Downloadable Social Media Content Calendar

When it comes to executing a successful social media campaign, the creation of a monthly content calendar is an important best practice technique that we recommend for all of our clients.

Regardless of whether you are managing one social profile or 10, the importance of forward planning your content and conversation themes is a really great habit to get into.

If you aren’t already in the practice of forward-planning your social media content, we hope that our free downloadable Content Calendar template will provide you with a helpful starting point.

What we are trying to achieve

1. Provide consistency and quality in your content– content quality is key to making your brand engaging.
2. Align the team – it can often be the case that a variety of teams and departments have knowledge and ideas that can be fed into your social media content calendar.
3. Give a framework and process to plan and manage the creation of content – structure means control, and less of a lastminute dash.
4. Enforces accountability – specifies who does what and when.
5. Helps with forward planning, client visibility and is a great meeting tool.

The calendar comes in the form of an Excel download, in which three tabs can be found, including  a help page, content calendar and finally the ‘create and define’ page which can be edited to your liking.

Calendar

The content calendar is the most important part of the document. We have made it as easy as possible to use, with most cells utilising drop down selectors for ease of use.

You will find drop down selectors in each of the cells for the below sections:

1. Name of client
2. Month
3. Owner
4. Content status
5. Facebook content
6. Type of content
7. Twitter campaign name
8. Target focus – Who is the campaign targeted at?
9. Facebook update – Is the update to be pinned, highlighted or a normal post.
10. Auto or manual – Is it scheduled to be an auto or manual Tweet?
11. Blog content

All of the above can be edited to your specifications, and we will go over this in the Create and Define section below.

Create and Define

You will notice there are seven tables in the ‘create and define’ section, and these correspond to the sections of the same names in the content calender.

Here you can use the set up we have already created for you, or make your own edits by simply double clicking on the appropriate cell, and then by adding your own text and then saving the edit.

Tips

1. We recommend you keep a clean copy of each tab as a template for future use.
2. Rename each new calendar tab with its month and year, to help keep things organised.
3. Look out for the helpful comments/notes in each tab.

Have we missed anything? Let us know and we will try and incorporate all of your suggestions.

Populate Digital Content Calendar by Populate Digital is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.populatedigital.com.