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Sep 16, 2025
A social media calendar is the backbone of every successful social media strategy. It helps you plan content in advance, stay consistent across platforms, avoid last-minute scrambles, and collaborate more efficiently with your team. With a well-organized content planning tool, you’ll never miss key dates, trending topics, or content opportunities.
In this article, you’ll learn how to create a social media content calendar template that saves time, improves performance, and eliminates guesswork. Plus, you’ll get access to free templates to get started right away.
A social media content planner is a schedule that shows all your upcoming social media posts, arranged by date and time. The planner can be a document, a spreadsheet, or a dashboard where you can organize content for multiple social media platforms.
Social media marketers and managers use content calendars to plan their posts, handle advertising campaigns, and keep track of their overall strategies. This comes in handy, especially when you manage multiple social media accounts.
Think of a social media calendar as an editorial tool that lets you create an agenda of upcoming posts, schedule posts, track important events and deadlines, and keep an overview of all your campaigns and projects in one place. Use your calendar together with a social media scheduler to maintain a steady posting cadence on multiple platforms.
A social media calendar includes:
Weekly social media content calendar in Planable
To create an engaging social media planner you have to make sure you’re posting a good mix of content, and avoid overlap or duplication.
So, I outlined an easy step-by-step process to boost your workflow and make content planning easier for you and your team.
The first golden rule in creating a social media calendar is to include a content mix (images, videos, gifs, articles, reposts) and formats (carousel posts, reels, polls, stories, live videos).
Start out by filling up your marketing calendar with recurring events. Here are a few content ideas for post types you can plan ahead:
A social media posting schedule is important for two reasons. First, social media should be used to supplement your other marketing efforts, not replace them. Second, because social media moves so quickly, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and post too much or too little. Both of these can result in a drop in engagement.
Your publishing schedule should be dictated by your business goals, available resources, and audience engagement patterns.
Social media experts recommend the following posting frequency:
You don’t need to be on every platform. You just need to be where it matters. Start by asking two simple questions:
Here’s how to figure that out:
Here’s an actionable tip: start with one to three platforms max. For most brands, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are a solid starting point. Test for 30–60 days, measure results, and expand only if you have the time and content to support it.
When it’s time to share your social media content calendar with the marketing team, you should have a clear workflow, and everyone should know what’s expected of them.
A social media planner tool like Planable can help your social media team better handle content planning: see what’s being worked on, who is working on it, and when it’s due to go live. This means you avoid not only surprises or last-minute scrambling to get things done but also overlaps or gaps in your content.
Social media campaigns have a lot of moving parts, including approval. Who gets to approve what? What type of content is important enough to warrant additional layers of approval? Should clients get a say when it comes to a particular piece of content?
Planable has a transparent and intuitive approval process that keeps big mistakes at bay. You know what I’m talking about: posting the same thing twice, accidentally publishing an unfinished post, or a disgruntled employee posting on the company’s behalf.
By planning and scheduling your posts ahead of time, you’ll build failsafes into your workflow. Scheduling gives your team and collaborators enough time to edit the copy and fact-check the information.
Planning ahead with a social media calendar also means you can insert an additional layer of protection by having organizational stakeholders green-light the content to ensure it adheres to brand guidelines, including tone of voice and design elements.
Once your posts are live, track their performance. Identify what gets the most engagement or drives the best results.
Use that data to test different variables such as content type, posting time, caption length, hashtags, and visuals. This is how you’ll find out what actually works for your audience.
Find out what tool is commonly used to create content calendars, makes planning faster and helps teams get smarter about what they post.
Planable is a social media tool that helps you plan and execute your social media content strategy. It offers a social media content calendar that lets you plan and schedule posts across 9 social media platforms.
You can also use Universal Content to create, customize, and collaborate on long-form content like blogs, emails, copy ads, or e-books.
Planable’s features let you collaborate with your team right next to the post and allow you to set different layers of approvals before the post goes live.
Planable’s content calendar
With Planable’s Campaigns, you can organize your content into structured projects, keeping everything neatly grouped for better planning and execution.
Campaigns calendar in Planable
Planable’s calendar has multiple approval workflows and settings to accommodate each team’s content planning needs:
Multi-level approval workflow settings in Planable
We needed to find more useful tools that would take less time from our work schedule. Planable’s calendar view made everything easier. I can do more things better and work better with my marketing team. — Aron K. from Blooders
Spreadsheets or Google sheets are a cost-effective way to keep track of social media posts. But if you don’t already have a social media calendar template, it can be tough to get started from scratch.
Using spreadsheets for your posting calendar means tracking every individual post manually and publishing content natively.
This can often involve a lot of manual work, especially if you handle multiple accounts and need to collaborate with your social team on a daily basis.
Whether you prefer Excel or Google spreadsheets, keep in mind they both have limitations when it comes to post approval and collaboration, which can lead to duplicating work and wasted time tracking down assets.
