Information to Making a Social Media Calendar [+ Template]

Social media practitioners and managers understand it’s simple to get caught up within the day-to-day of managing a number of social media accounts, particularly with a relentless circulation of recent content material, information and concepts. That’s why making a social media plan and sustaining a strategic, organized social media calendar is so important.

A well-built social media content material calendar helps you keep constant, plan strategically and collaborate seamlessly. This step-by-step information walks you thru making a high-impact content material calendar and provides a free calendar template.

What’s a social media calendar?

A social media calendar is a strategic, hyper-detailed plan of upcoming posts for all of your social channels organized by publish date and time. Together with the publish date and time for posts, your social media calendar may embody hyperlinks, tags, @-mentions, copy and media, corresponding to photographs and video.

You should utilize a digital calendar, spreadsheet or a social media administration platform like Sprout Social that provides an interactive dashboard and the power to schedule posts.

Advantages of utilizing a social media calendar

A content material calendar is the important thing to a profitable social media plan as a result of there are such a lot of advantages to utilizing one, from saving time to streamlining collaboration.

Listed below are just a few:

1. Saves time and widens group bandwidth

A social media calendar saves your group time by preserving them organized, particularly after they’re managing a number of accounts. That method, they’ll have extra time to deal with creating high-quality content material.

As a social media supervisor, planning out a social calendar months prematurely saves you from scouring trending matters and information tales daily for concepts. It’ll additionally offer you extra bandwidth to trace and check completely different methods to see what resonates most along with your target market.

2. Maintains a constant posting schedule

There’s no onerous rule for a way a lot you must put up, but it surely’s vital to put up steadily to take care of an lively presence.

A social media content material calendar permits groups to prioritize high quality, not amount. Plus, planning will construct larger consistency by way of your model voice and magnificence quite than posting in a reactive or unplanned method.

3. Ensures high quality and protects model fame

Proactive scheduling permits social groups to verify their work and shield their model’s fame. It’s simpler to catch a typo or stop a possible public relations disaster while you aren’t dashing and a workflow approval course of is in place. Utilizing a social media calendar will allow you to catch these errors sooner quite than later.

4. Streamlines cross-functional collaboration

A well-crafted social media calendar provides everybody visibility into upcoming content material, serving to groups align round key deadlines, campaigns and duties. A shared view streamlines cross-functional collaboration, minimizes last-minute scrambles and retains social efforts in sync with broader advertising targets.

By working from a transparent, centralized calendar, groups can keep organized, meet deadlines extra persistently and be sure that messaging stays cohesive throughout departments.

5. Optimizes approval workflows

Social media calendars are instrumental in streamlining approval workflows inside organizations. By offering a visible overview of deliberate content material, these calendars set up clear communication between groups and align everybody on targets, timelines and expectations for execution.

A centralized method to content material scheduling simplifies the approval course of as a result of it supplies simultaneous visibility amongst contributors and stakeholders. This ensures that every one members perceive the steps concerned for evaluations, iterations and approvals. Having everybody on the identical web page will help well timed approvals, stop bottlenecks‌ and preserve a constant circulation of high quality content material.

6. Helps planning for product launches, campaigns and occasions

Social content material calendars streamline cross-functional collaboration and workflows and facilitate strategic planning for product launches, campaigns and occasions. For instance, your group can be sure that its social media posts sync up with bigger campaigns so stakeholders can simply view what you’ve deliberate and supply suggestions, if obligatory.

As a result of social media calendars empower groups to align on timing, content material sorts, key milestones and deadlines, they help meticulous planning that successfully highlights and promotes every section of a launch or occasion. This strategic alignment additionally retains messaging constant throughout all channels.

7. Permits strategic content material repurposing

Calendars may assist with repurposing content material for social media. Sustaining a document of previous posts and their efficiency metrics will allow you to spot high-performing content material that’s simple to recycle or adapt.

Repurposing content material helps groups save time and sources whereas persistently delivering participating content material. This method enhances your content material technique and strengthens engagement over time.

