The Ultimate Social Media Content Calendar Template

Tips & How To’s Posted by Sam Social 1 Comment

Do you need a way to organize all your social media content ideas? Is your social media content calendar getting out of control?

The ultimate social media content calendar template can help you bring order to the chaos. It will help you think strategically about your social media content, as well as plan your tactical daily and weekly social media posts.

The Ultimate Social Media Content Calendar Template 

An effective content calendar template should be able to help you think long term and short term, strategically and tactically. Here are the first three steps for planning your social media content strategy and starting your posting calendar.

1Identify Big Picture Themes

It’s important to start with big picture themes so your social media content ties into your overall marketing strategy. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to help identify important themes:

• Are there major events planned such as product launches, conferences, or exhibits?
• Do you have seasonal events or promotions around holidays or times of year such as spring and fall?
• What major sales or promotions worked well in the past that you’d like to repeat?

Writing down your big picture themes will help you reserve the time and resources you and your team needs to develop your social media content for these important promotions.

You’ll then want to create a high level Editorial Calendar for the next six months at a minimum.

2Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar starts to get into the who-what-why for each major promotion or theme. It can serve to make sure all your marketing activities are coordinated across channels such social media, website, email, and press.

Content can take a while and some scarce resources to develop, so an editorial calendar can help to make sure resources are properly allocated. Make sure you identify major pieces of content needed, such as:

• Videos
• eBooks, guides and white papers
• Blog post series
• Infographics
• Custom imagery for posts

Many of these content pieces will need to be developed and available before any social media posts can be posted. That’s why it will be important to identify these and coordinate them in your social media content calendar template.

Whether you’re planning a week, month, or several months in advance, you’ll want to start filling in some of the details for each post in your post calendar next.

3Start The Tactics with Your Calendar of Posts

The post calendar is the tab in the content calendar template that you’ll probably use most frequently. You’ll want to keep it updated with key posts for each campaign, theme, or promotion. You can also identify assets such as photo’s, links, and downloads that will be part of each post series.

While it’s not critical to enter each and every post for every day, make sure that the most important ones are there for the beginning of each campaign and at key times during the campaign.

Keeping your post calendar up to date will help:

• Visualize what is planned and what is needed
• Make sure your content has an appropriate mix of different types of content
• Avoid missing key posts at the beginning or end of campaigns
• Avoid overloading your audience with too much on any given day or week.

If you’ve got a lot of overlapping campaigns running across multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram the post calendar will keep it all organized.

After you’ve started customizing your social media content calendar, you’ll be ready to generate more content ideas and start scheduling out your posts.

About the Author

Sam Social

Sam loves helping our users get the most out of Rignite and their social media. She blogs about ways to use Rignite to maximize your results from social media.

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