Picture a bike shop with a workshop. It is Sunday night and the owner realises nothing has gone up in ten days. They scroll through their phone for a usable photo, find one of a bike hanging in the shop window and post it with “Have a great week!”. On Monday they have no idea what to post, on Tuesday neither, and three weeks later the profile has gone quiet again. A content calendar stops that from happening: you decide in one go what you will post during the month, on which network, on which day and in which format.
What a content calendar is
It is a table of what you will post over the next few weeks. It can be a spreadsheet, a notebook or the social network's own planner. The tool matters less than you would think. What matters is that it is written down and that anyone on your team can open it and see what is due today.
What goes in each row of a content calendar
- The day and the network: Tuesday on Instagram, Thursday on LinkedIn.
- The topic: what the post is about, in one sentence.
- The format: reel, carousel, photo or story.
- The text and the image, or where they are saved.
- What you want people to do next: message you, book, come into the shop.
- Who is doing it and where it stands: idea, ready, scheduled or posted.
That last column looks like a detail, but it decides whether the calendar gets followed. If there is no name next to a post, nobody does it.
Before you fill it in: how often you will really post
The most common mistake is starting with one post a day. It lasts two weeks. A small pace you keep all year beats a big one that breaks down in March. If you run it yourself, one or two posts a week that go out no matter what, plus everyday stories, is a good starting point. On the profiles we manage, eight to twelve pieces a month is typical.
Choose where, too. Two networks done properly will get you further than five done by halves. If you are not sure which, our piece on social media for local businesses goes through which one suits each kind of business.
Three or four regular topics so you never start from scratch
What wastes the most time is deciding what to talk about every single time. That is why a good content calendar rests on a few topics that keep coming back. For a local business they tend to be these:
- What you do: a service or a product explained the way you would explain it to someone at the counter, with the price if you have one.
- How you do it: the workshop, the kitchen, the team, the process. Nobody else can show that.
- The questions people ask: what you get asked on WhatsApp or in the shop. If a question keeps coming up, you already have a post.
- The proof: happy customers, reviews, a before and after.
Offers and news have their place, but keep them to one in every four or five posts. People stop looking at a profile that only sells. And if each topic gets a fixed day (questions on Tuesday, the workshop on Friday), half the calendar fills itself.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Which format goes in each slot
Each format reaches different people, and your calendar should reflect that. Instagram explained it in 2023, in a post by its head, Adam Mosseri, on how it ranks what each person sees: Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels each use their own system.
Instagram: reels to get discovered, stories for the people who already follow you
- Reels. According to Instagram, most of the reels each person sees come from accounts they do not follow. They are how you reach new people.
- Stories. The ones at the top of the app come from accounts you already follow. They are for your regulars: Saturday's opening hours, what came in today, a poll.
- Carousels and photos. Good for explaining something step by step, in a way people can save and come back to.
In the same post, Instagram says it shows fewer reels that are low resolution, carry a watermark (such as another app's logo), have no sound, are mostly text or have already been posted on Instagram. If you film for TikTok, save the video without the logo before you also upload it as a reel.
LinkedIn, if you sell to other businesses
If your customers are companies, LinkedIn deserves its own column. A different tone works there: explaining a finished job, a problem you solved, a figure from your industry. What works on Instagram does not always work here.
And your Google profile, in the same calendar
Posts on your Google Business Profile can be planned too. One a week is plenty, and many can come from what you have already prepared for social media, with different wording. We cover that in Google Business posts.
The dates that go in first
Before you share out the topics, mark the dates you already know are coming. Your own first: when your season starts, when you close for holidays, when the new range arrives, when you are busiest and when you are quiet. Then the ones everybody knows, if they have something to do with what you sell: Valentine's Day, Sant Jordi on 23 April, Mother's Day (in Spain, the first Sunday in May), back to school, your town's festival, Black Friday or Christmas.
Meta's planner has a feature called Moments that suggests important dates, but according to Meta it is only available to businesses based in the US. Everywhere else, you add the dates yourself. If one of them is a closure, also prepare the post that says when you will be back and change the hours on your Google profile. How to do that is in our article on special hours on Google.
