How to Build a 30 Day Social Media Content Calendar

Have you ever tried to bake a cake without a recipe?

It seems like a good – and maybe even fun – idea when you first get started. But when the timer dings, you realize that you’ve been working on it for four hours, your ingredients are spread all across the kitchen… and the cake comes out of the oven flat.

If this has happened to you, you also know what it feels like to try to plan a 30 day social media content calendar without a process. We recognize that doing so can be an overwhelming, confusing process. Worse yet, pulling together content topics without a plan can take so much effort that it leaves you hesitant to do so again the following month.

The good news: There is a recipe for monthly content planning.
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In this blog, we’ll share with you the process that we use to plan monthly social media posts for our clients each and every month. And the best part? Once you get the hang of it, your team will be able to plan a month’s worth of content topics in just one hour.

Why is content planning an important part of your social media strategy?

When you want a powerful way to start messaging to your target audiences, the first step is simple: Set up the social media channels that will help you connect and drive audience engagement.

The second step is a little bit harder: What should you be talking about? That’s where regular social media content planning comes into play.

But why does it really matter? Because social media marketing is a slow, methodical process. No matter what your core social media goal is – to build awareness, foster community, or drive action – it cannot be achieved with just one post. Instead, success relies on getting your key messages out to your customers on a routine (often monthly) basis.

Setting a clear process for monthly content planning is also crucial to protecting your team’s time. If you charge ahead without a plan, choosing content topics can be a task that puts significant strain on your bandwidth.

Combining these two needs is what led us to a process that prioritizes planning goal-oriented content as efficiently as possible. We outline this process below.

What is social media content planning?

​You may only have a limited window of time to meet with your team to discuss social media content each month. That’s why it’s important to recognize what social media content planning is and is not.

Social media content planning is the process by which we strategically select topics for our social media channels each month.

Social media content planning is not: 

• Writing the text for social media posts 
• Creating graphics for social media posts
• Scheduling or publishing social media posts

We recommend keeping the actual content creation separate from your planning process for two reasons:

The first is ​strategic. Since you often have limited time to plan content, it’s best to use that time to make sure all of your team’s priorities and goals are represented on the calendar. That can’t be done for a month’s worth of content if you are also drafting the posts during the meeting.

The second is logistical. ​Once you have defined content topics and placed them on the calendar, the process of writing, finding images, and scheduling posts all becomes much more straightforward.

Content planning meeting: When?

When you’re first getting started with monthly content planning, we recommend reserving a consistent one-hour meeting at the beginning of each month for this process. However, you may find that you can allot less time for future meetings as your team gains experience and develops a regular agenda.

Set your content planning meeting during the first week of the month. During this meeting, you’ll be planning content for the following month. For instance, if your team was meeting in the first week of January, you’d be looking ahead at your social media content for February. 

Meeting at the beginning of the month gives you ample time to draft copy, research supporting links, create graphics, and schedule out your content. Doing so also gives you a chance to identify content needs (e.g., a team member should be assigned to take photos at an upcoming event) that can be taken care of well before you draft your content.​

Content planning meeting: Who?

Who should take part in this work? When scheduling your content meeting, we recommend inviting more team members, not less.

The wonderful thing about focusing your content planning meeting on topics – not writing the posts – is that doing so opens the door for more folks to participate. Some members of your team may not be social media experts, but they know what your audience is looking for. Capture their ideas in this meeting and spend time adapting them to social media later on.

As we always tell our clients: Great content ideas can (and do) come from everybody!​

Content planning meeting: How?

Now that everybody is in the room, begin your content planning meeting with a quick look at your content for the current month. If you’re meeting in January to plan February content, take a moment at the top of the meeting to glance at the posts you’ve drafted for January.

Is everything scheduled out and ready to go? If not, this is a great time to determine what is missing and who can help. But adhere to the advice above – it’s good to identify needs, but don’t actually spend time writing posts or creating images in this meeting.

Once you’ve finished this housekeeping check, you can look ahead to planning next month’s content. Your keystone in this process will be to plan topics, not posts.

As we’ve already mentioned, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details during a content planning meeting. If you begin to work on the exact wording of each post, the meeting will be over before you’ve made it through three posts.

That’s why it is so important to focus on only planning topics in this meeting. The conversation should sound like this:​

“We should post about the upcoming event on the 15th.”

It should not​ sound like this:

“How long should the post on the 15th be? Should we use this photo?”

To bring it all together, planning topics rather than content empowers you to:
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• Keep your meetings short and to the point
• Invite more people to participate
• Avoid getting bogged down in the details
• Adapt content across social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Easily plug topics onto your calendar
• Ensure that you are speaking to your core messages each month

​Plan a topic for each day you intend to post in the following month. For instance, if you are aiming to post twice a week, make sure you place topics on each Tuesday and Thursday on the calendar. If you plan to post three times a week, you can consider a Monday-Wednesday-Friday approach, or a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday approach.

