How to Plan a Month’s Worth of Social Content at Once

If there’s a way to save time and be more productive in our businesses, we’re all over it. One of our favorite ways to do this is to plan all of our social content. Otherwise, it can be way too overwhelming! 

Before we started planning our content, we quickly realized that posting a day at a time was not the way to go. Our thoughts would become scattered from all of the ideas we had, yet no actual system of turning those ideas into content. One we did create a system for batching though, it saved our time, sanity, engagement (no more gaps in posting!).

So, today, we’re going to walk you through our step-by-step system for planning a month’s worth of social content at once, so you can get back to being the productive queen (or king) you are.

1. Create a Content Calendar

We don’t care if this is on pen-and-paper, a digital calendar, a spreadsheet, whatever! As long as you have some way to map out your content ideas, you’re good to go. Figure out your posting schedule– we’d recommend a minimum of 3 posts per week. If you want to get even more detailed with times, you can look through your audience insights on both Instagram and Facebook and find out your audience’s demographics, most active times by day of the week, and growth trends.

2. Plan a Rough Outline of Your Content

For each of the posting days on your calendar, you should have a rough idea of what the post will be about and what kind of post it is (graphic, photo, or video). You should also be mapping out your Stories in the same way– photo or face-to-camera? We’re not saying it isn’t okay to still post Stories on a whim, but having some planned content will make your life much easier.

Be sure you’re keeping in mind any important dates or promotional periods. It’s also important to remember that your content shouldn’t be blatantly selling all the time. The majority of your posts should aim to build the know/like/trust factor with your audience. If you’ve gone so far as to figure out your audience’s most active days, you could plan your posts that do sell accordingly.

3. Create Your Content

Now that you have your ideas mapped out in a clear format rather than swirling around in your head between random thoughts of the Duke of Hastings (hey, Bridgerton fans), you’re ready to delve into them and make them actual posts. The order of how you want to create your posts is up to you, but you should be mini-batching here as well. So, write all of your captions together, film all of your videos together, gather all of your photos together, and create all of your graphics together.

If you want to alleviate some time off your schedule for this, you can grab our Square + Story Social Templates in The Creative Template Shop. You receive a total of 40(!!) graphics– 20 square format, and 20 Stories format.

There are enough graphics to take care of well over a month’s worth of posts, assuming you aren’t only posting graphics. These templates are customizable in Canva, so all you have to do is change the colors and fonts to match your branding and add your own images. You can purchase them one-off, or you can become a member of The Shop and download these, plus all other templates for only $47/month.

4. Schedule Your Posts

Now that you have all of your content mapped out and created, it’s time to get them scheduled! Facebook does have a native scheduling option for Pages and Groups. We personally prefer Later for posting on Instagram and Facebook because it’s user-friendly, the calendar layout makes it super easy to see a bird’s eye view of our posting schedule, and we’re able to save hashtag groups. You can set your posts to publish automatically, or if you have carousel posts, the Later app will send you a notification to your phone and allow you to easily copy your already-written caption and photos over to the Instagram app.

5. Revel in Your Own Productivity

You did it! You now have your content all planned for the month, which means you can say goodbye to the headache of figuring out what to post on a whim, or the “Oh, crap!” moment of realizing you’ve forgotten to post in a few days. We promise that once you start batching your social content, you’ll be looking at all of the other ways you can batch in your business!