With the fastness of the digital world, a consistent and engaging presence on Social Media is quintessential for any business or individual. Some social media calendar tools – are mighty companions in the race toward organized, efficient, and productive content management. This paper explains what a social media calendar tool is and gives you the 12 Best Social Media Calendar Tools so that you can be in control of your social media strategy and boost your online presence.

What are Social Media Calendar Tools?

A social media calendar tool is a software application designed to assist users in planning, scheduling, and managing their social media content across multiple platforms. Typically, such tools will offer a content creation function, schedule posting, team collaboration, and performance analytics.

They can save you much time, enhance consistency, and raise the general efficacy of any social media strategy by giving your social media efforts a central home.

Importance of Social Media Calendar Tools

1. Centralized Content Dash

These social media calendar tools are aggregate platforms from which all your content is planned and scheduled. The tools bring sanity to your posting schedule across multiple platforms by giving it a clear, visual representation; otherwise, the activity has the potential to turn into absolute mayhem.

This gives a better way of organization and more effective use of time and resources.

2. Post Consistency

It is an excellent virtue to maintain consistency in posting if one wants to keep their audience engaged on social media. The calendar tools assist in setting up and maintaining a regular frequency of posting, ensuring that your followers have a constant flow of your content.

Such consistency will not only be able to keep your brand top-of-mind but will also help develop trust with your target audience.

3. Strategic Planning

Equipped with a bird’s eye view of your content strategy, social media calendar tools facilitate advanced planning and queuing of your posts in correspondence with major dates, events, or campaigns.

This prescience will enable you to create content in a much more strategic way and help maintain a consistent brand message throughout.

4. Team Collaboration

For companies with social media management involving more than one team member, calendar tools make it easy to collaborate. Many of these platforms offer features that allow sharing of ideas, feedback, and even collaborative content creation and scheduling with one’s audience, making for a much more united and smooth workflow.

5. Time Management

By saving time scheduling posts in advance with social media calendar tools, you can take this time to redirect it into other imperative areas of your business or personal life.

It binds most of the manual posting time and brings better balance into managing social media.

6. Better quality content

Advanced planning and generation of content with a social media calendar tool give you time along with space to yield quality, high-engagement posts.

This serves as a mindful approach to content creation, which can result in improved audience engagement, hence equipping you with a much stronger presence across social media.

7. More Brand Consistency

Calendar tools allow for consistency in your brand message by putting all of your content from all networks in a bird’s eye view. This coherence in tone, style, and messaging differentiates your identity and helps to build a recognizable, trustworthy online brand.

8. Data-Driven Decision Making

Many social media calendar tools are fitted with features that offer analytics on post-performance, audience engagement, and the best times to post.

With this information at your disposal, you utilize your judgment in arriving at decisions concerning your content strategy, thus working to polish and perfect it over time.

9. More Productivity

The above-mentioned tools are particularly useful in terms of automation and scheduling, which helps raise productivity to an entirely new level.

When you group the creation of your content and schedule posting times further out, this allows you to be more productive in other areas of your business or personal brand.

10. Better Work-Life Balance

This can be overwhelming for the social media manager or a small business owner who constantly needs to be online and posting.

The tools for social media calendars ward off pressure, enabling one to have an active online presence without being glued to your devices 24/7.

Key Features to Look for in a Social Media Calendar Tool

Calendar software tools have a variety of features that include:

• User-friendly Interface: Easy to navigate and use.
• Platform Integration: Connects with multiple social media platforms.
• Scheduling Capabilities: Allows for advanced post-scheduling.
• Automation Features: Automates repetitive tasks and posting.
• Content Library: Stores and manages all your content in one place.
• Analytics and Reporting: Provides insights and performance metrics.
• Collaboration Tools: Supports teamwork and shared access.
• Customizable Calendar Views: Offers various ways to view and organize your calendar.
• Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Simplifies content planning and rescheduling.
• Mobile Access: Accessible from mobile devices for on-the-go management.

12 Best Social Media Calendar Tools

1. Visme as a Social Media Calendar Tool

Visme is an all-in-one online design tool with a social media calendar maker to plan, create, design, and publish social media content from one place. Marketers with no design experience can use it for nearly all platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and even Slack.

