How to create a social media content calendar for your small business

Updated: Jan 22, 2021

Are you feeling overwhelmed with your social content? Need a better way to organize your themes, posts, and ideas? A social media content calendar is your solution! A content calendar acts as a roadmap to success for your small business on social media. Making sure you take the time to plan ahead and create a social media content calendar for your business could make or break the performance of your business on social media.

You can find countless examples of content calendars on the web, but we've found that they are so specific to each unique business and social media goals.

We've outlined five steps to creating a social media content calendar here to provide you with all the considerations to take into account when building a calendar unique to your business.

Step 1: Outline your social media goals

Don't skip this step! It's important to consider a goal for everything you share on social media. Always ask yourself, "what is the point of sharing this piece of content"? You should be able to answer your question by citing one of your predetermined goals.

Here are some common social goals to get you started:

Increasing sales or leads
Driving people to your website
Increasing engagement on social media
Increasing brand awareness
Follower growth % increase

Step 2: Decide how detailed you want to get

Do you want to create your content calendar one month at a time? Or maybe you want to outline content for the next three months? What components are you going to include on your content calendar? Make some decisions on detail before you start:

Considerations:

How far in advance do you want to plan?
How much detail do you want to include?
Do you want to have every detail nailed down, or do you want to outline a looser plan?

Some common components of a content calendar for social media include:

Post topics and goals
Post dates
Captions and hashtags
Links and CTAs
Images or videos to include
What platform(s) you're posting to
The status of a post (drafted, scheduled, published)

Step 3: Determine what types of content you want to share

The types of content you share will help you achieve your social media goals (see step 1). Be sure to include a diverse portfolio of content for your followers to engage with. Here are a few different types of content to consider:

Sales and promotions
Blog posts
Inspirational posts
Quotes
Personal content
Customer testimonials
Interactive engagement posts (polls, Q&A)
Resources and news
Seasonal topics

Step 4: Outline monthly themes

Consider common themes when planning your content calendar and use them to brainstorm seasonal and promotional content:

January themes

Resolutions
Clean up and clean out
Fitness and wellness, self care
Dry January

February themes

Romance and love
Coworker appreciation
Black History Month

March themes

Spring cleaning
Spring break
Gardening and crafting
March Madness

April themes

Spring cleaning and organization
Showers and weddings
Baseball
Planning for summer
Ramadan begins

May themes

BBQs and camping
Showers, weddings, and graduations
Summer planning

June themes

Summer vacations, BBQs, and outdoor activities
Dads and grads
Pride month

July themes

Summer activities
Fourth of July

August themes

End of summer
Back to school
Black Business Month
Fall trends

September themes

Back to school
End of summer sales
Football season and tailgating
Fall fashion and fall trends
Oktoberfest
Fall food and drink

October themes

Fall and autumn
Halloween themed cocktails and food
Halloween costumes and parties
Holiday planning

November themes

Holiday planning, holiday sales, holiday gift guides
Friends and family, home entertaining, and hosting
Volunteering and community
Customer appreciation

December themes

Holiday, holiday parties, holiday hosting
Advent
Gifting, gift guides, and stocking stuffers
Holiday sales
Friends and family

Step 5: Build your content calendar

Create your content calendar on paper, in excel, with Google sheets, or using more sophisticated content calendar tools. You can organize your content calendar by dates, by topic, or by individual posts. Find what works best for you!