Social media marketing is tough. There are plenty of roadblocks that could stop you delivering the results you want to see.
Some of the biggest challenges are related to the seemingly simple process of planning and posting content. Indeed, one in eight social media marketers at small businesses say they struggle to post content consistently, while one in nine find it hard to create the content they need.
If planning is a problem for your team, it’s time you started using a content calendar for social media. That way, you’ll never find yourself desperately scratching around for last-minute content ideas.
With that in mind, we’ve rounded up 32 free content calendar templates you can start using straightaway. Happy planning!
1. Hallam’s Social Media and PR Calendar
Digital marketing agency Hallam has been sharing its social media and PR calendar template for a decade now, and we’ve got the latest edition for you here:
Like many of our favorite content calendar templates, it helps you build more timely, relevant campaigns by offering a comprehensive roundup of national and international events and holidays – like National Compliment Day and JRR Tolkien’s birthday.
Beyond that, Hallam’s calendar features a dedicated theme for each month to inspire the ideation process, plus monthly pro tips to help you get the most from your content.
2. Semrush’s Social Media Content Template
Semrush is better known for its SEO expertise, but its social media content calendar for Google Sheets is loaded with valuable features.
It has columns covering channel, date, status, asset type, topic, and more. Plus it’s color-coded, helping you understand your calendar at a glance – for instance, if the “visual type” column is looking a little monochrome, it could be time to diversify your range of visual assets. Semrush’s template also makes smart use of drop-down menus, which add consistency and minimize the risk of typos.
The only downside is that it looks a little cluttered, which could make it easy to overlook important information.
3. Adobe’s Social Media Calendar and Scheduler
Our next free content calendar template, from Adobe Express, is a whole lot more sophisticated than a simple spreadsheet. Instead, it’s an interactive calendar for creating, planning, and reviewing social media content.
You can even use it to schedule content on six platforms:
- TikTok
- X/Twitter
Plus integrates with social management and analytics tool Metricool so you can track the performance of your posts without leaving your content calendar. Useful stuff! (Just be aware that you’ll need to sign up for a free Adobe Express account and, optionally, a Metricool account to take advantage of all this functionality.)
4. Buffer’s Notion Content Team Calendar
Social media management platform Buffer has taken the generous step of sharing the actual content calendar it uses to plan content for the Buffer blog.
It’s built in Notion, the AI-powered workspace tool – so, like the Adobe Express template above, it’s a little more complex than your average spreadsheet-based calendar.
But while it can take some time to get your head around working in Notion, it offers a ton of valuable functionality, such as the ability to create filtered views to display different types of information.
Plus you can search the calendar based on properties like status, author, and channel – giving you multiple ways to track down previous posts and ideas.
5. Buffer’s Social Media Calendar Template for Google Sheets
Like the sound of using a content calendar created by the experts at Buffer, but don’t fancy getting to grips with Notion? No worries – try this Google Sheets template for size.
If you like drop-down menus, you’re gonna love this template, because it features drop-downs for selecting the relevant social platform and choosing your post status (spanning everything from ideation to publication).
It also has a super helpful “Start here” tab to help you use the calendar effectively, including tips for maintaining paragraph breaks, adding extra rows, and more.
6. Sprout Social’s Social Media Calendar Template
Like Buffer, the team at Sprout knows a thing or two about social media marketing, so why not turn to them for your next social content calendar template?
This downloadable template gives you space to add notes, highlight action items, and organize your content around customizable categories – like blog posts, event promotions, and product launches.
It also features dedicated columns for tracking awareness, engagement, and conversion-related metrics, helping ensure that your social media content delivers on your key marketing goals.
7. Socially Powered’s Content Calendar Template
Socially Powered is the brainchild of marketing consultant Erin Cell, who’s created her own social media content calendar for Google Sheets:
She’s even taken the time to record a six-minute Loom video to help you get to grips with it. Thanks, Erin!
Another useful feature – she added posting prompts – like “Fun fact” and “True/False” – throughout the template, offering valuable inspiration for when you’re struggling to come up with new content ideas.