Visme enables social media marketers to design a cohesive strategy from initial concept, execution, and scheduling to posting on all platforms simultaneously. Visme’s content calendar & social scheduling features are popular for its ease of use and its functionality. The calendar helps you stay on track to manage, build, and monitor your brand consistently across social media. Jumpstart your social media content creation and publish from one single platform. Visme allows marketers to get a bird’s eye view of social media planning to nurture the audience easily. 

Powered by AI, Visme makes the process of content creation faster and more efficient. With Visme you’ll never run short of ideas for your social media calendar. This allows you to quickly design your graphics and other content types and schedule for your social media. 

Key Features:

• Easy-to-follow content calendar
• Intuitive functionality. 
• Collaborative features 
• Powered by AI
• Millions of design assets
• Brand Kit
• Fully customizable templates 

Pros 

• Integrations with project management tools like Slack 
• Great for non-designers 
• Easy to use

Cons 

• Some functionalities could be complex for new users  

Website 

www.visme.co

2. Hootsuite

It is top-rated among all the Social Media Calendar Tools. Hootsuite represents an all-round social media management platform with strong, calendar-like functionality. This makes it a perfect tool for any business, from startups to established businesses, small or large, since it allows a user to manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard.

With its calendar feature, one can view which posts are scheduled, thus having a great plan and strategy for content planning and execution. Hootsuite is also versatile, with additional features such as team collaboration and detailed analytics.

Key Features:

• Multi-platform scheduling and publishing
• Team collaboration tools
• Content curation/suggestions
• Detailed analytics and reporting

Pros:

• User-friendly interface
• Extensive integration options
• A hefty amount of robust analytics capabilities

Cons:

• Expensive for larger teams
• Learning curve to use advanced features
• There is little customization available when it comes to reports.

Website: www.hootsuite.com

3. Later

Later was developed from an original Instagram-focused platform to become a multi-platform social media supporter. It offers a visually-based method for planning on social media, very substantial for businesses and influencers dealing with large degrees of visual content.

Later’s drag-and-drop calendar lets one schedule posts easily, while its Media Library serves to help organize and re amaç use one’s visual assets efficiently. The platform also offers features for user-generated content management and hashtag suggestions, hence improving the general content strategy.

Key Features:

•  Visual content calendar
• Instagram-specific features like Stories scheduling
• Curation of user-generated content
• Hashtag suggestions and analytics

Pros:

• Very intuitive and visually appealing
• Excellent for strategies focused on Instagram
• Strong free plan available

Cons:

• Fewer features for non-visual platforms
• More detailed analytics only on higher-priced plans
• Peak-time slowness

Website: www.later.com

4. Buffer

Buffer is very easy to use, and the simplicity can even be viewed as a big help for short businesses or for people who are just starting to handle social media. Its interface is clean, and simple, and features a calendar view through which it gets easier to schedule posts on several platforms.

One of the unique selling propositions of Buffer is its Queueing system, in which users just add content to a pre-set schedule for posting consistently. It also offers basic analytics and team collaboration features, making it an all-rounded solution for social media management.

Key Features:

• Easy post-scheduling and queueing
• Custom posting schedules on each platform
• Basic analytics and reporting
• Browser extension for easy content sharing

Pros:

• The interface is easy to use
• Inexpensive pricing plans
• Great customer support

Cons:

• Few advanced features are available
• Analytics is pretty basic compared to others
• No content curation tools are available

Website: www.buffer.com

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-inclusive social media management platform, designed to serve any business regardless of its size. It provides an advanced calendar tool for the overall planning and scheduling of content across a wide variety of platforms.

Not to add more, Sprout boasts advanced analytics that goes into the tiniest detail when giving insights on content performance and audience engagement. Further characterized by its powerful team collaborative features, the tool is most fitting for large organizations with complex social media operations.

Sprout Social seeks a balance between functionality and a clean, user-friendly interface.

Key Features

• Deep analytics and reporting
• Team collaboration and workflow
• Drag-and-Drop Content Calendar
• Social CRM

Pros:

• All-in-one feature bundle
• Full, clean team collaboration
• Good analytics and reporting
• Premade Content calendar template available

Cons:

• More expensive compared to some of the competition
• Too much for small businesses to handle
• Restricted scope of customization options

Website: www.sproutsocial.com

6. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is enterprise-class, creating very strong unified customer experience management that holds a robust capability of management tools in social media. The tool creates social media calendar software as part of a larger ecosystem targeted toward large businesses and corporations.

