Social media calendar

A social media calendar is one view of every post you've planned, laid out by date and by channel. It shows what's going out, when, and where, so you can see next week's gaps before they happen. Some people keep one in a spreadsheet. Others use a calendar that publishes the posts too, so the plan and the publishing stay in the same place.

Start by deciding which channels you're planning for and how often you want to post on each. Then:

1. Pick the days and times you want each channel to post.
2. Write your posts onto those dates, a month at a time if that suits you.
3. Leave anything you're unsure about as a draft.
4. Check the month for gaps and fill them before the week starts.

You can do this in a spreadsheet, or in a calendar that publishes for you.

Not to plan. Click any time slot, and you can write a post, add images, see how it'll look and save it, all without signing up. What you can't do without an account is schedule: publishing needs both a Buffer account and a connected channel. Once you create a free account, your planned content will appear in your Buffer calendar. In the meantime, you can still copy a draft and post it yourself.

They're saved in your browser for 30 days. That means they live on the one device you planned them on, so they won't be accessible if you switch to your phone, open a private window, or clear your browsing data. Creating a free account moves your drafts across, text and images included, where they will be accessible to refine or schedule.

Yes. Buffer has a set of free social media calendar templates you can copy, in Google Sheets, Notion, and a few other formats. A template is a good place to start, but our fully integrated calendar helps you create, plan, and schedule content from one place.

The calendar sits alongside the list view as one of the two ways to see everything you have queued. Anything you drafted before making an account is waiting for you there, so you pick the month up where you left it rather than starting it again.

Yes. Every channel keeps its own time zone, so a US account can run on Eastern while a UK one runs on London time, and you schedule each in the hours its audience is actually awake. The calendar itself shows times in whatever time zone your browser is set to, which is worth knowing if you're traveling and the grid suddenly looks shifted.

Yes. Drag it to the day you want and its time comes with it. You can write, edit and delete posts straight on the grid too, so when a launch slips a week you fix the plan where you're already looking at it rather than opening something else.

Anything sitting in the queue moves into the new slots. Switch LinkedIn from mornings to afternoons and the posts you'd queued shuffle into the new times in the same order. Posts you gave a specific date and time to don't move, so a launch you pinned to Tuesday at 9 stays on Tuesday at 9.

Yes, though it works a little differently. The Buffer mobile app shows you a week at a time or a single day rather than the whole month, and you tap a post to change it instead of dragging it. It's the same calendar underneath, so anything you add on your phone is waiting for you on the web.