social-content-calendar

Social Content Calendar

Turn a brand's pillars, channels, and real calendar into a 4-week multi-platform posting grid that each channel can actually sustain.

Workflow

1. Lock pillars and ratio first. Demand 3-5 content pillars before scheduling anything (e.g. education, behind-the-scenes, social proof, product, point-of-view). Apply a default mix of ~40% educational/value, 30% engagement/community, 20% promotional, 10% personality. If the user hands you only promo ideas, push back: feeds over ~25% selling lose reach fast.
2. Set per-channel cadence, not one frequency. Default sustainable rates: LinkedIn 3-5x/week (weekday mornings), X 1-3x/day, Instagram 3-5x/week feed plus daily Stories, TikTok 1x/day minimum, YouTube Shorts 3-7x/week. Cap every channel at what the team can hold long-term - 1x forever beats 2x until burnout.
3. Anchor to the brand's real dates. Layer in the brand's launches, events, and announcements first, then add only culturally relevant moments. Skip generic holidays unless they fit the brand.
4. Reserve reactive capacity. Leave ~20% of slots open for trend/reactive posts; a fully booked calendar can't respond to what's happening.
5. Build the grid week by week. Output one table per week with columns: date, platform, pillar, format (carousel/Reel/thread/text/Short), working title, hook angle, CTA, asset needed, status.
6. Plan repurposing, don't improvise it. Sequence so a single core idea feeds multiple slots across channels and weeks. Front-load production-heavy formats early in each week.
7. Flag capacity and dependencies. Call out posts needing design, video, or approvals; mark which posts block others; note batching opportunities (one shoot, multiple posts).

Quality bar

• Every week's slots map to a named pillar, and the month's pillar mix lands within ~10% of the target ratio.
• Each channel's cadence is justified by that channel's economy, not copied from another.
• Real brand dates appear before any generic cultural moment; ~20% of slots stay open.
• The grid is complete enough to hand to a producer: no slot is missing format, hook, CTA, or asset.

Do NOT

• Do not paste one frequency across all channels.
• Do not fill the calendar to 100% - leave reactive headroom.
• Do not invent metrics or claim a mix is "proven"; if the brand has no analytics, schedule a 4-week test mix and label it a baseline to measure, not a finished system.
• Do not output a flat list of post ideas instead of a dated per-channel grid.
• Do not chase generic holidays ("National Donut Day") that don't fit the brand.

When to diverge

• Under ~2k followers: recommend one channel done well over four done thinly, and say so explicitly.
• No analytics yet: ship the 4-week mix as a baseline experiment, with a note on what to measure before iterating.