Free Social Media Content Calendar Template (Google Sheets and Excel, 2026)

This free social media content calendar template is a Google Sheet you can copy, or download as Excel, in one click, with no email and no signup. Every post gets a row: date, time, platform, format, hook, caption, owner, approval, link and result. It comes with a filled 30-day example, a month view and a results log. Below you'll find how to fill it in, how often to post on each platform, and a filled example week you can copy.

Our pick for a business that would rather not fill in a calendar at all is Postdom, the AI social media tool. It reads your website, makes the month's posts for you (short videos, slideshows and single images in your brand), and schedules each one you approve at your posting times on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Starter is $39 a month for 30 posts on 3 accounts, and the Free plan is $0 for 1 post a month on 2 accounts on any platform, with a Postdom watermark. Paste your website and get your first post made.

Want the month written for you, free? Our social media calendar template tool reads your homepage and fills in 30 days of posts with dates, times, formats, topics and hooks.

Quick links: make a copy in Google Sheets, download it as Excel or view the template first.

Free social media content calendar template

The workbook has seven tabs. Each does one job, so it works whether you plan a week at a time or a full month with a team.

It is free and it stays free: there is no paid version and nothing to unlock. A solo owner can use six columns. An agency or in-house team can use the approval, campaign and reporting columns to stop the back-and-forth.

Need an Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn content calendar template? Use this same sheet. Pick the platform in each row, then filter the Platform column to see one platform's calendar on its own. The Month View counts posts per platform, so you can see at a glance whether each one is getting its share of the month.

Social media content calendar template Google Sheets

To use the social media content calendar template in Google Sheets, open the copy link and click Make a copy. The copy is yours to edit and share. Then:

1. Set the month. Open Settings and pick the planning month, your time zone, platforms, formats and statuses. The dropdowns everywhere else read from this tab.
2. Fill the yellow cells. Yellow cells are inputs and grey cells are calculated, so you only type in yellow.
3. Share it with your team. Give reviewers comment access so feedback sits next to the post instead of in chat.
4. Check the Month View weekly. It counts posts per platform and pillar and flags rows still missing an owner, link, alt text or review date.

Tip: in Google Sheets, use Data, then Create a filter on the Content Calendar header row to see only what is due this week or still waiting for approval.

Social media content calendar template Excel

For the social media content calendar template in Excel, use the direct Excel download. It opens in Microsoft Excel with the same seven tabs, dropdowns and calculated columns. To create a social media content calendar in Excel from scratch instead, these four settings do most of the work:

• Freeze the header row (View, then Freeze Panes) so the column names stay visible as the month grows.
• Add dropdowns with Data, then Data Validation, then List, for Platform, Format and Status. Free-typed values break filters and counts.
• Colour by status with Home, then Conditional Formatting, so approved, scheduled and missing-asset rows stand out.
• Count with COUNTIFS, for example =COUNTIFS(E:E,"Instagram",R:R,"Approved"), to see approved Instagram posts at a glance.

You can also export a single tab as CSV when another tool only needs flat rows.

Best social media content calendar tools and templates

We read each option's own page on 11 October 2026. Postdom publishes this guide and is first in the table because it is the only option here that makes the posts and publishes them, not just a grid to plan them in. The Best for column says where each of the others fits.

A spreadsheet or a template app gives you a grid. You still write every caption, make every video and post each one by hand. That is the gap Postdom fills.

What goes in a social media content calendar template

A social media content calendar template needs enough columns to answer three questions before anything goes out: what is posting, where and when, and who has signed it off. These are the columns in ours, with an example for each.

Keep approval and status in separate columns. "Approved" and "scheduled" are different states, and neither means the post is live. Put alt text in the row so it is written with the post, not remembered at the last minute. Review the final tagged link before it goes out.

How to create a social media content calendar

Here is how to create a social media content calendar in nine steps. The first month takes the longest; after that it is a short weekly review.

