How to Build a Social Media Content Calendar: Plan by Year, Month and Week

Why build a calendar?

Many social media routines stop because people only think about "what shall I post today?" on the day itself. On a busy day no idea comes, and after one day off, a second day off is easier. You also often remember seasonal events and announcements for your own events only at the last minute, too late to prepare.

A content calendar is a tool to remove this "thinking about it on the day." If the plan is already laid out, all you do on the day is write, or check a post you already wrote. When a team runs the account, everyone can see who posts what and when, which also prevents overlap, like two people writing about the same topic.

Build it in three layers

If you try to make one detailed calendar, it takes too much effort to keep up. We recommend building it from coarse to fine, in three layers: year, month and week.

What you decide in the upper layer is turned into specific posts in the lower layer. As a guide, the year layer takes about an hour, the month layer about 30 minutes, and the week layer about 15 minutes, not counting writing time.

Year layer: line up events and your own schedule

First, line up the big events of the year. Include things that happen at about the same time every year: public holidays and seasonal events, your industry's busy seasons, and your own fiscal year-end, new products, campaigns, trade shows and founding anniversary.

For Japan's public holidays, the Cabinet Office publishes dates up to the following year on its page "National Holidays" and also distributes them as CSV. It is handy to import them when you build the year layer.

What matters here is not to try to turn every event into a post. Choose only the events related to your products and customers. For a restaurant, that might be holiday opening days and seasonal ingredients; for a cram school, exam season and school vacations; for housing, inspections before the rainy season and typhoons. Find the times when people in your field think, "I want this information at this time of year."

Also write down your busy and quiet seasons. In busy seasons, the person in charge is busy and posts tend to stop, so plan to write ahead of time. Quiet seasons can be used to try a new pillar or look back at past posts.

Month layer: decide the main theme and announcements

In the month layer, pick up the events related to that month from the year layer and decide one main theme. For example, "new life" for March, or "beating the summer heat" for July, a topic that becomes the axis of the month's posts.

When you have an announcement, write not only the day of the announcement but the flow before and after it. For a new product, spreading it over several posts, such as a teaser one to two weeks before launch, an announcement on launch day, and customer comments and how-to use afterward, gets more chances to be seen than posting once.

Another thing to decide is the number of posts for each content pillar. Three posts a week is roughly 12 or 13 a month, so allocate them like "4 seasonal topics, 4 products, 3 behind the scenes, 2 announcements." Deciding the pillar mix in the month layer prevents imbalances like only product promotion.

Week layer: fill in each day

In the week layer, fit the number and mix decided in the month layer into slots by day and time. If you post on the same days and times every week, you do not have to keep deciding. For frequency, see how to decide posting frequency, and for times see how to choose posting times.

The items to decide in the week layer are:

• Date, time and network
• Pillar and theme (in one line)
• Who writes the text and who checks it
• Images or video to use (whether you have them or need to shoot them)
• Status (not started, draft, awaiting check, scheduled)

The last one, status, is important. If you can see at a glance which posts are in the plan but not yet written, you will not panic in the middle of the week.

Rules for using it as a team

If several people use the calendar, decide the rules first. Without rules, someone moves a plan and others do not notice, two posts end up in the same slot, or a post that has not been checked goes out.

Decide three things: who may add or move plans, when the check deadline is, and where the record of the check is kept. For example: "Only the person in charge moves plans, checks are done by 17:00 the day before posting, and checked posts get the status changed to checked." Then just looking at the calendar shows how preparation is going.

How to build the review flow itself is explained in more detail in how to build an approval workflow.

How to fill empty slots

Even with a calendar, some slots will have no idea. Having a few methods ready means you do not reach the day with a blank.

One is to republish a post that got good engagement in the past from a different angle. Rather than reposting the same text, add a new photo or what has changed since. Reusing text that is too similar can be treated as spam on some networks, so always change the structure and wording.

Another is posts that answer questions you often get. What you are asked again and again on the phone or in the shop is what other people want to know too. Collecting "things we are asked a lot lately" inside the company gives you a stock of ideas.

If you update your own blog or news page, briefly introducing those articles for social media is another option.

Recovering when the plan falls apart

There are always weeks that do not go to the calendar. A sudden announcement comes up, the person in charge is off, or prepared photos cannot be used. If you try to redo everything at that point, you end up not using the calendar at all.

When it falls apart, swap only that week's plan. Replace a planned post with the sudden announcement and move the replaced post to an empty slot in a later week. Don't cram in posts you couldn't publish; push them to the next week. Packing several posts into one day puts the same account's posts side by side on followers' screens and makes them less likely to be seen.

Once a month, compare the calendar with what you actually published and note why they differed, and next month's plan will get closer to reality.

You can use a spreadsheet, but the effort remains if it isn't connected to publishing

A content calendar can be built in a spreadsheet. But after you plan in the sheet, you have to schedule each post one by one in each network's screen when you actually publish, and the sheet and the real schedule drift apart. "The sheet said it was scheduled but it never went out" happens here.

Combine planning and scheduling in SNS TOWN's calendar

SNS TOWN's posts screen is itself a calendar. You can switch between week, month and list, and scheduled posts, drafts, posts awaiting approval and published posts from your connected networks appear on the same screen. Because the place where you plan and the place where you schedule are the same, nothing drifts from a sheet. To change a time, just drag the post on the calendar.

Slots that go out on the same day and time every week can be set in a post cycle. Future slots without a draft yet show on the calendar as dashed boxes, so you see at a glance where there are gaps. AI writes a draft for each slot from your company profile and key messages and lines it up under Awaiting approval by 15:00 (Japan time) two days before the posting day.

You can add a pillar's name to a post as a tag and filter the list by tag, so you can also check whether your pillar mix is unbalanced. If you leave internal notes on posts, your team's discussion stays attached to the post on the calendar. How to use it is explained with photos in See posts on the calendar.

Frequently asked questions