A social media calendar gives you a structured way to plan and publish across platforms.
When you have a social media calendar, you ensure a consistent posting cadence and remove the stress of having to come up with ideas on the fly.
In this guide, we’ll explain in greater detail what a social media calendar is and how to create one.
What Is a Social Media Calendar?
A social media calendar is a detailed overview of your upcoming social media posts that lays out what you’ll post, where you’ll post it, and when it will go live.
A simple social media calendar might just include dates with post titles and a summary of the content to include. More detailed calendars may include post times, hashtags to use, images, and links.
Here’s an example of what a social media calendar can look like when built with our free social media calendar template:
What Are the Key Components of a Social Media Calendar?
These are the key components most social media management calendars include:
- Platforms: Exactly which platforms the post will appear on, such as Instagram, X, Linkedin, and TikTok
- Posting time: The date and time when you intend for the post to go live
- Content type: The format the post will take, such as a single image, video, or poll
- Copy: The words included in the post, including calls to action (CTAs)
- Visual assets: Links to the assets that will be used in the post
- Hashtags (if relevant): Brand and industry hashtags to include
- Campaign details (if relevant): UTM parameters for campaign tracking
- Status: What stage the post is in, such as in progress, scheduled, or published
- Published link: The URL for the live post
What Are the Benefits of Having a Social Media Content Calendar?
A social media content calendar supports your social media strategy by allowing for the following benefits:
- It saves time: A social media calendar allows you to plan and schedule posts in batches, which reduces context switching and eliminates last-minute scrambling for ideas
- It keeps you consistent: A social media calendar provides a structured way to plan regular content that supports awareness, engagement, and growth
- It keeps you organized: A social media calendar keeps all your social media plans in one place to help you spot missed opportunities and important dates
- It helps maintain post quality: A social media calendar naturally invites a structured review process that reduces the risk of errors
- It enables collaboration: A social media content calendar serves as a source of truth that all relevant team members can use to move work forward
How to Create a Social Media Calendar
Create and use a social media content calendar by auditing your existing content, choosing the right platforms and formats, creating the actual calendar, scheduling posts, and tracking performance.
1. Audit Your Existing Social Content
Conducting a social media audit reveals what’s working and what’s not working to inform all your future social media content.
When reviewing your social channels, focus on these areas:
Set Social Media Goals
Social media goals should directly support your wider business objectives and reveal clear social media key performance indicators (KPIs) to track.
Social media goals often center around:
- Increasing engagement
- Driving qualified website traffic
- Growing awareness
When setting your social media goals, use the specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) framework. This helps you set goals that actually support the business.
Analyze Successful Content
Reviewing your highest-performing posts helps you identify topics, formats, and messaging that resonate with your audience to inform future content ideas.
Many social platforms provide native analytics for post performance, audience behavior, and engagement trends.
To stay organized and save time, use the Social Analytics tool in Semrush’s Social Toolkit to review performance across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
After connecting your accounts, select a platform to view and click on the “Posts” tab to review engagement rates, impressions, and other key metrics.
2. Choose Your Platforms and Content Mix
Choose platforms and content types based on where your audience is active and how they engage, so you can use your resources most efficiently.
Start by focusing on which platforms you’ll use, and then move on to determining what post types to create:
Choose the Right Platforms
To decide which platforms to prioritize, study which platforms competitors’ audiences use most.
Use the Behavior dashboard is Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit to compare your audience’s behavior with up to four competitors’ audiences. Once you add all relevant domains, take a look at the “Social Media” section to see which platforms your and your competitors’ audiences are most active on.
And review the “Interests” section on the Behavior dashboard to learn more about what your social media audience cares about.
Consider emerging platforms as well. Because some newer social media platforms could be great options depending on your brand and audience.
For example, Meta’s Threads is great for sharing personal stories and inviting comments. And Bluesky is good for educational content and niche topics.