8. Improves engagement and efficiency monitoring

Social media content material calendars improve the effectiveness of social media reporting by offering a framework for monitoring efficiency and engagement.

If you happen to use a social media administration software program like Sprout, you’ll be able to preserve your content material calendar and reporting in a single place. For instance, the Publish Efficiency Report highlights your top-performing content material and reveals precisely while you revealed it. This may also help you determine posts with spikes in engagement and fine-tune your social media content material as obligatory.

Kinds of social media content material calendars (and a template)

There are numerous social media content material calendars you should utilize to deal with your completely different wants. Let’s overview a few of them, together with a social media calendar template you should utilize:

Sprout’s social media calendar

Entrepreneurs plan content material for various timeframes: day by day, weekly and month-to-month, making it important to make use of instruments that help versatile planning. Sprout’s Publishing Calendar makes this simpler by streamlining long-term and short-term content material planning and execution.

As an alternative of utilizing separate calendars for every cadence and social community, you should utilize Sprout’s calendar—it has weekly and month-to-month views the place you’ll be able to plan and schedule content material throughout a number of networks. This makes it simple to see your content material schedule at a look and allows you to make modifications as obligatory. Cross-network visibility allows you to preserve a cohesive social media technique, optimize your publishing cadence and tailor messaging for every community.

‘Greatest time to put up’ social media calendar

Social media planning isn’t nearly publishing content material persistently—time is one other main issue as a result of it might impression your attain and engagement. The most effective occasions to put up on social media fluctuate by community and when your viewers is lively. To nail down the timing, you should utilize a weekly social media calendar that outlines ideally suited publishing occasions.

Social media calendar templates

As an alternative of making new calendars from scratch every week or month, use social media calendar templates to save lots of effort and time. That will help you keep organized, enhance visibility and align your content material along with your key efficiency indicators (KPIs), make the most of this downloadable template.

Obtain template

Tips on how to create a social media calendar

An efficient social media calendar goes past merely organizing posts—it helps you align content material along with your targets, maintain the complete group within the loop and deal with execution with out scrambling on the final minute to finalize matters, belongings or posting schedules.

With Sprout, you’ll be able to construct and handle a content material calendar that brings your social media content material to life, from planning to publishing to efficiency monitoring. Right here’s how one can do it:

Join your social media accounts to Sprout

Begin by connecting your model’s social profiles to Sprout. As soon as linked, Sprout centralizes your efforts, enabling you to plan, publish and monitor content material throughout all of your social channels from a single, streamlined dashboard—eliminating the necessity to toggle between a number of instruments.

Right here’s how one can join your social media profiles:

1. Go to Account and settings > Join a Profile.

2. Select the networks you need to join—Fb, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok or X (previously Twitter).

3. Comply with the prompts to authorize entry.

Join your social profiles to Sprout to unlock a unified publishing technique, saving worthwhile time, minimizing handbook duties and fostering seamless group collaboration throughout all of your social media accounts.

Conduct a social media audit

Earlier than you begin scheduling and publishing, take inventory of your present content material and its efficiency. This includes assessing what content material continues to be performing properly, what wants a refresh or archiving and what’s lacking altogether.

For instance, you open Sprout’s Publish Efficiency Report and uncover insights corresponding to your behind-the-scenes Reels outperforming product photographs on Instagram or your LinkedIn engagement dropping each Friday. These insights allow you to decide what to maintain doing, what to alter and the place to fill essential gaps.

Sprout makes it simple to conduct an audit with built-in efficiency reporting for every linked profile. Navigate to the Studies tab within the left-hand navigation bar, your central hub for all of your account and profile efficiency knowledge.

Right here’s what to search for:

• Metrics per community: Outline success for every platform (corresponding to clicks and conversions on Instagram, impressions on X or shares on LinkedIn).

• Profile efficiency: Monitor follower development, impressions, clicks and engagement per profile with Sprout’s Profile Efficiency Report.

• Publish efficiency: Use the Publish Efficiency Report to research which posts carried out the most effective (and worst) throughout your social media accounts.

