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Planning is one of those aspects of any project that can make or break it. The same goes for a social media management or marketing campaign. So, it is vital to get familiar with what exactly a social media planner is, why it is important, and how you can create a planner in 2025 that can help you win over the 5.42 billion social media users.
The primary goal of a well-crafted social media planner is to organize all of your social media posts. It helps you collaborate with others in a clear and effective manner. It is is also useful to avoid last-minute surprises and schedule content for important events, such as holidays, in advance.
So, without any further delay, let’s dive straight into the key aspects of a social media planner, starting with some basics.
A social media content planner, or simply a social media planner, is a comprehensive schedule arranged by date and time containing data related to your social media posts.
The exact type of social media planner can range anywhere from a simple spreadsheet, an actual calendar, or a social media management tool with content planning and scheduling features.
With so many social sites and social media management tools available, you don’t have to manually create content planners. Those days are also long gone when you had to write reminders to post something on physical calendars.
So, in this digital era, a social media planner can be defined as a tool that can schedule, organize, and manage your social media posts. Such systematic scheduling and organization are critical to streamlining the social media management processes. It is even more important for companies, brands, and managers handling multiple profiles across numerous social media platforms.
Not all social media planners are the same, but they typically have the following 6 key components:
A social media planner is an important part of social media management strategies nowadays due to the following reasons:
Being consistent in posting content across multiple social media platforms is easier said than done. If you manually plan and post content across major social sites on a regular basis, you’ll end up spending many hours in this mundane routine.
With an efficient social media content planner, however, you can plan months of content in advance in one go. It will also ensure you are posting content consistently on all channels to keep your audience engaged.
Related: How often should you post on social media?
Brands, large-scale organizations, and agencies have to manage multiple social media profiles on multiple platforms. Without proper planning, this entire social media management process can get cluttered and inefficient.
So, if you want to increase your efficiency by streamlining social media management strategies and properly planning your social media posts, you should use a social media planner.
Planning social media posts in advance is also vital to improve your branding efforts and ensure you are on the right track to achieve your marketing goals. Consistent engagement with your target audience with relevant and branded social media content ultimately translates into better brand recognition and branding.
Overall, a social media content planner is important because it acts like an all-in-one tool that helps you keep up with upcoming social media posts. Moreover, it helps you track key deadlines and manage your social media presence through a unified dashboard.
Creating a social media plan involves considering many different factors related to social media management. These key factors include:
Considering these factors, you can create an effective social media planner to achieve your social media goals in 2025 by following these steps:
Goals like higher engagement, greater reach, and more followers are likely to remain the same in all social media campaigns.
However, you should dive deeper in this step and set specific goals, such as:
These are some of the many SMART goals you can set when you start the process of creating a planner.
You are likely to be familiar with your core target audience if you already have a social media presence. But remember your audience’s expectations and requirements are also likely to change from time to time.
So, when you are creating a social media planner for 2025, you should re-evaluate the requirements and social media habits of your target audience.
For instance, if you are targeting Gen Z or Gen Alpha, you need to focus more on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. On the other hand, if millennials or boomers are your primary target audience, you will have to focus on Facebook, Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter).
Performing a comprehensive competitive analysis can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ social media. It is also useful to get familiar with the industry’s trends and implement best practices in social media content planning.
Other than considering your target audience, there are several other considerations that can ensure you are putting your social media efforts into the right platforms.
The summary of these considerations is as follows:
Consideration | Description | Impact on social media planner |
Audience demographics | Identify the age, location, gender, and interests of your target audience. Focus on platforms that cater to these demographics (e.g., TikTok for Gen Z, LinkedIn for professionals). | Ensures your planner targets platforms where your ideal audience spends time, maximizing content visibility and engagement. |
Content format | Match your planned content (e.g., videos, infographics, blogs) with the platform’s strengths. For example, YouTube works well for long-form videos, while Instagram supports visuals like photos and Reels. | Helps tailor the planner’s content strategy to each platform, ensuring compatibility and improved audience response. |
Engagement potential | Evaluate how audiences interact with posts on the platform (likes, shares, comments). Use platforms where engagement aligns with your goals. | Encourages allocation of resources to platforms with higher interaction potential. |
Advertising opportunities | Choose platforms that offer advanced targeting, ad formats, and analytics. | Optimizes budget allocation in the planner by identifying platforms with high ROI advertising options. |
Competition | Study your competitors’ strategies. Use platforms where competitors are thriving for inspiration or where they have limited presence to create opportunities. | Provides insights for the planner to capitalize on gaps in competitor presence or refine strategies to outperform rivals. |
Brand voice | Align the platform’s tone with your brand personality. For example, use LinkedIn for formal communication and TikTok for casual, fun interactions. | Ensures consistent tone and messaging in content planning. |
Scalability | Opt for platforms that can grow with your brand. Prioritize those with robust analytics, advertising options, or API integrations for long-term scalability. | Ensures the planner can adapt to increasing audience or content demands, supporting sustainable growth. |
Budget constraints | Assess the costs of maintaining a presence, including ads and tools. Start with platforms offering strong organic reach or affordable paid options. | Helps prioritize platforms within budget, making the planner cost-effective while maximizing impact. |
These key factors will help you choose the right social media platform for your brand. Since companies typically have a broad target audience, it is understandable that you are likely to plan and publish content to multiple social media platforms.
