A Step-by-Step Guide on Making a Social Media Content Calendar for 2024

A social media schedule that lists all of your upcoming social media posts by date and time is called a social media calendar, often known as a social media content planner. You can arrange material for various social media networks using the planner, which can be a document, spreadsheet, or dashboard. Calendars are used by social media managers and marketers to schedule content, manage campaigns, and monitor their overall strategy. This is useful, particularly if you oversee several social media profiles.

A social media schedule must to consist of:

• Timing and date of publication
• Post format on social media platforms (youtube short, tale, reel, etc.)
• Visual post-copy (picture, gif, video)
• Hashtags location tag

How to make a 2024 social media calendar

Make sure you post a variety of content on your social media calendar and steer clear of overlap or duplicate.

However, how can one design a calendar that seamlessly integrates with the work processes of their team? We've laid out the simple, step-by-step procedure for you:

Step 1: Determine the Formats and Post Types

Are you unsure about what should be on your social media content calendar? The best practice is to use a variety of formats and content types, such as carousel posts, reels, polls, stories, and live videos, along with photographs, videos, gifs, articles, and reposts.

Step 2: Decide how Frequency you want to Post

There are two main reasons why a social media posting schedule matters. First and foremost, social media need to support rather than take the place of your other marketing initiatives. Second, it's simple to get overwhelmed by the rapid pace of social media and publish either too little or too much. A decrease in involvement may come from either of these.

Your company objectives, the resources at your disposal, and the trends in audience involvement should determine the publishing schedule.

Experts in social media advise posting at the following frequency:

• Three to five Instagram posts every week
• Five to seven videos every week on Instagram
• Weekly tales on Instagram: 7–15
• Three to five Facebook updates every week
• Ten to twenty tweets every week on Twitter
• Three to five postings each week on LinkedIn
• TikTok posts: five to seven each week
• Posts on Google My Business: one to three each week

Step 3: Select the appropriate platforms for yourself

Will you be posting to a single social network or several? Take your resources and business goals into account. What goals do you have, and how much time and money are you willing to dedicate to them?

Start by closely examining the competition: on which platforms do they post the most and on which ones do they ignore altogether? Next, delve deeply into your intended audience's habits and whereabouts. What can you learn from their behavior?

Avoid feeling obligated to use every social networking outlet; you'll just wind up overcommitting and getting nothing in return. Start with the three most popular social networking sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) if you're unsure which one to use, and then go from there.

Step 4: Work Together, Provide Comments, and Approve Postings

You should have an organized procedure and everyone should understand their responsibilities when it comes time to submit your social media content calendar with the marketing team.

Your social media team can manage content planning more effectively if they use a social media planner tool like Planable, which lets you know what's being worked on, by whom, and when it will go online. By doing this, you can avoid content overlaps and gaps in addition to surprises and last-minute scrambling.

Approval is just one of the many moving components of social media campaigns. Who has the authority to authorize what? What kind of content is significant enough to require several levels of approval? Should customers have a say on a specific piece of content?

These three problems are three more than you should have encountered if you have encountered them. Planable features an easy-to-use and transparent review procedure that helps prevent major errors. What I mean is when someone posts anything on social media twice, publishes an incomplete post by mistake, or an unhappy employee posts on the company's behalf.

Step 5: Plan, Coordinate, and keep an eye on your posts

By organizing and scheduling your postings in advance, you'll incorporate backup plans into your daily operations. By scheduling, you allow your team and partners ample time to revise the text and verify the accuracy of the information. By creating a social media calendar in advance, you can also add an extra degree of security by getting approval from organizational stakeholders for the content to make sure it follows brand standards for tone of voice and aesthetics.

Once your posts go live, monitor their performance to see which are generating the most interaction and producing the desired outcomes. Utilize the results of your research to do platform-specific experiments and explore the kinds of content, publishing days and hours, copy length, hashtags, and multimedia assets that your audience responds to.

Tools for social media calendars

1. Plannable: social media organizing, scheduling, and preparation

A social media application called Planable assists you in organizing and carrying out your social media content strategy. You may prepare fresh content and schedule posts on Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, Pinterest, and LinkedIn with its social media content calendar. Planable's capabilities enable you to specify several approval levels prior to a post becoming live and engage with your team immediately next to the post.

2. Spreadsheets: a manual method of organizing social media content

A simple technique to monitor social media posts is via spreadsheets or Google sheets. It can be difficult to start from scratch if you don't already have a social media calendar template, though. When you use spreadsheets for your posting calendar, you have to publish material locally and manually track each every post.

This can frequently require a significant amount of manual work, particularly if you manage several accounts and must regularly communicate with your social team. Regardless of your preference, keep in mind that post approval and collaboration are limited in both Excel and Google spreadsheets, which might result in redundant effort and lost time searching for content.

3. Google Calendar: a reasonably priced calendar for digital material

Another inexpensive tool for tracking your social media marketing activities is Google Calendar. By making a new Google Calendar and adding events for every social media post, you can construct your social media calendar. Don't forget to add the platform, content, date, time, and any other pertinent details. By doing this, you'll be able to monitor your social media posts and make sure they remain true to your brand.

Social media calendar advantages

If you still need more convincing, consider the following advantages of using a content schedule in your social media marketing:

Spend less time and focus on your whole social media plan

Even for the most intelligent experts, organizing, developing, and carrying out social media marketing strategies can take a significant amount of time.

Social networking has the drawback of requiring daily effort and attention. The days of just publishing whatever comes to mind when inspiration strikes are long gone. A calendar on social media to save the day! 

You may prevent multitasking, plan ahead, and publish content in groups by using a content calendar for social media. If you wish to provide your internal staff with further support, it can even assist you in allocating and distributing work to external talent efficiently when used in conjunction with quality freelance management software.

Keep your social media publishing schedule constant

The secret to reaching your marketing objectives is having a well-organized posting schedule. Posting regularly entails regularly appearing in your audience's feed with insightful, original information. It's the most effective method to raise engagement and get seen by the algorithm.

Maintain a regular posting schedule to grow your company's following and establish a community around your brand. When the time comes for your audience to purchase your services, you will have the opportunity to create trust by sharing insights and empathizing with their problems.

Avoid clear of major material uploading problems

Have you ever been embarrassed by someone else's errors indirectly? Imagine that times thousands of times. The following are some instances of common social media blunders made by social media teams:

• Brands failing to notice significant occurrences. similar to the occasion when Adidas realized how important wording is.
• not checking everything three times before posting. similar to the occasion when a BBC reporter broke the news of the Queen's passing.
• attempting to profit from trends and memes without having a solid social media plan. Similar to when LG ridiculed Apple on Twitter in response to consumers' fears that the brand-new iPhone 6 may break or bend. An iPhone was used to send the tweet.
• Inadvertently promoting your indie-folk band on your workplace's social media accounts (this can occur).