8. Monday.com’s Multipurpose Content Calendar Template
Already using Monday.com for project management? Why not start managing your content plans through the platform too? Which is exactly what you can do with our next template.
Created by the team at Monday.com, this template makes it easier to collaborate and manage publishing schedules for any content type or marketing channel.
Unlike static spreadsheets, it also helps you save time through built-in automations. For instance, you can set reminders for individual tasks to receive automated notifications when the due date is approaching, helping you keep projects on track.
This template also offers various ways to view your content schedule, from a simple table to a Kanban board to an interactive timeline.
9. HootSuite’s Social Media Content Calendar
First up is a social media content calendar template from HootSuite, which incorporates five popular platforms:
- TikTok
Because it’s a Google Sheet, it’s fully customizable. So if some (or all) of those platforms aren’t relevant to your audience or goals, you can easily switch them out.
This free content calendar template has lots of useful features, but one of our favorites is the evergreen content library tab. Use it to paste links of blog posts and other resources that work well on social at any time of year.
10. HootSuite’s Social Media Editorial Calendar
Another social media content calendar template from HootSuite, this one is a simpler version that helps with planning individual content assets. Create a new tab for each month, then plan out your social calendar week by week.
As standard, the calendar includes space for the following information:
- Title
- Author
- Topic
- Deadline
- Published
- Time
- Notes
But if you want to add other stuff — like links to graphics or details of the type of content you’re sharing — just create a new column or two.
11. Content Cal’s Customized Content Calendar
Content Cal has added an element of automation to its social media content calendar template. Answer questions about your objectives, channels, and content types to create a customized calendar spanning 12 months of content.
Obviously you’ll still have to draft and post the actual posts. But this calendar still saves you a bunch of time by helping you define the type of content that should be included in your social media strategy. It also ensures your social plans are aligned with your wider marketing goals.
12. HubSpot’s Social Media Content Calendar
Next up is this social media content calendar example from HubSpot, which allows you to plan your posting strategy from a single spreadsheet.
It contains tabs for different elements of your social strategy, from daily posting to overarching monthly campaigns. You’ll also find dedicated sections for each social platform.
13. Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Calendar Template
Social Media Examiner has created a content calendar template in Google Sheets.
It might not have some of the fancy formatting of some of the other spreadsheet-based calendars in this roundup, but it’s packed with plenty of detail. The day-by-day multiplatform view makes it a strong choice for social media teams that post high volumes of content.
14. Small Business Trends’ Social Media Calendar Template for Small Businesses
Unsurprisingly, Small Business Trends has created a free content calendar built with small businesses in mind.
This template is actually based on the same calendar used by the marketing team at Small Business Trends. Given that the publishers have 160,000+ followers on Twitter and 85,000 on Facebook, it’s fair to say they know what they’re doing.
The template can be downloaded as a PDF, spreadsheet, or Word document. It includes sections for multiple platforms across each day of the (working) week, plus lots of helpful prompts to help you come up with content ideas.
15. Backlinko’s Content Calendar Template
Backlinko’s free content calendar template can either be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet. It’s split into two tabs:
- A standard month-and-year calendar view
- A content list and workflow
The calendar element is actually a little basic, containing nothing more than a box for each day of the month.
However, the workflow sheet is pretty detailed and gives you an off-the-shelf process for bringing together all the various elements required to create high-quality social media content.
16. Moisson Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Trello Template
South African agency Moisson Marketing has created a Trello-based social media marketing planner that you can duplicate and share across your team.
As well as a space to plan all your posts, it incorporates various Trello lists for:
- Saving helpful marketing resources
- Adding potential content ideas that can be worked up into draft posts
- Tracking work in progress
- Sharing monthly social media progress reports
That makes it one of the most comprehensive resources we’ve found. The only downside, of course, is that you’ll probably need to pay for a Trello subscription if you’re going to use it for multiple projects, or across a large team.
17. Smartsheet’s Social Media Content Calendar Template for Google Sheets
Our next social media content calendar example, courtesy of the team at Smartsheet, is the perfect choice for organizations that need a detailed, daily breakdown of their social media content planning.
It has space for five social platforms — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram — plus an “Other” section for additional social networks.