Sprinklr has higher-order functionalities around content planning, approval workflows, and cross-channel campaign management. AI-powered insight and automation make the platform real to activate businesses to size by multiplying their social media strategy.

While no doubt overkill for smaller operations, Sprinklr represents the real deal when it comes to large enterprises handling complex social media presences.

Key Features:

•  AI-optimized content
•  Advanced workflow and approval processes
•  Cross-channel campaign management
•  Comprehensive analytics and reporting

Pros:

•  Solid features for enterprise-grade management
•  Powerful AI and automation capabilities
•  Seamless integration with other marketing tools

Cons:

•  Steep learning curve due to a complex interface
•  High price tag
•  Too much for small to medium businesses

Website: www.sprinklr.com

7. Canva Pro

It is one of the best freely available Social Media Calendar Tools. Canva, although serves primarily as a graphic design website, Canva Pro hosts an inbuilt content planner that doubles up perfectly as an ideal social media calendar. This uncommon marriage allows one to bring into being visually rich content and schedule it directly within the same platform.

Canva Pro’s calendar feature integrates well in conjunction with design tools, allowing users to plan, create, and schedule posts efficiently. This tool, allowing several social media accounts, provides simple analytics.

If visual content creation is as important to a business or person as scheduling, then Canva Pro becomes an attractive all-in-one solution.

Key features:

•  Design and schedule in one place
•  Huge collection of pre-made Content calendar template
•  Team collaboration
•  Analytics and Insights

Pros:

•  Seamless content creation-scheduling process
•  User-friendly interface
•  Large library of design elements and templates
• Free social media calendar template available

Cons:

•  Advanced scheduling features are few.
• Basic analytics compared to dedicated social media tools
• Design focus may not suit all social media strategies

Website: www.canva.com

8. Google Sheets

Offering an ultra-flexible and -customizable solution for a social media calendar is Google Sheets. Not designed specifically for this purpose, it does have spreadsheet capacity adaptable to suit comprehensive content calendars.

Users can customize sheets for everything from content ideas to posting schedules across multiple platforms. With the real-time collaboration abilities of Google Sheets, it becomes excellent for businesses looking for a cost-effective solution that is also extremely customizable.

However, it misses out on automated posting and analytics features found in dedicated social media tools.

Key Features:

•  Highly customizable spreadsheet format
• Real-time collaboration
• Integration with other Google services
• Version history and change tracking

Pros:

• Free of charge
• Highly flexible and customizable
• Team collaboration is excellent

Cons:

• No auto-schedule features
• No built-in analytics features
• Setup and maintenance are manual

Website: — www.google.com/sheets

9. Notion

Notion ranks among the most flexible workspace tools to build powerful calendars for your social media work. The flexible database and page structure will allow users to come up with any type of calendar that will suit their specific needs.

Other collaborative capacities of Notion include concerted work on planning and content creation with the help of other team members. While it does not typically allow facilities for direct posting or analytics, Notion does an excellent job of getting ideas in order, following up on the progress of content, and managing an overall social media strategy.

Addressing this through integration with other tools may begin to build a fuller system for the management of social media.

 Key Features:

• Customizable database and page structures
•  Team collaboration tools
•  Task management capabilities
•  Integration with other productivity apps

Pros:

• Highly flexible and customizable
• Excellent for organizing ideas and strategies
• Strong collaboration features

Cons:

• No direct posting capabilities
• Lacks built-in analytics
• Can be complex for new users

Website: www.notion.so

10. Monday.com

Monday.com is a work operating system that allows users to create an effective social media calendar by customizing it. With its visual board layout, users can plan, track, and manage social media content on various platforms.

The solution offers a highly flexible way for teams to create custom workflows, set deadlines, and assign tasks—making it perfect for social media management collaboration.

While not specifically designed for social media, Monday.com has good integration capacity, and being customizable, it’s a very strong option for teams looking for an all-inclusive project management solution to adapt to any of their social media needs.

Key Features:

•  Custom board layout and workflows
•  Time tracking and deadline management
•  File sharing and collaboration tools
•  Integration with various third-party apps

Pros:

•  Very easy to customize to suit any exact need
•  Excellent in team collaboration and task management
• It enhances productivity with a visual interface

Cons:

• No built-in option for social media posting
• Too overwhelming for small teams or single users
• Too expensive to handle a larger team

Website: www.monday.com

11. Trello

It is the most remarkable project management software, which can be turned around effectively and function as a social media calendar. It uses the card-based system to create boards that signify different parts of your social strategy and cards on every board that denote the posts or campaigns.