Choose What to Post
Once you’ve selected your platforms, define a content mix that supports your goals, brand voice, and audience expectations.
Here are a few simple frameworks that help balance value-driven and promotional content:
- The 80/20 rule: About 80% of content informs, educates, or entertains, while 20% promotes your products or services
- The rule of thirds: Dedicate one-third of your content to each of the following: curated or user-generated content (UGC), content that encourages engagement and interaction with followers, and promotional content for your products or services
Passion Planner is a good example of a brand that mixes product-focused posts, UGC, educational content, and relatable content. For example, here’s a post about their products:
And here’s some user-generated content that Passion Planner reposted:
Here’s an educational post that Passion Planner shared to give their followers actionable advice:
Finally, Passion Planner posts relatable memes that resonate with their followers:
You probably have a sense of what post types work well based on the audit you performed, but it’s still a good idea to experiment with a range of content formats like:
- Videos
- Images
- Infographics
- Text-based posts
- Testimonials
- User-generated content
- Livestreams
Always align the format with the platform. For example, a blog post summary might perform well on LinkedIn but feel out of place on Instagram or TikTok.
3. Build the Calendar from Scratch, Using a Template, or Using a Tool
You can build a social media calendar from scratch, use a template, or use a dedicated tool, depending on your budget and your needs.
Build a Calendar from Scratch
Building a social media calendar from scratch gives you full control over structure and workflows, making it a good option when your team has specific needs.
When creating a custom social media calendar, follow these best practices:
- Keep it simple: A calendar should save time—not add more work. Avoid complexity that slows planning or execution.
- Use color coding: Visual cues make calendars easier to scan. Include a key, so everyone understands what each color represents.
- Choose the right medium: Build your calendar in a tool your team already uses comfortably to support collaboration and adoption
A simple social media calendar built with a spreadsheet might look like this:
Build a Calendar Using a Template
Using a template is one of the fastest ways to start planning social media content without building a calendar from scratch.
If using a template sounds like the right fit, you can use our free social media calendar template. The template has columns for social media channels, day of the week, topics, post copy, visual assets, and other key details.
Use the default format or customize our social media calendar template to match your needs. Add post details directly to each cell and share the sheet with your team to enable collaboration.
Build a Calendar Using 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.
For example, Semrush’s Social Poster is designed for scheduling and managing social content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Google Business Profile. It lets you plan posts in advance and publish them from a single dashboard.
Social Poster even comes with a built-in AI assistant to help you draft posts more quickly. Which is helpful if you’re running low on inspiration or need to create a post at the last minute.
4. Schedule Your Content
Create a posting schedule that suits your availability, resources, and your audience’s preferences.
Plan When to Post
Posting at the right time and frequency can boost the likelihood of engagement.
For each platform you use, define:
- When to post
- How often to post
Some social media platforms provide insights into when followers are most active.
For example, Instagram shows audience activity by day and time, helping you know when to post for the highest levels of engagement.
For a more detailed view across platforms, use the Social Analytics tool in the Semrush Social Media Toolkit. You can see which days resulted in the greatest reach and impressions.
Use the activity patterns you see to schedule posts during periods when your audience is consistently online and responsive. And pay attention to whether a certain threshold leads to diminishing results.
Schedule Posts Ahead of Time
Scheduling posts in advance helps you publish consistently without needing to post manually every time.
If you rely on a basic calendar or template, you can schedule posts directly within individual platforms. For example, X allows you to schedule posts in advance:
Facebook also supports scheduling through Meta Business Suite:
Using a centralized social media calendar tool with a scheduling function makes it even easier to manage content across multiple platforms. For example, Social Poster.
After connecting your social accounts in Social Poster, open the “Calendar” tab to view all scheduled posts in one place and adjust timing as needed.
To create a new post in Social Poster, click “New post.” From there, you can choose the platform you want to publish on, draft your content, add visuals and links, and apply UTM parameters for tracking (where relevant).