An example content calendar for one month
Back to the bike shop. Two posts a week, stories when something happens and one weekly post on the Google profile. A spring month could look like this:
- Week 1. Tuesday: a carousel with five things to check before taking your bike out in spring. Friday: a twenty-second reel adjusting gears in the workshop. Stories: Saturday's hours and a poll on which route customers ride.
- Week 2. Tuesday: a photo of a customer with their newly built bike, with their permission. Friday: a reel on how to tell if your tyres are at the right pressure. Stories: the new stock arriving.
- Week 3. Tuesday: a carousel on what a service includes and what it costs. Friday: a free slot for whatever happens that week. Stories: a look inside the workshop.
- Week 4. Tuesday: a Google review turned into an image. Friday: a before-and-after reel of a restored bike. Stories: a reminder about any bank holidays.
Look at the Friday of week three. A calendar with no gaps breaks the moment something worth telling happens. Leave one in every four or five posts free and fill it with whatever comes up.
The customer photo comes with their permission for a reason. If people appear in your posts, check first what you need to ask for: we explain it in photos with people and image rights.
How to prepare the content and schedule it
The calendar really saves time when you prepare content in batches. One morning to take the photos and videos for the whole month, one afternoon to write the captions and a short while to schedule it all. It is much quicker than getting your phone out every time a post is due.
Meta Business Suite, for Facebook and Instagram
For Facebook and Instagram, Meta Business Suite has a planner that shows posts, stories, reels and ads in a weekly or monthly calendar. From there you schedule content for a future day and reschedule or delete anything already planned. Three things in it are handy for a small business:
- You can write different text for Facebook and for Instagram in the same post.
- When you schedule, the Active times option suggests hours based on when your followers were most active over the past seven days.
- You can give someone else access to prepare the posts and review what they have scheduled yourself.
On LinkedIn, company Pages can schedule their posts anywhere from one hour to three months ahead. There are exceptions: you cannot schedule events, posts with several photos, reshares, polls or job posts. For those, your calendar has to remind you to post them by hand.
If something serious happens in your town on the day you have an offer scheduled, go in and move it. Scheduling does not mean forgetting.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
How to tell if your content calendar is working
Once a month, before you prepare the next one, look at what happened with the last. Likes say very little. What you want to know is this:
- How many people visited your website from social media.
- How many messages, calls or booking requests came in, and how many turned into sales.
- Which topics and formats brought those messages.
That is how you decide the next month: repeat what brought customers and change what did not. How to measure what comes from each place is in where your customers come from.
Mistakes we see in content calendars
- Planning three months of daily posts. It gets dropped within two weeks. Four weeks you actually follow is better.
- Copying the same post to every network. The photo can be the same, but a LinkedIn caption is not an Instagram caption.
- Uploading the video with the TikTok logo to Instagram. As we saw, Instagram shows it less.
- Not saying what to do next. Every post should end with a clear call to action: message us, book, come and see it.
- Leaving it without an owner. If nobody has it written down that Tuesday is theirs, nothing goes out on Tuesday.
What it costs for us to run it
Our prices are published. Social media posts are part of the Advanced Presence plan, €1,500 a month plus VAT: two pieces a month, which can be increased if you want to post more often. That plan also includes seven articles a month on your website and seven on your Google profile, replies to all your reviews and management of your Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns.
If you only want social media management, it is quoted as a fixed price in writing after a first chat. It covers the content plan and calendar, the copy, the design of each piece (images, carousels and short videos), posting and a monthly review of what worked. All with no lock-in. The details are on our social media management page.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Your content calendar, from the Palau Firal
We are three partners working at the same table, in the Palau Firal in Sant Antoni de Calonge, next to Palamós. We run social media for businesses in Girona, Barcelona and the Costa Brava, and we nearly always start the same way: with a four-week calendar that can actually be followed.
Send us a link to your profile and we will tell you which regular topics we would put in your calendar and how many posts a month you can keep up. No commitment. You can also write to us through the contact form.