DIGITAL SOP 044: Creating a Social Media calendar

Last Updated / Reviewed: March 25th, 2024

Execution Time: N/A

Goal: Create a social media calendar to help you plan and track your business’ social media activity.

Ideal Outcome: You will never again ask any of the following questions:

• Hey guys, what goes on Facebook today?
• Where do we post this?
• Guys, does anyone remember where we posted that super-funny GIF about our new product?
• Why are we posting only on Facebook?
• Do we even have any other social media accounts?
• Was this approved?
• Who approved this?
• Why is there a monkey eating a banana posted on our LinkedIn?

Pre-requisites or requirements: Just social media accounts and access to Google Sheets. Patience and diligence are quite great to have too 🙂

Why this is important: All digital marketing efforts should be accounted for. They should be planned, they should be numbered, they should all be aligned with your brand’s goals. A social media calendar will help you plan and manage what is very frequently the single most chaotic type of digital marketing effort.

Where this is done: In Google Sheets, mostly.

When this is done: When you decide to run your social media marketing through a calendar before posting. You only need to create the calendar once – but our advice is to make a new copy of it every week (otherwise, it will most likely get too crowded – especially if you are posting daily on more than one social media channel).

Once you have your calendar set up, you simply need to update it as you go (which shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes/day if you are posting daily social media updates, provided that you already have the content you want to post).

Who does this: You, your Social Media Manager, or Community Manager.