The Best Social Media Planner & Tracker

A social media planner is an essential piece of kit for any blogger or a small business owner. Just as important as a social media planner is a social media tracker. A social media tracker will give you the space to keep a record of all the interactions that your posts receive. You can then use this data to spot trends, to test what is a hit with your audience so that you can do more of it and also see what is a flop with your audience so that you can avoid repeating it. What would be amazing is if you could combine the two into a comprehensive social media planner and tracker in one. Well, the good news is, that is exactly what I have created! Launched on 1st November 2021 this social media planner and tracker will help you get all your social media under control.

To get your hands on a copy of the social media planner and tracker, fill in this form.

Social Media Planner – Section 1

The first 4 sheets are where you can write down all your content ideas. It is ideal to have around 4 content pillars that you cover. Your pillars are the key topics you talk about for example a hairdresser may talk about colouring, perming, long hair & short hair. They could then list all their ideas for each of these topics or pillars. I’ve added columns for different media types (posts, reels, stories and blogs).

The Content Pillars sections of the planner will become your bank of ideas so if you are ever stuck for what to post then you can just grab an idea from here and run with it. This will be the place where you transfer all your notes from bits of paper, notes on your phone, notes on the back of your hand etc. that you have thought of whilst going about your day and compile them into list form.

Social Media Planner – Section 2

This is where we get down to the real nitty-gritty of planning your content. There are 14 tabs in the social media planner which are where you can plan out all of your content across all of your platforms. As the social media planner and tracker is launching on 1st November 2021, I have started from there. You then have one tab for each month taking you right through to the end of 2022.

On each month you will find all the dates and days listed down the left-hand side. When you come to reuse the planner in 2023 and beyond, you can easily change the dates/days.

Just above the dates, you will see examples of awareness months that are taking place that month such as veganuary or stress awareness month. You may wish to use these to help inspire ideas for relevant content.

The third column has examples of awareness days such as World Autism Awareness Day or significant dates such as National Unicorn Day. Some of these will be written in red, this is because the date of these changes each year such as Mother’s Day or Easter.

The next columns are split up into the 4 main social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. I have not included Pinterest as that is a search engine and not a social media platform. I have also not included TikTok as it is not as widely used as other platforms and the way in which content is created for it is very different.

Within each of the social media platforms, you will find a column to note down how many interactions (likes, shares, comments, saves, retweets etc.) each post received. There is a column to write down the caption that you want to use for that days post so that you can then just copy and paste it into your scheduler. The next column is where you can make a note of the image that you want to use, this could be something like a note of a kind of gif you want to post or it could be something that you have created yourself on a service such as Canva. You can either insert the image itself or just a link to where you have that image stored. The final column is where you can note down the hashtags that you want to use for that post, at the top of the column it gives you an idea of the maximum number you should use for each platform. Remember that your hashtags need to be relevant to the post.

As time goes on, this will become invaluable as not only will you be able to see how your content has performed on a post by post basis, but you will also create a swathe of content that you can reuse.

Social Media Planner – Section 3

The next section is the Hashtag Bank. This is where you can curate your own lists of hashtags that you want to use and break them down into different categories (the columns) and how used they are (the rows). I’ve colour coded the rows in a traffic light system so that you can use more of the green and amber ones and less of the red ones to help get more eyes on your posts. If you use all red hashtags then finding your posts will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack either because they will get lost in the millions of others using that hashtag or because hardly anyone is using it so it is far less likely to be searched.

The Insights Tracker

The final section is the insights tracking. At the end of the month, have a look at your insights for the month and note the figures in the columns. Once you add your figures this will automatically adjust the charts. The clustered bar charts will show the total per month of your engagement types for each platform.

The line chart at the bottom (not shown but can be seen on the video demonstration) will show you which platform you get the most engagement on.

Video Demonstration

This video demonstration of the social media planner and tracker was filmed during beta testing, it has had some changes made following the testing. The insights section no longer has pie charts, these have been replaced with cluster bar charts as shown in the image above.

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