• Tag efficiency: Consider how completely different content material classes (like “marketing campaign,” “product” or “occasion”) carry out utilizing Sprout’s Tag Efficiency Report.

• Publishing conduct: Visualize your put up frequency by day, time and social channel to simply determine gaps and fine-tune your publishing cadence.

As you audit your content material, analyze your rivals to assist gauge your success. Pay shut consideration to what they’re posting, how typically and the way a lot engagement they get.

Sprout’s Competitor Posts Report simplifies this course of, enabling you to see rivals’ top-performing posts, examine engagement metrics aspect by aspect and floor traits of their content material technique from a single view. It’s a fast method to spot what’s working for others in your business.

Sprout Tip: Export PDF reviews to share along with your group or stakeholders, turning your audit right into a data-backed pitch for what to maintain creating and what to revisit or keep away from.

Unsure the place to start out? Obtain our free social media audit template to information you thru the audit course of step-by-step. It’s additionally customizable, so you’ll be able to tweak it to align along with your targets.

Obtain template

Choose your social media channels, content material sorts and posting cadence

Shoppers aren’t simply scrolling by way of social media feeds—they’re buying on them. Based on Sprout’s 2025 Index Report™, Fb leads the best way, with 39% of shoppers making purchases there, adopted by TikTok at 36% and Instagram at 29%. This highlights the worth of tailoring your content material technique to the place your viewers is most engaged.

To tailor your content material technique, start by aligning it with the channels your viewers makes use of to interact and store. Right here’s how you are able to do that:

Select the proper networks on your viewers

You don’t need to be current on each social media community. The place your viewers spends time—and the way they behave there—ought to information choice.

For instance:

• Instagram and TikTok are for visible storytelling and short-form video.
• LinkedIn is for B2B manufacturers and thought management.
• Pinterest drives discovery and is nice for evergreen content material.

Match content material sorts to targets

Your social media calendar ought to characteristic a mixture of content material codecs to satisfy completely different advertising targets. This content material selection retains your feed recent and reaches your viewers in a number of methods, whether or not the objective is to coach or entertain them. Sprout’s 2024 Content material Benchmarks Report revealed that short-form movies lead in engagement throughout most social networks, with 81% of viewers favoring them.

But it surely’s not about what’s in style or chasing traits. The content material codecs you select ought to resonate along with your viewers and your targets. Right here’s how one can match content material sorts to your targets:

Purpose	Greatest content material sorts
Construct model consciousness	Reels, TikTok movies, branded intro movies and influencer collaborations
Drive engagement	Polls, Q&As, interactive Tales and carousels
Generate conversions	Testimonials, product demos, limited-time presents and powerful CTAs
Educate your viewers	How-to content material, weblog excerpts, infographics and knowledgeable quotes
Earn belief and loyalty	Behind-the-scenes movies, user-generated content material and worker options

You’ll be able to degree up your content material technique with Sprout’s listening instruments. Leverage social listening for aggressive analysis to determine the high-performing content material sorts, key phrases, hashtags and matters your viewers is already interacting with. This helps you ship related and high-intent content material the place your viewers is already lively.

Outline your posting cadence

There’s no magic quantity for a way typically to put up. It depends upon your viewers, network-specific norms and inner bandwidth.

That’s the place Sprout’s ViralPost® is available in—it robotically identifies the most effective occasions to put up, taking the guesswork out of posting cadences by analyzing your viewers’s engagement patterns and recommending optimum ship occasions for every community you employ.

To additional optimize your posting technique, contemplate the patterns that surfaced out of your audit and aggressive evaluation. Examine every social community’s publication dates and occasions to find out particular themes. This data helps you arrange and plan your posts for max visibility.

Arrange your campaigns with Sprout’s Asset Library

Sprout’s Asset Library permits you to add and retailer numerous asset sorts, together with photographs, movies and textual content snippets. This centralized repository provides your group entry to authorised, on-brand content material, serving to them keep away from last-minute scrambling, time-consuming file searches or grabbing outdated supplies.

