11 Social Media Calendars, Tools, & Templates to Plan Your Content
What do cross-country road trips, wedding speeches, and social media marketing have in common? Planning.
You could improvise all three, but it's better to have a plan for what direction you're heading — especially when developing your social media content strategy.
Let's dive into our list of top tools to stay organized and on top of your game.
Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging
1. HubSpot's Downloadable Template for Excel
Content Calendar
Price: Free
Marketers might already use Excel for different types of reports and data analysis in their roles, but this multifaceted tool is perfect for social media content calendar organization, too. Excel can be customized according to the priorities and metrics your team is focused on, so it's a great option for planning ahead.
The good news? We've already done the heavy lifting for you by creating a free, downloadable social media content calendar template using Microsoft Excel. Marketers can use this template to plan out individual social media posts easily — monthly or annually — while keeping an eye on bigger picture events, holidays, publications, and partnerships.
Use the Monthly Planning Calendar Tab above to get a bird's-eye view of what's coming down the content pipeline in a given month.
In the Content Repository tab, you can add the content you'll be publishing on this tab to keep track of which pieces have been promoted already and to easily recall older content that can be re-promoted.
You can draft and plan out social media posts in advance on the Social Network Update tabs. These tabs are for organizational purposes. After planning out your social media posts, you'll manually upload the content of the posts to a social media publisher.
For more on how to use the templates, check out this in-depth guide from my colleague Lindsay Kolowich.
This free resource can draft social media posts or bulk-upload them into a publishing app to maximize efficiency. (HubSpot customers: You can use this spreadsheet to organize content and upload it directly into Social Inbox. For instructions on doing this, check out the template's cover sheet here.)
Why we like this social media tool:
Marketers with small teams and heavy workloads will love this intuitive template. It acts as a social media content planner, tracker, and archive, making it perfect for sharing your social plan with stakeholders and referring to it when you need to repurpose old content.
2. Google Drive
Content Calendar and Asset Organization
Price: Free for personal use. Google Workspace plans for businesses start at $6 per month.
Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build an effective content calendar.
Here's an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track their editorial and social media calendars to make sure posts align with new blog content. These calendars can be easily shared with multiple teams to avoid scheduling conflicts and align campaigns.
Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members without switching between platforms.
With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments all in one place and collaborate on different projects without emailing back and forth or scheduling a meeting. This is a particularly useful feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.
Why we like this social media tool:
Google has several products that can be used together to create quick, seamless workflows. So whether you're publishing dozens of posts per day across multiple platforms or ramping up one channel for your freelance business, you'll find value in the Google Drive system. The best part is that HubSpot customers can easily link their Google Drive accounts to the HubSpot portal to upload files from Drive into the HubSpot software.
3. Loomly
Content Planning, Creation, Publishing, and Calendar
Price: 15-day free trial. The Base plan is $26 per month for 2 users and 10 accounts when you choose the annual agreement.
If you want more mileage out of your content calendar, you can turn to an all-in-one content planning and publishing platform such as Loomly.
Loomly offers tools beyond content scheduling and management. This tool provides inspiration and direction to help you create content. It also allows you to manage your content assets, schedule posts, view them as a list or a calendar, and analyze what posts are working versus which ones need work.
Loomly's most robust feature set includes a collaboration and approval environment so that teams can submit mockups, provide comments, see version logs, and flag for approval. This can help you streamline processes for efficiency when there are "too many cooks in the kitchen" on a particular project.
Why we like this social media tool:
If your team is responsible for organic and paid social, this tool can do both. And for your team who wants to avoid using their personal account for social media duties, they can respond to comments and replies directly in Loomly — that means they won't need to login to each native platform to engage with followers.
4. Trello
Task Management and Content Calendar
Price: Free for individual use. The Standard plan starts at $5 per user per month, billed annually.
Looking for an organizational tool that's highly effective for team collaboration? Try Trello. This platform offers a full calendar view, making it easy to visualize what content is going out and when. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello's flexible assignment “cards” and customizable “boards” and “lists” to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and store brainstorm ideas.
You're not limited to just one structure, though. Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week, on a specific platform, or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.
Why we like this social media tool:
Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize labels with different publication statuses so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they're due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks where content is being published.
5. SproutSocial
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Price: The Standard plan starts at $89 per month for five social profiles, billed annually.
Sprout Social’s social media calendar and publishing tool make it easy for teams or individuals to plan and schedule all of their social posts. You can schedule content to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more.
You can also tag each social post and add notes to track and report your posting strategy and campaigns. Additionally, their publishing suite includes a tool called Optimal Send Times, which analyzes your social media data and automatically publishes at a time your audience is most engaged.
