quiet.
Consistency factors into a lot of platforms’ decisions to push certain content. Basically, the more consistently you post, the better your chances of getting in front of your target audience. Once you organize your processes, you can focus all your energy on creativity. You can also keep track of social, cultural, and historical moments that are relevant to your audience or brand to tap into for future campaigns. With your content ready and raring to go, play around with your calendar to find the perfect mix for each day, week, and month.
It provides a comprehensive view of all posts in a calendar format, along with a planning view similar to our Google Sheet calendar. Decide how often you will post on each platform based on your goals and available resources. While consistency is important, maintaining high-quality content is equally important. Your chosen posting frequency will guide how much content you need to prepare for your calendar. For guidance on posting frequency, refer to our social media guidelines.
Sprout Social’s External Approvers capability lets you email them a review link so they can approve, reject or leave comments, with no login required. Build one calendar that gives you a full cross-network view while making room for platform-specific details. That’s how you stay organized without flattening your strategy. CapCut is a free video editing app with an intuitive interface and a deep library of effects, transitions, and templates. We use it for TikTok edits and all our other social video content.
Without one, content gets lost in Slack threads, clients give feedback on outdated drafts, and posts go live that were never properly reviewed. With a shared content calendar, everyone in your team knows what is planned, who owns what, and what stage each piece of content is in. Every post you publish should connect to a goal, whether that is brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation, or product conversions. AI can detect when too many posts are scheduled in a short time frame or when posts from different teams overlap, helping social media managers avoid content clashes and fatigue. Features like bulk scheduling, AI-powered caption generation, and the best time to post recommendations significantly reduce the time spent on social media management. Identifying and scheduling posts for the optimal times, along with AI-powered suggestions and hashtag generation, helps users connect with their audience more effectively.
Step 5: Batch Create Your Content
The format matters less than the habit of using one consistently. You might find the tool that helps you reach your next social media KPI. Combining these tools could help you execute your strategy efficiently to drive ROI.
- Debayan Paul is a content marketing leader specializing in product-led B2B SaaS content, with a background in journalism that still shapes how he writes.
- Based on SocialBu platform data from May 2026, the top 10% of publishers account for 84% of all published content.
- Try these weekly or monthly templates created by the team at Buffer, or navigate to Canva’s Calendar templates gallery and play around with making your own.
You can also view all your posts in different views, like a list, table, Kanban board, or Gantt chart, which can be useful in planning. It’s a great choice for a content marketing or editorial calendar template too, as you can map out newsletters, blog posts, and other digital marketing campaigns. A social media calendar template is a ready-made structure for planning what you’ll post, where, and when, so you’re not staring at a blank screen every week. Whether you’re a solopreneur or working with a large team, a social media content calendar is key to staying consistent and meeting your goals. You’ve guessed it – we’ve taken all of our learnings as social media managers and crafted the number one tool set for social scheduling – you should check it out! But, regardless of your tool set, we asked Later’s social team to break down how to build a successful content calendar.
If you assumed building a social media calendar is complex and tedious, you’ll be surprised to know there are many software that can do this in seconds. To guide you in using these tools and point you to seven best ones for 2025, we’ve compiled this great guide. We’re demonstrating the entire process in 8 actionable steps, analyzing the best calendaring software, and outlining pro tips to make your work a breeze.
Have one person on your team test one out and report their findings. You can schedule one Pin at a time, up to one month in advance. I signed up for Loomly’s free trial quickly because I didn’t have to add credit card info, which I know can be a deterrent if you’re just looking to test a tool.
You’ll want to leverage market research, which can help you find the most popular social media platforms for your audience. As marketers, we recognize that social media is integral to an effective inbound marketing strategy. With so many social networks available to us, staying organized and planning for when and what we share is crucial. This is exactly where a social media calendar enters the picture. Check out the best social media calendar tools to help you keep track of what to post and when. We’ve recently transitioned our marketing content calendar to Airtable, which offers a user-friendly “Social Media Calendar” template.