Google Calendar is another budget-friendly tool to keep track of your social media marketing efforts. You can build your social media calendar by creating a new Google Calendar and adding events for each social post. Be sure to include the date, time, platform, content, and any other relevant information.
This will help you keep track of your social media posts and ensure that they are consistent with your brand.
A social media content calendar template helps you hit the ground running. It gives you a framework to get started with organizing, scheduling and planning your upcoming social media posts. There’s no size fits all approach to this, so you’ll have to tailor it to the particularities of your campaign.
Planable’s content calendar template is key to managing multiple social media accounts. You can easily visualize your content by week or month and get a complete overview across all your pages. One unified calendar ensures one seamless social media strategy across multiple channels.
Planable also allows you to give clients or stakeholders a quick overview of the content plan via a guest view link. They can see posts and give feedback without having to log in.
Weekly content plan overview created in Planable, showing scheduled posts across multiple platforms.
Need some extra convincing? Here’s how your social media marketing efforts can benefit from a content calendar:
Planning, creating, and executing social media marketing campaigns can be a considerable time sink even for the savviest of specialists.
Using a content calendar tool for social media allows you to plan ahead, create content in batches and avoid multitasking. If it has collaboration features, it can even help you distribute and delegate work effectively to outsourced talent. This gives your in-house team extra support when needed.
A structured posting schedule is the key to achieving your marketing goals. Posting consistently means showing up in your audience’s feed daily with valuable, unique content. It’s the best way to get noticed by the algorithm and increase engagement.
It’s important that you’re remaining consistent with your marketing strategy when creating a monthly social media calendar. Because it’s easy to lose sight of your strategies and goals when you’re not actively focusing on it.
Bry’Ana Gage, Product Marketer at 500apps
Keep up a consistent posting schedule to build an audience for your business and create a community around your brand. It’s an opportunity to share insights and sympathize with your audience’s pain points, which builds trust when the time comes for them to buy your services.
A social media calendar will help to keep track of content consistency, quality, and how well you’re performing. Feedback gained through this will help you make the necessary changes to improve your social campaigns.
Rhi Storer, Marketing Analyst at Shopper
In a world where basically anyone can create content, you have to work extra hard to stand out.
Social media posts often involve input from multiple team members (designers, writers, managers, PR, brand specialists, you name it) all collaborating to get every detail right. But the logistics of managing assets, scheduling, and distribution can slow down the creative process and impact content quality.
A social media calendar simplifies this by organizing workflows and deadlines, freeing your team to focus on creating better content. Removing these logistical challenges leads to stronger, more consistent posts.
According to a study by The Marketing Meetup with 1,070 respondents the lack of time for creative work is the second biggest challenge for marketers. A clear, organized content calendar it is just essential for your strategy. It frees up mental space so you can focus on creativity instead of scrambling to plan your next post.
A social media calendar gives you valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. By organizing your content in a clear, trackable way, you set the stage for effective testing.
You can plan A/B tests to discover key details like the optimal posting frequency and best times to publish on each platform.
Your posting frequency will shape your social media planning calendar. Be sure to take into consideration internal resources when you do this. For example, don’t commit to posting daily when you don’t really have the time to develop original content and research relevant material to support this.
Prafull Sharma, Founder at LeadsPanda
Repurposing content can be as much of an art form as the act of creating it itself. Besides the obvious benefit of not having to pump out fresh content on a regular basis, repurposing your old stuff for social has several other perks:
However, not every piece of content lends itself to this strategy. Evergreen content is the best fit for repurposing for obvious reasons. Topical or time-constrained content requires a different system unless you put a creative twist on it or run the quirkiest social media page this side of the Internet.
💡 Check out our top Hootsuite alternatives picks for 2025!
Planable is one of the best free social media planners available. Its free plan includes up to 50 posts. It’s user-friendly and built for seamless collaboration and approval workflows.
A content calendar keeps your team accountable by laying out deadlines and plans in advance, making collaboration easier and more efficient.
Managing multiple social accounts can get chaotic, with each platform having its own quirks. A social media calendar helps you organize and streamline this process. It also ensures brand consistency by giving you a clear overview of how and when your content is distributed.
Using a tool like Planable makes setting up and managing your content calendar simple and effective.
Everybody directly or indirectly involved in the creation process should consider using a social media calendar:
If you want to take your social media game to the next level, a content calendar is the way to go. It will help you post consistently and save time. So roll up your sleeves and start creating! Also, don’t forget to try out Planable, one of the best social media planners. It’s free.
No matter your role, a content calendar it’s your backstage pass to smoother workflows, stronger strategies, and stress-free posting. If you’re serious about showing up online, it’s time to get organized.
Content marketer and aspiring YouTuber, in no particular order. Expertise in content writing, social media copywriting, and neo-noir graphic novels. Used to run a music webzine in the 2 seconds in the early 2010s when blogs were hot. I tweet very badly on Twitter.
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