As standard, every section includes a slot for six posts a day, with predefined time slots for each post. Naturally, you’ll want to edit these based on your own posting frequency. Beyond this, there’s room for:
- Social copy
- Images
- Links
- Data on click engagement (you’ll have to add this data yourself once each post has gone live)
18. Asana’s Social Media Calendar
If you’re an individual or a small social media team with a limited number of projects, you can use Asana free of charge. Otherwise, you’ll need to pay for its Premium or Business plans.
Either way, once you’ve created an Asana account, you can start using this fantastic social media calendar.
Because it’s a collaborative project management tool, it offers a bunch of functionality that you don’t get with a simple spreadsheet-based content calendar.
For instance, it allows users to drag and drop tasks straight into the necessary date slot and add custom fields to define which platform you’ll be posting on.
Perhaps its best feature is the ability to assign tasks to other team members. Once you’ve come up with a post theme, you can hand it over to the copywriter, then add a graphic designer to create visual elements. Once they’ve finished, they can assign the task back to you for approval and scheduling.
19. SocialBee’s Social Media Calendar Template
SocialBee has created weekly social media content calendars for each month of the year, with prebuilt sections for seven of the most popular social platforms:
- Google My Business
- TikTok
Each section contains multiple fields, allowing you to add all the necessary details about each individual post. For instance, you can include ideas for hashtags, assign a due date, and paste links to visual elements to accompany your post copy.
As with any spreadsheet template, it’s easy to customize any and all of these elements so that it better suits your social media marketing requirements.
20. Vertex24’s Content Calendar Template
Vertex24’s free calendar template is designed for planning and tracking the progress of tasks related to social media content creation.
As well as a standard monthly calendar view, it includes a helpful gantt chart that provides a visual breakdown of each individual post.
Another nice feature: the calendar is pre-populated with some of the biggest US holidays and events, offering some helpful hints for timely social media content ideas.
21. Template.net’s Social Media Editorial Calendar
Template.net is home to hundreds of thousands of easily editable templates covering countless tasks, including social media planning.
This ready-to-use calendar can be downloaded for Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, or PDF, depending on the requirements of your team. Just edit the content in each column for a simple, shareable view of your content strategy across multiple platforms.
22. ClickUp’s Social Media Content Calendar
Like Asana and Trello, ClickUp is a project management tool that has a library full of useful templates. Again, you’ll need to create a ClickUp account before you can use them. You can start with a free plan, but you’ll need to upgrade once you hit your 100 MB file storage limit.
This easy-to-use content calendar template offers multiple views, allowing social media marketing teams to:
- Plan and organize content by platform and publication status
- Store ideas for future social media posts
- Prioritize posts based on marketing goals and external trends
23. CoSchedule’s Social Media Content Calendar Template
Editorial calendars are CoSchedule’s whole business, but it’s been generous enough to give some of its templates away free of charge — including this social media content calendar spreadsheet, which helps you plan daily posts across multiple platforms:
This template includes a bunch of helpful features, including the ability to:
- Schedule posts by channel, day, and time
- Filter daily posts by channel
- Color-code posts by category
- Add monthly notes to highlight important topics
- Identify gaps in your posting schedule by looking at a monthly view
24. CoSchedule’s Basic Blog Content Calendar Template Spreadsheet
Up to this point, most of the free content calendars we’ve shared are geared toward social planning, but this next one — again from CoSchedule — is designed to support your blog content strategy.
Although it’s pretty basic, this content calendar still offers plenty of helpful functionality, allowing you to:
- Organize blog posts by headline, keyword, and author
- Monitor blog post performance throughout the year
- Add links to image files and CMS posts
- Arrange posts by month to get a top-level overview of your blogging strategy
25. Jotform’s Social Media Calendar
Jotform is an online form-builder rather than a dedicated content planning tool, but its library of “marketing sheets” features 20 different templates, including this useful social media calendar.
One small catch: you’ll need a Jotform account to use it. But you can create up to five forms for free.
Fill out the form with information about each post, assign the relevant social media channel and content type, then input the planned publishing date and time. Jotform does everything else, sorting each post into a color-coded spreadsheet that can be viewed as a calendar across multiple device types and shared with other team members.