Teams using Sprout Social have realized $1.1M in time savings from core platform capabilities over three years, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study. I keep track of our metrics in a spreadsheet so the entire team can easily see how new strategies are impacting results. For example, when LinkedIn pushed out a new algorithm update, we created a post to educate our audience and meet the moment.
You can also use Semrush Social to find the best time to post specifically for your brand. Use your minimum viable calendar to experiment with posting frequencies for a few weeks. These pillars will guide your content brainstorming and creation efforts. Let’s find out how you can create a minimum viable calendar to get your marketing efforts off the ground. You’re setting your team up for missed deadlines, subpar content, and lots of frustration. On the other hand, calendars that constantly pivot to chase every trend can dilute your brand identity.
Of course, features and capabilities will differ based on your calendar enabler or platform. Spreadsheet calendars are popular with individuals and small (even mid-sized) teams, thanks to their low cost and superb flexibility. Posting one to three times daily aligns with algorithmic preferences. Each platform has different audience habits and algorithm signals. The table below outlines how template requirements typically evolve based on team size. Use it as a reference to gauge whether your current setup supports your structure or quietly slows it down.
An additional feature I want to call out is the AI assistant, which you can use to draft social media content and save even more time. This tool makes it simple to draft http://www.deliveredsocial.com/international-content-calendars-local-behavior-soltaros-ou your social posts account-by-account. You can quickly draft posts, upload media (like images), and any important campaign information for tracking. Below, plan out posts for entire weeks or months in advance, freeing up your working hours to strategize for the future.
Create a new spreadsheet on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and add the above-mentioned fields as column headers. “First define what you need to do, and how you’re going to do it. Remember, “Without a strategy, there is no plan. Without a plan, there’s chaos.”
By tracking and analyzing UTM parameters, you’ll see what content meets your conversion goals and what drives the most engagement on social media platforms. Using a social media calendar ensures your team has plenty of time to do their best work. Google Sheets works well for teams that want a simple way to plan social media content without committing to a dedicated tool. A tool that’s specifically designed to be a social media calendar removes a lot of manual work and also centralizes planning, scheduling, and publishing in one place. A simple social media calendar might just include dates with post titles and a summary of the content to include.
For example, say that Instagram has historically been your top social media channel for engagement, but you’ve seen a drop in the last six months. Once you‘ve completed your audit, it’s time to use what you learned. Your audit should give you a sense of what you’re doing right, where you should experiment, and which channels are best for your audience. Your social content planner gives you a simple way to let everyone know what you’ll need well before you need it. Mark important dates, holidays, and events that are relevant to your department, office, or organization. Plan your content around these key dates, and if you’re preparing for a major event, schedule announcements and reminders in advance.
The first step to creating a social media calendar is to understand your goals. It’s free and accessible anywhere (on web, mobile, or tablet) – even offline. Smooth customization and scalability make it easy to create workflows, visualize timelines, and analyze post engagement trends.
Or, you might find that short videos generate more engagement on TikTok than on YouTube. As well as getting feedback from the teams who use your social media calendar, you can also dig into your analytics to find out which posts perform best. Track your metrics on each social platform to identify posts that get the most likes, shares, saves, and comments, and adjust your calendar to include more posts like these. It’s also important to remember every social media platform is unique. Each caters to different audiences, has different content formats, and offers different ways to interact with content and users. Consider the nuances of each channel as you plan your social media calendar.
Plan Your Content Schedule
Many social media channels offer native post-scheduling features, and you can also use social media scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Later to assist with this. Unlike the other simple spreadsheets on our list, Iconosquare’s social media content calendar template comes as an actual calendar view. While handy, it can only be used in Notion or Google Calendar, limiting its audience. Don’t worry — you don’t need to be on ALL social media platforms to get a high social media ROI. Focus on where your target audience is and the platforms with the highest ROI. This will save your team effort and time, resulting in a much more manageable social media content calendar.
With a paid plan, you can schedule and publish posts to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. Canva also provides high-level performance insights for published posts, helping teams track results without leaving the platform. Canva is best suited for teams that create design-heavy social content and want to plan and publish posts directly from their design workflow. A social media calendar can help you save time by keeping all your ideas and posts in one place.