6 free calendars to make your SMM promotion better

It’s no secret that social media marketing is an incredibly effective way to boost the visibility of your brand, grow your customer base and increase sales. But with so many tasks to manage and multiple platforms in which you need to be present, it can quickly become confusing and time-consuming. Getting organized is one of the key elements to a successful social media marketing (SMM) campaign. Knowing what you need to do and tracking your progress so you don’t miss important deadlines are essential for utilizing SMM effectively. To simplify things, why not get help from one of the best free tools around – calendars? By leveraging free calendars for SMM campaigns, you’ll have all your important dates at hand while saving yourself plenty of headaches down the road. Keep reading to discover more about why smart businesses are turning towards calendar solutions for enhanced success on social media!

What is a social media calendar?

The social media calendar is a tool for planning and organizing marketing tactics in one place. It is an easy-to-understand manual for all marketing plans.

The social media calendar answers the following questions:

What marketing projects are we planning? The calendar can include major product launches, weekly newsletters, social media campaigns, marketing offers and more.
Who is responsible for each project and task? It’s helpful to assign an appropriate expert to each task.
What’s the deadline for projects? No more deadline panic before the sale. A monthly calendar will allow the team to plan ahead and get all work done on time.

A social media calendar is essential for any marketing effort. It shows important steps to be taken and keeps them from getting lost in the flow of the work routine. A content marketing calendar allows you to easily monitor planned activities and be sure they are going the right way. It is also useful for tracking the smaller milestones needed throughout the year.

Creating a calendar is a necessary step in the team’s work and should be reviewed regularly. While it can take considerable time and effort, requiring serious discussion, it’s important that the marketing team spend time planning the campaign in advance. Of course, it’s very difficult to create and plan all campaigns a year in advance. But a monthly or quarterly calendar will allow you to follow the approved plan, see who is responsible for a particular campaign or piece of work, and not lose sight of ideas that come up.

While a content calendar may seem simple enough at first glance, a truly useful calendar is bigger than a simple Excel document. It should be functional, from syncing between team members to integrating automatic email updates.

What is a good social media calendar?

A good calendar should have the following features:

Synchronization. One of the most important features of a marketing calendar is that it automatically syncs when someone fixes it. This ensures that all team members using any type of device can use and see the most current version of the document at any time.
Multiple and customizable formats. Even one marketing department is likely to have multiple (if not more) calendars running simultaneously to make changes across platforms. Being able to use it across multiple calendars is critical.
Google Calendar integration. The ability to add Google Calendar events directly to your marketing calendar will save time and make it easy to integrate many other team calendars.
Filterable Categories. For small, start-up marketing teams or agency marketing departments, creating a focused calendar view is useful and necessary. This is because all of these user categories often handle all aspects of marketing strategy on the same team. Filtering by category will allow the team to track and manage all activities, or check all scheduled content without interfering with other categories.
Ease of use. In general, calendars should be user-friendly for everyone, not just experts. If the calendar isn’t convenient for all team members, it won’t be useful or popular.

How to create a social media planner for Instagram or Facebook?

Creating a calendar each month or quarter can be a time-consuming task, but it’s worth it because it helps you follow a plan and reach your goals each month.

Here are the steps for building a social media calendar:

Think through a marketing plan. It should detail the actions, campaigns and events needed to implement your ideas and strategy. The first step in creating a calendar is to select the necessary actions.
Identify key dates and events on your calendar. Then you’ll need to identify the deadlines and campaigns. After that, add them to the calendar with project deadlines to provide a detailed schedule for the quarter or year.
Determine the composition of the team. Select and specify the team members responsible for each task. To ensure the calendar is complete, ask marketing leads to fill it with priority dates and planned campaigns.
Choose the frequency of events. Building a calendar will allow you to more clearly anticipate periods of marketing activity, scheduling social media posts, blogs, e-book releases or other content so you don’t attack your audience chaotically and keep them waiting.

Best tools to plan your posts on social networks

1. Jotform Social Media Calendar

The social media calendar on Jotform is not simply aesthetically pleasing and practical. Your social strategy is displayed in the tabs at the top for each channel you use to carry out your strategy, including live and virtual events.

Remember to include a tab for content details and who in your team will be in charge of creating the content on your social calendar if you’re modeling it after this one. To keep things organized, you may also have a distinct tab for each month.

Price: The free plan is available, or you can use the Pro plan starting at $34 per month.

2. Hootsuite Planner

Hootsuite Planner takes it a step further by allowing you to design, preview, schedule and publish all your social media posts directly from the interactive calendar. It works with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok.

A social media calendar created with Hootsuite’s Planner is interactive. You get a visual overview of all your assets in one place (text, images, links). From there, you can easily publish, schedule or edit your posts.

With Hootsuite’s Bulk Composer, you can even schedule hundreds of posts across multiple social profiles.

Price: The Professional plan costs $49 per month and includes a free 30-day trial.

3. Trello

They are searching for an administrative tool that fosters strong teamwork. Use Trello. It is simple to see what content is being sent when using this platform’s full calendar view. More precisely, social media managers can organize to-do lists, manage content calendars, plan campaigns, and store brainstorming ideas using Trello’s adaptable assignment “cards” and customized “boards” and “lists.”

Yet, you are not restricted to a single structure. Users can alter boards to suit their needs. For instance, a group could publish ideas related to a topic, like a campaign or awareness day, or make a board to arrange social media posts for a given week on a particular platform.

Price: For individual use, the Standard plan is free and starts at $5 per user per month, billed annually.

4. Agorapulse

Agorapulse, like Hootsuite, provides social publishing tools and a content calendar to help you manage your social media accounts easily. This includes post scheduling (or rescheduling), queueing, and bulk uploading, which is extremely useful for teams that use quarterly or monthly content plans.

What distinguishes Agorapulse is its social inbox, which allows you to manage all interactions from various platforms in a single location. After all, content isn’t a one-and-done activity; it’s about increasing reader awareness and engagement.

Price: The free plan is available, or you can use the Pro plan for small teams starting at $79 per month.

5. Loomly

If you want to get more mileage out of your content calendar, consider using an all-in-one content planning and publishing platform like Loomly.

Loomly provides tools in addition to content scheduling and management. This tool provides inspiration and guidance to assist you in creating content. It also lets you manage your content assets, schedule posts, view them as a list or a calendar, and analyze which posts are working and which need improvement.

The most comprehensive feature set of Loomly includes a collaboration and approval environment where teams can submit mockups, provide comments, view version logs, and flag for approval. When there are “too many cooks in the kitchen” on a particular project, this can help you streamline processes for efficiency.

Price: You can try Base for free for 15 days. The annual plan for two users and 10 accounts is $26 per month.

6. HubSpot’s Excel Content Template

Our first choice is Hubspot’s free downloadable template. This content calendar can be opened in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and used to draft social media posts for a specific time period, get a clear picture of your content strategy, and much more.

What’s the best part? Because of the Microsoft Excel integration in this template, you can customize the tabs in any way you see fit to best reflect the metrics you’re attempting to measure.

Price: free

Conclusion

Free calendars can be a great tool to help you stay on track with your SMM promotions. By using calendars to schedule the time and date for your social media posts, you can simplify your workflow and improve efficiency when working with SMM platforms. This approach will enable you to stay organized with your posting schedule, and also provide you with valuable insights into the performance of your content. With this information, you can make informed decisions about your social media strategy and refine your online presence to better engage with your audience. For any business looking to improve their SMM strategy and make the most out of their efforts, using a calendar is highly recommended. So go ahead, pick one that suits you best — and get to planning!

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