What are the best tools to plan a content calendar?
A few weeks ago, I asked in my newsletter: “How do you plan out your content?”
And I was shocked by the amount of responses I got that said, “I just post on the fly!”
My shock comes from two places:
I’ve lived an entire career of planning content for others, where documentation and approvals and plans and other such things to prove you know what you’re doing are required, and have trouble thinking about content in any other way.
I’ve worked with a LOT of business owners, marketers, and teams on social media and other content, and continuously getting out posts is the first thing to stop when people get stressed or busy.
But I also know from being an Operator that if you don’t prioritize certain activities, they’ll never happen.
Planning your content ahead of time is one of the best ways to make sure it gets executed—but it’s one of those things where the tools can 100% get in the way of you actually executing.
So far, I’ve collected about 15 years of content planning experience and I have tried a million things. I’ve talked to a million product reps, watched tons of videos, and had hands-on experience with a whole slew of tools.
I’ve worked agency-side and client-side, and I think I have a good understanding of what can be the most universal tool and process of them all.
But first…let’s take a look at the losers.
The worst tools to plan a content calendar
Before I get to my preferred tool, I’m going to give you a quick rundown of what I’ve tried and what doesn’t work for me:
Word or Google Doc
Good in theory, a pain in the ass on the execution side. It’s easy to send off to get reviews and approvals because most people know how to use these things without being taught.
However, you’re looking at it straight down a page, and you don’t get a calendar view (so it’s hard to see holistically).
Worse, you can’t easily shuffle things around when you need to shift you calendar. There’s a lot of copy and pasting and scrolling and heartache. My professional opinion: Avoid at all costs.
Excel or Google Sheet
Again, good in theory, but such a pain: reviewing and getting feedback isn’t the most straightforward process (cell comments? use a different color? Just erase and start over?).
If you need to move things around, you’re spending most of your time reformatting rows and columns; if you have images embedded, they don’t move with your columns. And there’s so much scrolling.
Look. I’m a spreadsheet fanatic, okay? But in the case, I have to say… avoid.
Social management tools
If you have something like Sprout, Agorapulse, Sprinklr, or one of the myriad of higher-end scheduling and management tools, the reps always try to sell you on the benefit of reviewing and editing right in the platform. Just send review links to clients and bing-bang-boom, you’re done.
Yet I haven’t seen this work out well in any situation. Clients don’t want to make edits, they want to tell you what to edit and have you fix it.
Also, sometimes shuffling around content is a multi-step process—ie, click into an individual post, change the date in the dropdown, go back to the calendar, repeat. Not all these tools have drag-and-drop. And, you can’t color-code or leave calendar notes on some of them.
I won’t crap on this method because it can work great, especially on the agency side—but if you’re a small biz, these tools come with a big price tag and should have a dedicated handler. A better route, but not smooth, and not the best for everyone.
Airtable
I used Airtable for social content planning for awhile and thought I’d found the holy grail, but alas. What’s good in theory turned out to be horrible in practice.
It’s because of the way they structure their plans—and, honestly, it’s a disaster.
On the free plan, you run out of data fast. “Okay, so upgrade!” you say. But if you upgrade your station, everyone who accesses your database must be upgraded, too. If you want to share your upgraded workspace with anyone, and you want them to review and leave comments, you have to pay for a seat for them, too.
When you have several clients or stakeholders, this gets expensive real quick. Plus, features like color-coding dropdowns and other things like that aren’t available on the free plan. Avoid if you don’t want to cry down the line.
The best tool to plan a content calendar
Through all the trial and error, all the messing around, the best tool I’ve found to plan content is Notion.
Why Notion is the best
Even on the free plan, it has incredible functionality. Meaning, you can get started and find a system and test pretty quickly if it’s gonna work for you or not. You can have color-coded dropdowns and basic functionality that you’re forced to pay for with Airtable.
It’s endlessly customizable. I’m a nerd, and one of my favorite things to do is dig into other peoples’ processes. I watch tons of videos on how strategists and social managers plan their content, and everyone does it slightly differently. So if you have different language or steps for your content, you can alter the system to fit your exact needs.
You can invite clients without them needing paid seats. And the limit is extremely high, too—I think 100? Better yet, they have easy-to-understand levels of access and an easy-to-understand feedback/commenting system.
Once you have it set up, it does what you need without being too complicated. I’m sure there’s some AI tool out there, or even some not-artificially-intelligent thing, but once you have it set up, Notion’s system just doesn’t get in the way. It’s not trying too hard. It just works.
It’s a great solution for individuals, small companies, and large businesses. It’s affordable (or FREE!) for the solopreneur just starting out, and also not a price-gouging subscription for the small businesses. And for large businesses, there’s a lot of governance/access levels you can set so that people aren’t just going absolutely nuts with database customization (and, again, it’s not an insane price tag).
The downside?
Notion has a learning curve, for sure. When you first open it up and you’re staring down at a big blank screen, it’s not obvious what you’re supposed to do, and all the built-in tutorials in the world aren’t going to help.
You do need to train yourself a bit, and if you have a team, you’ll need an onboarding process. (Psst: If you ever need someone to help you document a process like this, I’m your girl.)
For those who want to get started quick: thankfully, there are plenty of templates, but we’ll get to that next week, because I have yapped more than I should for one post.
Fun fact, this post was originally going to be about HOW to execute, but I didn’t want to jump right in without explaining why I do it this way.
So, next week, tune in for a video blog post, where I walk you through my process.
Side note: I’m feeling very chicken-and-egg about this and feel weird talking about execution before strategy, but hey—the internet isn’t a linear place, and Future Jen will not even remember the order. So, long story short, if you’re concerned about strategy, you’re gonna have to wait…unless you just reach out to me for a personal session.
