Social calendar

What a social calendar is

A social calendar is a dated production plan for your social accounts. It names what goes out, on which platform, on which day, and who writes it. What makes it different from a spreadsheet of post ideas is the writing date: posts are drafted in batches, a month at a time, weeks before any of them appear.

It is not a social content strategy. The strategy decides which platforms deserve your time and what you are trying to say on each, and it usually tells you to drop one. The calendar comes after that decision and turns it into a routine. It is not the captions either; writing those post by post is social copywriting.

When you need one

You need one when the account goes quiet for three weeks every time work gets busy. That is the ordinary pattern for a small business: a good fortnight of posting, a run of jobs, silence, then a guilty burst. Batching breaks the link between how busy this week is and whether anything gets posted.

The second case is two or three people posting without coordination, so the same offer is announced twice and the launch nobody mentioned goes out unsupported. A calendar with named owners and dated slots settles that in one page.

You do not need a social calendar if you have not yet decided which platforms you are going to keep. Planning a month of posts for four accounts you cannot sustain produces a month of guilt. Decide first. You also do not need a separate one if social is a small part of a wider publishing plan; the whole-business content calendar holds every channel in one place and the social rows live inside it. Buy that one when blog, email and social all need dating together. Buy this one when social is the only thing that keeps slipping.

What goes in it

The calendar is built around the batch, not around the day. Everything in it exists to make one writing session a month produce enough posts to cover the month after.

• Standing slots. The fixed pattern: which days carry a post, on which account. Set against the hours you really have, which is usually fewer posts than you hoped and more than you currently manage.
• Post types in rotation. Four or five recurring kinds of post — a job just finished, an answer to a common question, a piece of the blog, a person on the team, an offer — so the batch session starts with prompts instead of a blank page.
• The batch day. A dated half-day each month for writing, and a shorter one for photographs or clips. This is the appointment the whole calendar exists to protect.
• Dated exceptions. The launches, seasons, trade shows and closures that have to be posted around, marked in advance so the batch covers them rather than being interrupted by them.
• The reactive gap. One or two slots a week left deliberately empty for something that actually happens. A calendar with no gap gets abandoned the first time it collides with real life.

What you get

The calendar itself. A dated sheet covering the next quarter, one row per post, with the platform, the date, the type, the owner and the draft-by date. Delivered in whatever your business already opens, usually a spreadsheet, because a tool nobody has logged into is a tool nobody uses.

A batch brief. Two pages telling whoever sits down on the batch day what to write: the rotation, the prompts for each type, the length and register for each platform, and the checks before anything is queued.

Standing rules. One page on what to do when the batch does not happen, what to post when something goes wrong publicly, and when to break the calendar on purpose. The rules exist so it bends in a bad month instead of being thrown away.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A garden centre outside Moncton runs a Facebook page and an Instagram account. Two staff post when they remember. In May and June the accounts are lively, and from July the posting stops for weeks at a time, which is precisely when the store is busiest and most worth visiting.

The calendar sets twelve posts a month across both accounts: three a week, with Wednesday and Saturday fixed and the third slot floating. The rotation is five types: what is in flower this week, one growing question answered, a staff pick, an arrival or delivery, and one event. Batch day is the last Tuesday of the month, a half-day, with a photograph walk through the greenhouses the Friday before. Two slots a week stay empty for weather and for whatever comes off the truck. The decision that came out of the work was to close the third account entirely, which nobody had been willing to say out loud.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which accounts you have, who posts now, and the last time the posting stopped. No charge.
2. A look at the accounts. What you have published over six months, what people responded to, and which platform is carrying the others. Two working days.
3. The draft calendar and batch brief. Five to seven working days after the call. You tell me which slots you cannot hold and which post types you would never write.
4. The first batch, run together. A working session in which the first month is actually written, so the routine has happened once with someone in the room.
5. Handover. The final calendar, the brief and the standing rules, with the next two batch days already in your diary.

Two to three weeks from the first call to handover is typical.

What it costs

A social calendar is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size varies: two accounts or five, one quarter or a year, captions written by you or by me. The pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see the shape of it. The number is agreed in writing before anything starts and does not move unless the scope does.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The batch day proves that writing twelve posts from nothing is the hard part, and the blog turns out to be the cheapest source, which is one article split into a fortnight of posts. The owner notices their own account outperforms the company page, which points at posts written for a personal account. Or the batch runs fine and the bottleneck moves to loading the posts into the scheduler, which is content scheduling. The calendar is finished work on its own and none of the three is assumed.