So, even after considering these factors, you might realize that you need to have an active presence on all social media platforms. These platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, YouTube, X, etc.
Ultimately, it all comes down to how much you can manage without impacting the quality of your social media content and whether you are using the right social media content planner and management tool to streamline your workflow.
The previous four steps have dealt with identifying your goals, audience, competitors, and relevant social media platforms. They ensure you are ready to plan social media posts.
Now that you are familiar with these key points, you should focus on planning content that can engage your audience better than your competitors to fulfill your social media objectives.
There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to planning, scheduling, and posting content across different social media platforms. You should strike a balance between different types of content, including captivating text, engaging social media images, GIFs, and videos.
Moreover, the type of content you are planning is also dependent on your target social media platforms, such as Instagram Reels, LinkedIn carousel posts, TikTok live videos, Facebook Stories, etc.
Once you have planned what type of content you need to post, the next step is to decide when you should post it to maximize its impact.
Having a well-planned social media posting schedule can do wonders for your social media engagement because of the following factors:
The process of choosing the right posting frequency and posting time might seem difficult at first. But the good thing is that this entire process can become quick and easy by using a reliable social media planner and scheduler.
Curating social media content often involves collaborations with other marketing team members. Having a clear and streamlined collaboration workflow is important to avoid confusion while posting content.
For instance, if you are a social media manager having the final say in approving or rejecting a social media post, you should configure a social media content planner in a way that other team members are only able to add posts to the planner.
Similarly, if you are planning social media content on behalf of a client and want them to have the final approval right, you need to choose a social media planning tool that allows you to share planned posts with clients.
The final step to creating an effective planner is to schedule your social media posts at suitable dates and times using the social media planner tool of your choice.
The scheduling frequency is dependent on your available resources and workflow. You can either plan and schedule an entire week of social media posts in advance. You can even plan the content for the entire month. Scheduling is ultimately useful to save time and make sure your social media posts are locked and loaded to go live at the perfect time.
The exact type and design of a planner is dependent on your specific platforms. The kind of content you are planning to post on your profiles also affects the template.
Generally, you should use a social media planner template that allows you to plan, organize, and schedule your social media posts in advance. Ideally, you should use a comprehensive social media management tool that offers features related to planning, scheduling, and posting content.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for customizable and free social media planner templates to get started, you can view the following template and request editing access:
Alternatively, you can also download the social media content planner template for 2025 in PDF format for free:
Let’s understand how to use the social media planner free template with the help of a case study.
TerraClothing, a sustainable fashion brand, can effectively utilize our social media planner template to organize its 2025 social media content strategy. The following image demonstrates their social media planning for the month of January.
The brand maintains a balanced content mix with
Their social media strategy kicks off with a trivia post about water conservation in organic cotton production on January 2nd. It is followed by Monday Motivation posts about sustainable fashion resolutions.
Mid-month content includes practical how-to tutorials about creating capsule wardrobes and customer success stories. The month concludes with a major event promotion for their Spring 2025 collection preview.
The brand cleverly uses platform-specific approaches:
This structured approach ensures consistent posting across platforms while maintaining platform-specific engagement strategies and content formats.
By now, you have learned how to create a social media planner in 2025 that can help you reach your social media goals and boost engagement across various social media platforms.
The complexity and changing nature of social media make it difficult to keep up with the trends and manage a manual social media planning schedule.
Therefore, it is important to choose user-friendly and reliable social media planning tools that can help you streamline this process.
Let’s discuss how you can select the right social media content planner and what are some of the top options currently available.
An ideal social media planner tool has the following features:
By looking for these features in social media planning tools, you will be in a great position to pick the right tool.
Following are the top 4 tools you should use to plan your social media content in 2025:
ContentStudio is a powerful social media management tool available for marketers, brands, agencies, and companies. Its extensive features support efficient social media planning, AI-powered content creation, scheduling across multiple platforms, and comprehensive analytics.
Planner, also called social media calendar, is one of the most important parts of ContentStudio. It allows you to plan and schedule your social media posts in advance in an interactive manner.
Moreover, you can easily view the planned posts in various ways, such as on the calendar, feed, list, and compact list. ContentStudio also provides platform-specific views, including Instagram Grid view and TikTok Grid view. Such customization options help users easily plan social media posts.
Some of the other key features that make ContentStudio the go-to social media planner tool are:
Overall, ContentStudio makes social media planning quicker, easier, and more efficient, so you should definitely check out this tool.
Plan, schedule, share, and analyze content for 15+ social media channels.
Try ContentStudio for FREEIf you are looking for a very basic and completely free social media content planner, you can try out Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. These tools have customizable rows and columns, so a business can make a sheet that caters to their specific requirements, such as posting schedule, specific date and time, platform, hashtag, and post description.
While customization is a huge benefit of using spreadsheets as a social media planner, not everyone is familiar with its usage. Moreover, you might also face difficulty in finding the right social media content planning template in Sheets or Excel file formats.
