How to Schedule Social Media Posts [Free Template]

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Sure, Benjamin Franklin probably wasn’t thinking about social media posting schedules when he said this, but hey, if the shoes fit…

Clichés aside, you might have the best social media content strategy in the world, but do you release your content when everyone can see it? Or, a better question: do you publish when your target audience sees it?

Here’s everything you need to determine the best social media posting schedule for your business.

How to create the perfect social media posting schedule

A social media posting schedule will help you stay organized and ensure that content is created ahead of time for all your upcoming social media marketing campaigns. But there is no perfect schedule that suits everyone. The ideal frequency and timing of your social media posts will depend on your audience and industry, among other things.

Read this five-step process to find the perfect time to post on social media. Eventually, you will have a complete social media dominance plan.

1. Know your audience

This is the most important step! For social media content scheduling to work, you need to know:

• Who is your target audience?
• What time of day are they online?
• Where do they communicate online and when? For example, do they start the day on Twitter and end the day by scrolling through Instagram? (Aren’t we all?)

Don’t worry if your audience is in a different time zone than you. Later, we’ll look at social media scheduling tools that will automatically post your content at the best times. (Hint: it’s Hootsuite. Hootsuite does it.)

2. Figure out how often to post

Whenever content doesn’t work, many people immediately blame the “algorithm”. And while sometimes content fails simply because it’s not great, algorithms do play an important role in what your audience sees on social media.

Every social platform has its own algorithm, which is a fancy word for “a system that seeks to understand what its users want and then delivers it to their screens.”

How often you post is one of the factors algorithms use to rate and distribute your content.

In June 2021, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri confirmed that posting two posts per week and two stories per day is the best way to succeed.

TikTok recommends posting at least once a day and up to four times a day for best results. Once a day doesn’t sound like much until you realize that it’s basically conceptualizing, scripting, filming and editing what used to be a TV commercial every single day.

For Facebook, relevance is the main driver of the algorithm. New posts always carry more weight, even when combined with other ranking factors. It’s especially important to know when your target audience is on Facebook and post accordingly.

Need a little help figuring out how often to post on each network? Here is a quick guide based on our research:

• On Instagram, post 3 to 7 times a week.
• On Facebook, post 1 to 2 times a day.
• On Twitter, post 1 to 5 tweets per day.
• On LinkedIn, post 1 to 5 times per day.
• On TikTok, post 1 to 4 times a day.

3. Plan Your Campaigns Ahead

In addition to regular content, plan big product launches, announcements, and seasonal campaigns well in advance.

To keep everything organized, make a high-level calendar. It’s not just a place where you write and plan your post. Your calendar is part of your social media content strategy and helps make sure you account for everything you need to get out into the world.

This is your guide to what to post, not just when to post.

It can be as simple as a to-do list to make sure you get everything done on time – no last-minute rush:

September

• Black Friday/Cyber ​​Monday Campaign Draft Posts
  • 5 text messages
  • 7 photo/image ads
  • 1 video ad

October

• Creating visual resources for the BF/CM campaign
  • Complete by October 15

november

• Plan and promote BF/CM posts

4. Evaluate your work

You can post at any “hot”time to post from this article and hundreds of other sources online, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best schedule for you.

We’ve already talked about how important it is to know when your audience is online. But you also need to experiment.

Maybe you get an average of 5% organic post reach, or about 1 in 19 followers, but what if 6% of your audience can see your posts? Or 7%? Or 10%?!

Following the same content publishing schedule quarter after quarter, year after year is likely to hurt your growth.

This doesn’t mean you have to drastically change things every week. You need a baseline to tell if any of your experiments work. Try doing one experiment per month. Change one of your regular posting days or times to a new one for a month and see which timeslot works best.

Small changes and experimentation over time can make a big difference. Think of it like A/B testing your social media.

5. TL;DR? Post at this time

You have reached the cheat sheet section of this article.

While all of the above is true, and you shouldn’t arbitrarily post content you find online from time to time without first doing proper audience research… Well, if you’re not going to follow my advice, here are some universal guidelines for the best. times you have to publish based on extensive research.

The best time to post on social media is 10:00 am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

But is it when your audience is online? Who knows!

Scheduling your content around this time is a good starting point, followed by your analytics and audience research. This will allow you to develop a personalized and truly effective social media posting schedule that works for your brand and your audience.

Free Template: Social Media Posting Schedule

So, you know what you’ll be posting about based on your social content strategy. Now you also know how to find the best time to post on social media for your audience. Now how do you make all this happen? It’s time to start creating a social media posting schedule that will work for your business.