Planning topics with content buckets

But how do you select which topics to talk about next month? Some will come easily: If you have a big event coming up, it’s natural to post about it. But some topics – including those that may be most closely related to your goals – may not come so easily

We can ensure that we speak to all of our key message areas through the use of what we call content buckets. 

A content bucket is a theme that you speak to on social media from month to month. They may focus on:
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• Core customer values (gain creators and/or pain relievers)
• Key marketing objectives (growing awareness, generating donations, etc.)
• Timely information (events, deals, holidays, etc.)

You can name as many or as few content buckets as serves your messaging needs. Common content buckets include:
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• Brand awareness content (“who we are,” “what we do”)
• Audience education (i.e. podcast clips)
• Products and services
• Key brand messages
• Audience gain creators
• Audience pain relievers
• Events

Your content buckets offer you a means for both strategic and tactical planning, and should always connect to customer and business needs. 

One great way to select your content buckets is to consider your key marketing goals. For instance, if your goal is to build awareness, you’ll want to regularly create content that introduces your audience to your mission and offerings. If you’re looking to educate folks, you should save space in your calendar for posts that share key resources and information.

We recommend defining your content types ahead of your first planning meeting. During your monthly sessions, you’ll use content buckets to guide your discussion by focusing on the questions they raise. For example:

​CONTENT BUCKET: EVENTS

• “What events do we have coming up next month?”
• “What highlights do we want to share from recent events?”
• “What events are our partners hosting in the near future?”

CONTENT BUCKET: EDUCATION

• “What educational resources could we share?”
• “What key fact should we speak about next month?”
• “What’s a common question or misconception we could answer with our content?”​

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​Content buckets are reusable resources not only month-to-month, but year-to-year. If your organization is involved in an annual event, for example, you’ll be able to review your posts from the prior year to see how you talked about it then, and use analytics to tweak your strategy for this year.

Combining the content buckets with your content calendar

Now that you’ve determined when you plan to post and the topics you’ll be posting about for the month, you should take some time to consider how you arrange your posts on the calendar.

​Some of these choices will be obvious – for example, if you’re planning to post a promotion for an upcoming event, you wouldn’t schedule it for after the event has occurred. 

Other options for post scheduling may be more open, which is why a good next step is to identify the response you intend your posts to provoke – which will also help you reach different segments of your audience. 

Each month, you will reach people who are in very different stages of their relationship with your organization. Any given post may reach users who have never heard of you and folks who have engaged with you for years. 

If you post twice per week, you have eight slots for content every month. We recommend that you make sure that in those eight posts, some are for new users and others are for those who already know you. You can do so by creating content that makes users FEEL, THINK and DO.

FEEL posts use storytelling to drive awareness and speak to member needs, aspirations, and values – in other words, they tug at the heartstrings. Posts that describe your company’s mission are examples of FEEL content, as are posts that spotlight members of your organization or valued volunteers. This content motivates people who don’t know your organization very well to learn more about you.

THINK posts use facts and testimonials to proactively address customer questions and concerns. This category can also include educational content that may not be tied directly to your offerings, but which speaks to your organization’s perspective and approach. THINK posts speak to those who are somewhat familiar with you already, and can help them make the leap from consideration of your services to participation.

DO posts spark your audience to take a specific action, such as filling out a form, attending an event, or signing up for your newsletter. DO posts speak to those who are very familiar with your brand and only need a clear opportunity to get involved with what you’re offering.

After you’ve established your content buckets and what you expect each of your posts will do, take a moment to curate your calendar based on those audience responses. A well-balanced social media month includes a healthy mix of FEEL, THINK, and DO posts, and avoids “bunching” too many of the same type of content into a single week.

But remember – content buckets are not set in stone! Your marketing strategy may very well change over the course of time. We recommend revisiting your content buckets regularly (at least once per year) to ensure that they are still aligned with your goals.

Conclusion

The strategies and tactics we’re describing above offer a framework that should also be viewed with some flexibility – you know your team and bandwidth best, so feel free to adapt the ideas above in ways that make the most sense for your organization.

Got any questions? We teach our process through our Same Page Content Planning Session half-day workshop. Learn more about the workshop here, or reach out today if you need support!

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​Bilal Dardai

Bilal Dardai (Senior Writer) has worked in digital marketing and branding as a copywriter, editor, and social media coordinator for over 15 years. His clients have ranged from small businesses and not for profit organizations to large multinational corporations across a wide array of industries. (he/him)

​Daniel Prohuska

Daniel Prohuska (Senior Strategist) began his career at Sarah Best Strategy as a strategy intern before joining the team full-time in May 2022. While he enjoys all kinds of digital marketing tasks, Daniel is most driven by his passion for helping vital, untold stories find their intended audience. (he/him)