Hence, if you choose to plan your social media content using Google Sheets or Excel, you must be familiar with its limitations and have another social media management tool in mind to fulfill other social media tasks.
Canva is a highly popular online design tool. Since Canva is primarily used for designing, using it as a social media planner tool might not be your first thought.
Nevertheless, you can find a variety of free social media planners and content calendar templates in Canva that you can customize according to your specific requirements.
Just like spreadsheets, Canva can fulfill only your basic planning requirements. You cannot get any scheduling or analytics features in Canva. Moreover, even the process of manually editing a planner template can be time-consuming, especially if you are doing it for multiple months and various clients.
Trello is a popular project management tool used by many users and organizations to effectively oversee all aspects of a project. While it is not necessarily a social media planner tool, you can still repurpose its board to plan and manage your social media posts.
Here’s an example of an existing Trello template for social media planning that you can repurpose as per your specific requirements:
While Trello has many features and benefits related to categorization and adding filters, there are a few significant limitations as well. You cannot view the planned posts and tasks in the traditional calendar view available in other social media planning tools.
Moreover, Trello can only be used as a project management or planning tool. You cannot use it to schedule content for your social media platforms or analyze their performance. This can end up causing you to spend even more time in social media content planning and scheduling, so it is better if you choose an all-in-one tool in the first place.
Let’s summarize the key features of top social media planning tools:
Feature | ContentStudio | Google Sheets or Excel | Canva | Trello |
Primary purpose | All-in-one social media management, including planning, scheduling, analytics, and collaboration | Basic content organization and scheduling | Visual content planning | Workflow and task management |
Best for | Marketers, agencies, and businesses of all sizes seeking a comprehensive social media solution | Small teams or businesses on a tight budget | Brands focusing on visual content planning | Project management and teams dealing with tasks allocation |
User interface | Intuitive interface with multiple calendar views | Simple and functional rows and columns | Drag-and-drop design interface | Visual boards with customizable cards |
Content creation | AI-powered writing assistant to help users write social media posts | Requires external tools for content creation | Built-in design tool with different templates | Requires external tools for content creation |
Scheduling | Supports 10+ platforms with direct scheduling and posting | Manual scheduling | Requires external scheduling tools | Requires external scheduling tools |
Analytics | Comprehensive analytics for social performance across platforms | No built-in analytics | No built-in analytics | No built-in analytics |
Collaboration Features | Easy collaboration with task assignments, real-time comments, and approval workflows | Basic collaboration with shared sheets | Real-time co-designing and commenting | Task assignments, comments, and activity tracking |
Integrations | Integrates with all major social media platforms. | Cannot integrate with social media platforms for planning and scheduling. | Cannot integrate with social media platforms for planning and scheduling. | Cannot integrate with social media platforms for planning and scheduling. |
We’ve already discussed the importance of social media planners and how they can improve your branding and efficiency by consistently posting across various platforms. In addition to these benefits, there are several other advantages of planning social media content for businesses and agencies:
Overall, social media planners can be the perfect tools you are looking for to upgrade your social media game.
Throughout this detailed article, we have looked at various examples of social media planning and templates you can use to plan your social media posts.
Now that you are familiar with the top social media planner tools let’s take a specific example of how you can plan your posts in ContentStudio.
1. First of all, open ContentStudio’s official website and create an account, if you don’t have one. Login to your account to access its dashboard.
2. On the dashboard, click on your profile picture in the top right corner and open Social Accounts to connect your social media accounts with ContentStudio.
3. Once your social accounts are connected, open Planner from the navigation bar.
4. Under ContentStudio’s planner, you have many different options to sort the posts as per their publishing status and platform. Moreover, you can view the planned content in various views. If you want to add a post at a particular date, simply click on the new social post icon.
5. The Post Composer will open up, and you can easily craft a post for one or multiple social media platforms and add it to the planner.
Here’s an example of ContentStudio’s social media planner in monthly view:
You can also see your weekly planned and scheduled posts for clearer description:
The bottom line is creating a social media planner or using a social media content planner tool is a necessity for marketers, brands, and agencies today to have a strong online presence. Without proper planning, you are likely to make mistakes that can harm your brand’s engagement and reputation.
The good thing is that the entire social media planning, scheduling, and tracking process can now be handled using one platform like ContentStudio. So, there is no need to create a manual planner or use complex spreadsheets to plan your social media content. Try out ContentStudio for free today and see for yourself why it is one of the best social media planners for improving your social media strategy.
Using a social media planner is essential to post consistently on social media platforms. It helps you meet your target audience’s expectations with relevant and engaging content. Moreover, planning social media content in advance helps you save significant time to focus more on your core social media management and marketing strategies.
The internet is full of social media planner and management tools nowadays. Choosing the best one is dependent on your specific requirements. Generally, ContentStudio, Google Sheets, Canva, or Trello are some of the best free options.
The best content planner for social media is the tool that provides the essential features of collaboration, planning, content creation, scheduling, and posting under the same dashboard. Considering these features and overall user-friendliness, ContentStudio stands out as the top social media content planner tool.
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