Sustaining a library of persistently branded visuals, voice and messaging to be used throughout your social media accounts boosts model recognition and marketing campaign ROI by constructing viewers belief and engagement.

Sprout’s Asset Library makes organizing belongings by marketing campaign easy with its tagging system. To add an asset, take the next steps:

1. Head to Publishing > Asset Library.
2. Click on + Add New and choose the asset sort (picture, video or textual content).
3. Fill in asset particulars, together with title, description and any related tags.
4. Click on Add Asset to add.

Sprout helps JPEG, PNG, GIF (as much as 20MB), MP4 and MOV (as much as 3GB).

Right here’s how one can arrange your belongings utilizing folders in Sprout’s Asset Library:

Arrange belongings with folders

When you add your belongings, preserve a tidy library by categorizing belongings into folders primarily based on campaigns, content material sorts or themes.

Right here’s how one can create a folder:

1. Within the Asset Library, click on the folder icon within the top-right nook.
2. Choose Add Folder.
3. Title your folder (for instance, “Spring Launch 2025”).
4. Click on Create Folder.

So as to add belongings to a folder, do the next:

1. Choose the belongings you need to transfer by checking the bins subsequent to them.
2. Click on Transfer to Folder on the prime.
3. Select the suitable folder and make sure.

Tag belongings to categorize campaigns higher

Tag your belongings with related marketing campaign identifiers to make them simply discoverable. This helps you higher arrange belongings and ensures seamless integration into related marketing campaign workflows.

Tagging belongings additionally helps you robotically floor related belongings when creating new campaigns, saving time trying to find supplies that align with marketing campaign themes or targets.

Listed below are fast steps to tag belongings for higher marketing campaign categorization:

1. Create a marketing campaign

Earlier than you’ll be able to tag belongings, you’ll have to arrange your marketing campaign in Sprout:

• Navigate to Publishing > Campaigns > Energetic Campaigns.
• Click on Create Marketing campaign within the higher proper nook.
• Fill in marketing campaign particulars, together with the identify, description and any related tags.
• Click on Create Marketing campaign to save lots of.

2. Tag belongings inside the marketing campaign

When you arrange your marketing campaign, you’ll be able to affiliate its belongings. Right here’s how one can tag current belongings:

• Go to Publishing > Asset Library.
• Click on on the asset you need to tag.
• Within the asset particulars pane, discover the Marketing campaign dropdown.
• Choose the suitable marketing campaign.
• Click on Save Asset.

3. Filter belongings by marketing campaign

To view belongings for a selected marketing campaign, do the next:

• Within the Asset Library, use the Filter choice.
• Choose the marketing campaign you want from the Marketing campaign filter.

Filtering by marketing campaign helps you rapidly discover the belongings you want. No have to scroll by way of a listing of choices, you’ll be able to maintain content material creation shifting with out dropping focus.

Automate content material approval workflows

Content material approvals can gradual issues down when a group doesn’t have a course of in place. A streamlined approval course of quickens content material creation and helps you publish content material persistently and on time. An easy approval workflow instantly contributes to manufacturing effectivity, which, in line with the Index, is the primary method social groups measure success internally.

Sprout makes it simple to construct approval workflows so your posts can transfer seamlessly from draft to publish with out bottlenecks or back-and-forth emails.

Right here’s how one can arrange an approval workflow with Sprout:

1. Go to Settings > Approval Workflows.
2. Click on Create New Workflow.
3. Give it a reputation (like “Advertising Staff” or “Authorized Evaluate”).
4. Assign related approvers.

1. Select whether or not all approvers should approve a step or if anybody approver is sensible.
2. Click on Save.

With an environment friendly approval workflow and designated approvers, you’ll be able to seamlessly approve every put up earlier than it goes reside.

Want sign-off from somebody in authorized, a consumer or somebody in one other division who’s not an assigned approver in your Sprout workflow? Sprout’s Exterior Approvers functionality allows you to e-mail them a overview hyperlink to allow them to approve, reject or depart feedback—no login required. Simply add their e-mail when assigning an approval, and Sprout will deal with the remaining.