Why we like this social media tool:
Coming up with social media content ideas isn't always easy. Sprout Social's social listening tool lets marketers like you uncover niche conversations that your audience is interested in. From there, you can join the conversation for brand awareness or start your own conversation on the topic to grow your following.
6. Evernote
Content Calendar, Task Management, and Asset Organization
Price: The Basic plan is free. Create a custom template using the Personal plan for $7.99 per month.
Evernote is a note-taking app that marketers can use to keep track of all the moving parts that comprise a social media campaign.
The tool also features yearly, monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, making it easy to keep track of when you're publishing content on social media, when you're producing blog content, and other team-wide priorities. (Evernote offers customizable templates for each of these that can be downloaded into the app.)
Another useful feature is Evernote's Web Clipper extension for Chrome. Marketers can use this tool to easily save links to their Evernote Notebook for sharing later on.
Why we like this social media tool:
The Evernote mobile app also boasts interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later. This feature is of particular value for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram.
7. Hootsuite
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Price: The Professional plan starts at $49 per month and starts with a free 14-day trial.
Hootsuite offers a built-in Planner tool to help you create campaigns, identify publishing gaps, and collaborate with your content creation team. Its primary features are in social publishing so that you can release content to your networks in advance, but it also has rich features for collaboration and post approvals.
You can even curate content from other sources without logging into your account. Once your content is created, you can preview it with the Composer tool, which displays according to each social network's unique format.
Why we like this social media tool:
Cross-collaboration is a big deal on just about any marketing team, and Hootsuite has a way to make this even easier. The social publishing platform comes with a built-in content library that serves as the single point of truth for your entire organization. Does your sales team need a product feature cheatsheet? Customer service looking for details on the latest product feature? All that and more can be found in your team's Hootsuite content library.
8. Agorapulse
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Price: The individual plan is free, or you can use the Pro plan for small teams starting at $79 per month.
Similar to Hootsuite, Agorapulse offers social publishing tools and a content calendar so that you can manage your social media accounts with ease. This includes scheduling (or rescheduling), queuing, and bulk uploading posts, which is incredibly helpful for teams who use quarterly or monthly content plans.
Why we like this social media tool:
What makes Agorapulse different is its social inbox that allows you to manage all the interactions from various platforms in a single place. After all, content isn't just a one-and-done activity; it's about building awareness and engagement with your readers as well.
9. StoryChief
Content Planning and Distribution
Price: Team pricing starts at $90 per month, billed annually.
If you want more from your content calendar than simply knowing when posts go live, StoryChief is the option for you. With StoryChief's smart calendar, you can better strategize and plan your content strategy across channels.
It displays much more than your timetable — it also allows you to assign collaborators to tasks and filter them by campaign. StoryChief self-describes its tool as a "content distribution platform" that unifies analytics and publishing across multiple channels for a more simplified approach to content creation. Best of all, it syncs with HubSpot and all of your favorite calendar apps.
Why we like this social media tool:
Believe it or not, there are quite a few similarities between social media marketing and SEO marketing— StoryChief bridges this gap with its SEO Copywriting tool. By highlighting the areas you can improve your copy for the reader (and subsequently the search engines), you can write clearer, more engaging content that works on social media and your website or blog.
10. ClearVoice
Content Creation and Management
Price: Request a free consultation for pricing.
So what about content planning and creation? ClearVoice offers content creation tools to fit into your workflow. Their big claim to fame is their Talent Network Search which allows you to find and connect to content creators to work on your projects. Yet, ClearVoice also has features for task management for internal and external collaborators.
You can create, edit, and approve projects in an interface that makes editorial management easy. It also includes a dashboard and dynamic editorial calendar with plenty of interactive functionality and integrations with other popular software.
Why we like this social media tool:
Not every social team is working for a big agency or client. For freelance content teams who want to stay organized and on time with their social media publishing, ClearVoice offers some of the same great features at a price customized to your team.
11. Zerys
Content Creation and Management
Price: $40 per document plus $49 per month for project management.
Zerys is another platform that matches you with your ideal content creation freelancers. However, it markets itself as a platform dedicated to content success, offering content planning, production, publishing, promotion, conversion, and analytics features.
Why we like this social media tool:
You can manage unlimited content projects, plan keywords and titles for blog content, hire writers, and view deadlines on an integrated calendar. With the project management features that Zerys offers, in-house writers can use the platform to produce quality work on time every time. It also integrates with HubSpot so that publishing is a breeze.