Click “Schedule” when your post is ready.
5. Track Your Social Performance & Adapt Your Calendar
Track social media performance regularly to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how to adapt your strategy.
The KPIs you track should align directly with the goals you set earlier. Common social media KPIs include:
- Engagement: Reactions, comments, and shares that indicate how strongly content resonates with your audience
- Conversions: The number of sales, leads, email sign-ups, or other conversion events tied to social posts
- Website traffic: Visits driven from social posts, which you can track in Google Analytics
Track Social Media Engagement
Track engagement data to identify which posts perform best and replicate that for future content.
Most social platforms provide native analytics dashboards where you can review engagement metrics for individual posts. For example, Pinterest shows saves, and clicks, and total engagements for each post:
To monitor engagement across multiple platforms in one place, use Social Analytics from the Semrush Social Media Toolkit. Click on the “Total interactions” or “Engagement” report (it depends on the platform) to see an overview of engagement trends for the platform you’re analyzing.
Track Conversions
To track conversions from social media, you’ll likely need to add UTM parameters to links when scheduling posts.
UTM parameters are short snippets added to the end of URLs that make it easy to track campaign performance. Here’s an example of a UTM parameter for a social media campaign:
You can add UTM parameters directly during post creation within Social Poster. Click the “UTM” button, fill out the fields, and click “Apply to post.”
Check out our guide to UTM codes in Google Analytics to learn how to analyze this data. And to understand how to use UTM tracking for better social media campaign performance.
Track Social Traffic in GA4
Track social traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to understand which platforms drive visits to your website.
To view overall social traffic, open the GA4 property you want to analyze and go to “Reports” > “Life cycle” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.”
The Traffic acquisition report shows an overview of traffic sources, including “Organic Social” and “Paid Social” (for when you’re running ads on social media). You’ll also see engagement metrics.
To view traffic from individual social media platforms, click “Add filter +,” select “Session source / medium” in the “Dimension” drop-down, choose “exactly matches” as the match type, and select the social platforms you want to analyze from the “Value” drop-down. Then click “Apply.”
Finally, switch to “Session source” in the drop-down at the top of the table to see each selected platform as a separate row.
Comparing engagement metrics by source in GA4 helps you identify which social platforms drive visitors who are more likely to engage. These insights allow you to focus on higher-performing platforms.
Social Media Calendar Tools
Here’s an overview of some of the best options for social media calendars:
Semrush Social Media Toolkit
The Semrush Social Toolkit is best suited for teams that want one centralized place for all their social media needs:
- Content creation and scheduling: Plan, create, and schedule posts across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Use the AI assistant to generate engaging post ideas and copy.
- Analytics and reporting: Track performance over time and benchmark against competitors
- Collaboration: Simplify teamwork with features like post approvals, shared access, and automated reporting
- AI-assisted planning: Use Social Content AI to brainstorm ideas, generate copy and visuals, and create a content plan that keeps your audience engaged
Google Sheets
Google Sheets works well for teams that want a simple way to plan social media content without committing to a dedicated tool.
Google Sheets allows you to create separate tabs for each month and customize columns based on your needs.
Note that Google Sheets doesn’t support native scheduling or performance tracking. Teams using Google Sheets typically rely on separate tools for those functions.
Notion
Notion is a good option for teams that want a customizable workspace to manage social media planning alongside other projects.
Be aware that Notion doesn’t support post scheduling or publishing, so you’ll need to do those tasks separately.
Canva
Canva is best suited for teams that create design-heavy social content and want to plan and publish posts directly from their design workflow.
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.
Manage Your Social Media Presence with a Content Calendar
An effective social media calendar helps you plan, organize, and execute your social media strategy.
If you want to manage a calendar while also gaining competitive insights, AI tools, and performance analytics, try Semrush’s Social Toolkit.
Sign up for Social Toolkit today.