Drag and drop tasks, deadlines, and progress—all from one beautiful, intuitive interface. Although this tool doesn’t allow direct posting and lacks analytical features, the flexibility and set of collaboration features Trello offers make it a great choice for teams looking for a visual way to plan and organize their social media content.

 Key Features:

•  style task management with cards
•  Custom boards and lists
•  Team collaboration and assignees
• Integration with other popular tools and services

Pros:

• Intuitive and visual
• Customizable for a good amount of workflows
• Strong free tier

Cons:

• No social media posting or analytics natively
• Cluttered interface for complex projects
• Limited reporting features in the free version

Website: www.trello.com

12. Hopper HQ

Hopper HQ is a social media management tool that focuses on primarily serving visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. It has an intuitive calendar view where one can plan and schedule posts on these image-centered networks.

A feature that makes Hopper HQ exceptional is the image editing characteristics: cropping, filtering, and other adjustments are possible inside this tool. There is another unique grid preview feature for Instagram in this tool to maintain visual feed coherence.

While that focus on the visual platforms may be a turn-off for some, Hopper HQ is perfect for businesses and influencers who put most of their efforts into image-based strategies in social media.

Key Features:

•  Visual content calendar
•  Advanced editing tools for images
•  Preview Instagram grid
•  Bulk upload and scheduling

Pros:

•  Solid for visual-focused strategies in social media
•  Well-designed user interface
•  Great image editing functionality

Cons:

•  Primarily used for visual social media platforms
•  Fewer features for text-based content
• A bit pricey compared to some other options available

Site: www.hopperhq.com

13. Sendible

Sendible is a full-blown social media management platform with one of the most potent features—a Calendar component—as part of the offering. It supports many social media platforms and content types, hence suitable for businesses running diverse social media presences.

It gives a clear overview of scheduled content across multiple channels, drag-and-drop rescheduling, etc. In addition to these, the platform provides strong content suggestion features, team collaboration tools, and granular analytics.

All in all, Sendible’s all-in-one approach sets the platform quite far apart as a very strong competitor among businesses seeking out full-featured social media management.

Key Features:

• Content planning: Multi-channel content calendar
• Content curation and suggestions
• Team collaboration and approval workflow
• Comprehensive analytics and reporting

Pros:

• A wide range of supported social media platforms
• Strong content suggestion features
• Thorough analytics with custom reporting

Cons:

• The steep learning curve to master all features in the interface for new users
• Some users report occasional glitches
• Advanced features are part of higher-tier plans

Website: www.sendible.com

How to Choose the Right Tool for Your Needs

• Define Goals: Identify your social media objectives and requirements.
• Team Size: Consider the number of users and collaboration needs.
• Budget: Assess your budget and compare pricing plans.
• Essential Features: List must-have features for your strategy.
• Platform Integration: Ensure compatibility with your preferred social media platforms.
• User Experience: Opt for a tool with an intuitive and user-friendly interface.
• Customer Support: Look for tools offering robust customer support.
• Scalability: Choose a tool that can grow with your business.
• Trial Periods: Take advantage of free trials to test functionality.
• Reviews and Testimonials: Read user reviews and case studies for insights.

Tips for Maximizing the Use of Your Social Media Calendar Tool

• Regular Updates: Continuously update your content calendar with fresh ideas.
• Performance Analysis: Regularly review analytics to measure success and adjust strategies.
• Team Collaboration: Utilize collaboration features to improve team communication and workflow.
• Content Diversification: Plan a mix of content types to keep your audience engaged.
• Advance Scheduling: Schedule posts ahead to ensure consistent posting, even during busy times.
• Audience Feedback: Monitor audience engagement and feedback to refine your content.

Conclusion

The ideal social media calendar tool will depend on your needs, the size of your team, and how intricate your social media strategy is. No matter if you’re a solo entrepreneur, small business, or large enterprise, there’s a tool on this list that can help make managing your social media easier.

Other tools, such as Later, Canva Pro, and Hopper HQ, have very solid visual content execution. If you want a more all-rounder solution with advanced analytics, then the use of one of these 12 Best Social Media Calendar Tools is a must-go.

FAQs