Click the link below to download our free social media post schedule template. It’s built for Google Sheets, so it’s easy to edit anytime, anywhere and collaborate with your team.

Here’s how to get the most out of it:

Make a copy

The file will open as a read-only Google Sheet. Click “File”then “Make a copy”to create your own editable version of the spreadsheet to be stored in your Google account.

You will see a guide on how to use it on the first tab, so check it out. You can remove this tab from your copy.

Edit it for your needs

The graph shows one week of content planning for all major social platforms. Now it’s time to make your own schedule.

Do not post on all of the listed social networks? Delete lines.

Post the ones that are not included? Add rows.

Don’t want to write every day? Edit the schedule.

You get the idea. Make the template suitable for your business.

After you set it up to work with your social media platforms, posting frequency and time, copy and paste the lines so you can write a month’s worth of content on the tab.

Then duplicate that tab 11 times to create an entire social media content calendar for the entire year. #mindblown To do this, right-click on the tab name at the bottom and select Duplicate.

Add your content

Time for the best part. Get in there and start writing your social media content.

You don’t need to plan months or even weeks ahead. If you don’t already have a content production process in place, try to create content a week early first. Of course, big campaigns will require more planning.

The template offers suggestions for the types of content to post, from posting your latest blog post to a video or something else. Change these content categories to match what you’re posting about.

Then…get to work:

These are the basics for planning your content, but this table can do so much more. See our detailed social media calendar guide for more tips on using this template, such as how to create an evergreen content library, an editorial calendar, and more.

How to schedule social media posts

Hootsuite makes it easy to schedule all your social media posts in one place.

There are two ways to schedule posts:

1. individually
2. bulk upload

How to schedule individual social media posts

Using the Hootsuite scheduler, you can schedule individual posts for all connected social media accounts. You can set it up to post to just one account or multiple profiles, and edit your content to make it look right on each platform.

With Hootsuite, you can schedule and automatically publish the following content formats:

• Facebook feed posts
• posts on instagram
• instagram stories
• Video from TikTok
• Tweets
• LinkedIn messages
• YouTube video
• Pins (on Pinterest)

Ready to start? Here’s how to schedule a post in three quick steps:

Step 1: In Hootsuite, click Create, then Publish (or Pin) from the menu on the left.

Step 2: Create your post.

Select the platform(s) you want to publish to and write or paste your content. Add a link, photo, video or other resources.

A feature I personally love is the ability to tag people or brands. For example, if you write @hootsuite, you will automatically be prompted to select the appropriate account to tag on each platform. This saves time and ensures that you tag the correct account.

Step 3: Pick a time – or let AutoScheduler do it for you!

Hootsuite AutoScheduler chooses the best time to post based on your performance history and audience. Messages can also be saved as drafts or published immediately.

That’s all!

How to bulk schedule social media posts

With Hootsuite, you can also save time by downloading and scheduling up to 350 posts with a single click.

Here is a step by step guide explaining how Hootsuite’s Bulk Composer works:

Want to test these tools for yourself? AutoSchedule and Bulk Composer are included in the professional Hootsuite plan, which you can try for free for 30 days.

Try it for free. You can cancel at any time.

3 Useful Social Media Planning Tools

Hootsuite Scheduler

Hootsuite Planner is where you can view and edit upcoming scheduled posts. It’s like a “mission control center”for your social content.

Here is a quick guide on how to use Hootsuite Composer and Planner to create and schedule posts:

Best time to post Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s Best Time to Post feature, found in the Analytics section, analyzes your past performance to show you data on the best time to post on each of your social platforms.

But there is no “best” time to post everything, so this tool goes one step further and breaks down suggested times into three key goals:

1. Raise awareness
2. Increasing Engagement
3. Attracting traffic

This allows each piece of content to be aligned with business goals and streamlined planning for maximum ROI. (Feel free to copy/paste this phrase from your boss’ tech brochure to justify getting a Hootsuite.)

The best time to post is available for Hootsuite Team accounts and above.

Try the Hootsuite Team plan for free for 30 days

Social advertising Hootsuite

Manage your paid content at the same time as your organic content with Hootsuite Social Advertising. In addition to saving you planning time, you get a complete picture of your social media results with unified analytics and ROI reports.

By seeing the results of paid campaigns and organic content together, you can make informed decisions and quickly make changes to active campaigns.

Here’s more information on how to optimize your social media ads with Hootsuite Social Advertising:

Use Hootsuite to schedule social media content across all platforms. Schedule your content, find the right time to post, and measure performance with real-time analytics – all from one dashboard.