Monitor content material approval standing

To maintain issues shifting, head to the Wants Approval part below Publishing. You’ll see:

• Posts awaiting overview
• Remaining approvers
• Any suggestions or change requests

Plus, prompt notifications of approvals or rejections remove delays and doubts about when to proceed.

Schedule and automate posts in Sprout

As soon as your content material is prepared, don’t simply put up it on the fly. Scheduling forward helps you keep constant, keep away from last-minute scrambling and have interaction your viewers at optimum occasions.

With Sprout, you’ll be able to plan, schedule and automate posts throughout all of your social media accounts from a single dashboard.

Right here’s how one can queue up your posts:

1. Click on the inexperienced Compose button within the top-right nook.
2. Select which profiles to put up to (Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and so forth.).
3. Add your textual content, add your picture or video and preview the put up on every chosen community.
4. Manually set the posting time or click on Use Optimum Ship Instances to let Sprout decide the most effective time primarily based in your viewers knowledge.
5. Click on Schedule.

Sprout Tip: Set a default schedule utilizing ViralPost® in your Publishing Settings. That method, your group received’t have to consider timing each time they hit Schedule.

Monitor efficiency in Sprout’s dashboard

Your social media calendar isn’t only a planning software. It’s additionally a method to observe and measure metrics throughout each community you employ. Use it to research what’s working, what’s not and how one can constantly optimize your social media calendar.

As you overview your campaigns, deal with amassing key efficiency indicators like engagement charges, impressions, clicks, conversions and viewers development. These insights allow you to perceive how your content material resonates along with your viewers and the place to regulate your method.

Sprout makes this simpler with numerous social media reviews that serve completely different functions. For instance, the Publish Efficiency Report helps you determine top-performing content material, whereas the Marketing campaign Report supplies a high-level view of how particular person campaigns drive outcomes. You may as well use the Profile Efficiency and Tag Efficiency reviews to get insights into network-specific traits or observe content material by themes or targets.

To be taught extra about managing campaigns in Sprout, discover this detailed information on making a marketing campaign efficiency report.

Social media calendar apps

There are a lot of social media administration instruments and social media scheduling instruments to select from. Right here’s a fast overview of our prime two favourite instruments:

Sprout Social

Sprout’s instruments will genuinely empower your social media group. The interactive content material calendar and publishing and scheduling instruments enhance visibility, enhance group effectivity and increase buyer loyalty, so social groups have extra bandwidth for inventive efforts. For example, you’ll be able to observe up in your scheduled posts by establishing a course of for responding and interesting along with your viewers within the Good Inbox.

Basically, Sprout’s interactive content material calendar allows you to handle the social expertise from starting to finish.

Google Calendar and Sheets

Google Calendar and Sheets are free, pretty intuitive instruments with many social media calendar templates. Each apps permit for straightforward viewing of upcoming posts and drive collaboration by way of suggestions and feedback.

Notion

Notion is a robust note-taking app, but it surely’s additionally a software for entrepreneurs. The app has a database characteristic that can be utilized to create templates, together with social media calendars. Notion is extremely customizable and collaborative, so customers can simply view the standing of content material and provides suggestions through feedback all inside one platform.

Floor your planning with a social media calendar

Your time is just too worthwhile to spend deciding what to put up daily. With a well-planned social media content material calendar, you’ll be able to remove the day by day guesswork and unlock time to deal with long-term planning and different key elements of your advertising technique.

You’ll be able to create a social media calendar from scratch, however utilizing a template and personalizing it to your model’s wants will prevent time whereas guaranteeing that you’ve got all of the important elements. Sprout’s social media calendar template makes organizing and optimizing content material planning simple. With Sprout’s Instagram, Fb, TikTok and LinkedIn integrations, you’ll be able to simply create, schedule, publish and have interaction with social posts.

Strive Sprout at no cost—enroll utilizing your corporation e-mail right now.