1. Pick the platforms you can keep up with. Two platforms posted every week beat five posted when you remember. A common start is Instagram and TikTok, or Instagram and Facebook, with LinkedIn added for B2B.
2. Set a posting pace per platform. Use the posting schedule table below and choose the lowest pace you can keep for three months.
3. Choose three to five content pillars. These are the themes you post about again and again, such as how it's made, behind the scenes, offers and customers. Give each a share of the month.
4. Mark key dates first. Add launches, sales, holidays and local events before anything else, and start planning big ones four to six weeks out.
5. Collect ideas in the Ideas Library. Write hooks and angles as they come up, so planning day is picking, not inventing.
6. Fill one row per post. Date, time, platform, format, hook, caption and owner. Or let Postdom make the month's posts from your website and skip the writing.
7. Review and approve once a week. One sitting to approve the week ahead is faster than chasing single posts.
8. Schedule the approved posts. Copy each one into the platform's own scheduler, or approve it in Postdom and it is scheduled for you at your posting times.
9. Log results and repeat what worked. Add views, saves and clicks in the Performance tab two or three days after posting, and plan more of the posts that beat your usual.

Social media posting schedule template

Use this social media posting schedule template as a starting point. The pace is what we suggest for a small business that wants to stay consistent. The data column is what the largest published study says, and the time slot links to our best time to post guides, which compare the big studies hour by hour.

Sources, as plain text: Buffer, "How often to post on social media", published 13 January 2026, read 11 October 2026. Time slots from our guides to the best time to post on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and X, which compare the Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Buffer studies.

The platforms themselves don't set a number. Instagram's help center sets no target number of Reels per week, and YouTube publishes no ideal posting frequency. So pick a pace you can keep for three months: one good week is luck, and a run of weeks is a system. Postdom starts every connected account at up to two posts a day, at about 9am and 7pm your time and never between 10pm and 7am, and you can change it on the Posting page.

What to put in the rows, from our research

Frequency only matters if the posts are worth watching. In Postdom's analysis of 1,272 TikToks and Instagram Reels from 160 accounts, a hook written as text on screen went with 1.8 times the account's typical views, opening on a real place with 2.3 times, and a quick recap at the end with 52% more views. The most common ending, a soft invite like "let me know below", went with 39% fewer views, and hook length made no clear difference. The full numbers are in what makes a short video go viral, and why text-heavy videos lag is in our wall-of-text study.

So give your calendar a Hook column and write the hook as the line that goes on screen, plan where each video opens, and end with a recap, not "let me know below".

Social media content plan template

A social media content plan template is the layer above the calendar: the pillars you post about and the share of the month each one gets. Here is the plan behind the example bakery calendar. Swap in your own pillars and keep the shares roughly the same: most posts should teach or show, and only about one in five should sell.

Social media content calendar example

Here is one filled week from the example bakery's social media content calendar, the same plan shown in the image at the top. Copy the level of detail: every row has a time, a format, a hook and an owner before it goes to review.

That is 11 posts a week: Instagram 4, TikTok 4, Facebook 2 and LinkedIn 1, which sits inside the starting pace above. Sunday is a rest day. Postdom makes posts like these from your website, so a business like this approves the week instead of writing it.

Monthly social media calendar

A monthly social media calendar plans four or five weeks at once, so you can see the platform, format and pillar mix before anything is due. Plan the month in one sitting, review it each week, and drop timely ideas into the next open slot instead of adding extra posting days. These are the dates worth putting in first for the next few months:

Spreadsheet or Postdom: when to switch

The spreadsheet is the right tool while you have time to write and post everything yourself. Switch when filling the rows is the part that never gets done.

Plenty of teams use both: the sheet for the plan and the approvals record, and Postdom to make and post the work. See Postdom's pricing for every plan.

Download the template and start planning

You don't need another login to plan next month. Copy the sheet, fill in week one, and review it on Friday.

When filling the rows becomes the hard part, paste your website into Postdom and let it make and schedule the posts for you.