Whether it’s your first time running social media for a company, or you’re just looking to boost your online profile, social media templates will save you valuable time and effort. And we’ve created six to help you on every leg of your journey—from planning and message scheduling, to publishing and results tracking.
1. Social Media Strategy Template
A social media strategy will bridge the gap between where you are in the pursuit of your social media goals and where you want to be.
Use this template to create a social media strategy that will guide you in your online activities. Answer the questions in each step to establish what your goals are, how you will achieve them, and how you will measure success.
The social media strategy template teaches you how to:
- Clarify your business’ social media goals
- Audit your current social media status
- Create or improve your social media profiles
- Develop your content strategy
- Use analytics to track progress and adjust your strategy as needed
Download our social media strategy template
Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence with Hootsuite.
2. Social Media Audit Template
An important part of creating your social media marketing plan is conducting a social media audit. This audit serves to assess your current social media use and goals, and how they’re working or not working. We’ve put together a social media audit template to walk you through the steps and help you conduct your audit more effectively.
The template is comprised of six steps that will take you through your audit from start to finish:
- Creating a spreadsheet of your social profiles
- Finding other accounts that may be representing you or your brand
- Creating a mission statement for each profile
- Ensuring accounts are on brand
- Centralizing ownership of passwords
- Creating a process for how new channels will be established moving forward
Download our social media audit template
3. Editorial Calendar Template
There are two important types of content calendars that a social media manager will almost always make use of. The first is the editorial calendar, which will gather all your content projects into one document to help you plan and schedule each release.
The easiest way to organize a content calendar is by using a separate ‘sheet’ within a Google or Excel Spreadsheet for each month. Activities can be broken down by day or hour, depending on the volume and cadence of your content plan.
Your editorial calendar should include simple information about each of these projects:
- Title or description of the content
- Links to supporting documents, like content briefs
- Author or writer
- Deadline
- Channels you will promote it on
The following is a very basic template of an editorial calendar. You should add columns or rows as required.
Download our editorial calendar template
PDF
Excel File
Open Document Format
Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence with Hootsuite.
4. Social Media Content Calendar
The second valuable content calendar is a social media content calendar. This should include all of the social media messaging you’ll be using to promote your content, organized by date and time. Social media engagement can’t be planned in advance, but social media promotion can be, which is where this calendar comes in handy.
This calendar will solve some of the biggest issues that social media users face—continuing to post badly-performing content, ignoring certain accounts and overwhelming others, missing important dates or events, and holes in the content calendar.
Download Our Content Calendar Template
PDF
Excel File
Open Document Format
5. Bulk Upload Template
When you run your own business, it’s hard to find time to publish Facebook or Instagram posts one-by-one throughout the day. To help save social media users valuable time, Hootsuite allows you to bulk upload up to 350 social media messages across all social networks.
To do so you need to create a .csv file of all the social messages you’d like to upload, placed in a specific format:
- Column 1: Date and time. The accepted DATE format is: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm or dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm. Be sure to identify which format you are using when uploading your file. Times must be set in the future (at least 10 minutes from upload time) and should end in either a 5 or a 0, i.e. 10:45 or 10:50.
- Column 2: Your message. For Twitter there is a limit of 140 characters, including the URL (which reserves at most 23 characters)
- Column 3: URL (optional): The full URL you want to include in your message
For this purpose, we suggest using a plain text editor like TextEdit or NotePad. They don’t have built in columns so you have to use commas, but the format is clear in the sample .csv above. Unfortunately Excel usually causes formatting issues, so we don’t recommend using it to build your spreadsheet. (Note: If you decide to use Excel, you’ll need to tell Excel that that data in column is Text and not to be changed or it will try to convert your dates into a different display that will fail your upload.)
Download our bulk upload template
Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence with Hootsuite.
6. Social Profile Image Sizes
Social media profiles are often your first opportunity to make an impression on new prospects or customers. And the pictures on these profiles are the first thing people notice—often coming to serve as the visual representation of your brand online.
You should always strive to have images fall within the recommended dimensions of each network. Why? A square is a square, right? Well, you never know when profile images will be posted elsewhere on social.
Here are templates showing the optimal dimensions for profile images on each major social network:
LinkedIn Profiles
LinkedIn Company Pages
Google+
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