26. Firefly’s Social Media Content Calendar Template
Firefly Marketing hasn’t just taken the time to build a free social media content calendar template for Google Sheets — it’s also created an explainer video on how to use it.
Helpfully, Firefly has added all the year’s major holidays and hashtag days (like #nationalpizzaday) to ensure you don’t miss out on any opportunities for engagement. And it’s even included a cover sheet detailing the best times to post across different platforms, tailored to specific industries.
Firefly also regularly adds new features to its template. For instance, it recently incorporated a “budget” column to help plan your social ads spend and a “goals” row to help keep your posts aligned with your overarching marketing strategy.
27. Iconosquare’s Quarterly Social Media Content Calendar
⬇️ Add to Notion or Google Calendar here
Social media management and analytics platform Iconosquare has created a quarterly social media content calendar for Notion and Google Calendar.
Fully editable and exportable, the calendar is packed with events, hashtags, holidays, and other special days. To use it, simply duplicate the Notion template, add it to your Google Calendar, or download it as a PDF, HTML file, or Markdown.
The only downside is that Iconosquare only publishes the next three months of dates and events toward the end of the current quarter, limiting your ability to plan in advance. But you can unlock the full 12-month calendar by signing up for a (paid) Iconosquare account.
28. Coda’s Blog Content Calendar Template
Coda is a tool that combines all your words, data, and teamwork into a single document. That makes it a good fit for housing your content calendar because you can plan, write, and proofread in the same place.
This template was created by Al Chen, solutions architect at Coda, who says it’s designed to be used by “agencies, in-house content teams, and solopreneurs who have made content a key component of their marketing strategy.”
One of the best features of this blog content calendar template is that it offers multiple viewing options, including content type, campaign, and product stage. You can also keep tabs on all your live content, making it easier to monitor performance and identify gaps in your schedule.
29. Google Sheets Geeks Social Media Editorial Calendar
You’ve probably noticed that many of these free content calendar templates are Google Sheets files. That’s not surprising because many of us use Google Drive, and it’s highly collaborative (not to mention free for individuals). So it makes sense to share a template from the fanatics at Google Sheets Geeks.
This template doesn’t just look superb — it’s also super simple to use. Write posts in individual cells, view the current calendar week in the mini-calendars on the right, and scroll across the rows to see which posts are due on any given date. You can also choose between monthly and yearly templates, with weeks starting on either Sunday or Monday.
(Note: The first Google Sheets Geeks editorial calendar template was published in 2021, with updates shared in 2022 and 2023, so be sure to check for the latest version — they’re usually published in November or December.)
30. Airtable’s Content Calendar Template
Airtable is part database, part spreadsheet, making it a good fit for planning and storing your content in a single platform.
This content calendar lets you view results, future content ideas, and your team members’ workloads. Use it to:
- Assign tasks and track deadlines through multiple calendar views
- Get a big-picture view of the status of different content projects
- Publish planned posts with a single click
You’ll need to sign up for Airtable to use this template, but if your team only features up to five creators or editors, you can get by with a free account.
31. Loomly’s Social Media Calendar Template for Google Sheets
Loomly is a social media management platform that helps users plan, create, and track the performance of their social media content. And it’s also been generous enough to share its own Google Sheets-based content calendar template.
This simple template includes columns for your posts and media assets and has a built-in character counter. Helpfully, it also has a “comments” column, making it easier to give feedback on individual posts.
32. Miro’s Social Media Calendar Template
Miro is an online whiteboard tool, making it less restricted than some of the other marketing tools in this article — giving you greater flexibility to customize it to your team’s specific needs.
Miro’s social media content calendar includes:
- The date, time, and timezone when each post will go live
- The social media channels on which each post will be published
- Social media copy and visuals
- Relevant links and tags
- Information on geo-targeting
- Details about whether the post is organic or paid
- Space for feedback and approvals
Unsurprisingly, you’ll need to sign up for Miro to use this template, but you can create a single workspace with three editable boards (and unlimited team members) free of charge.
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