Building your social media calendar

Planning a social media strategy, whether for a short term campaign or a longer term plan can feel like an extra burden on a time challenged volunteers in grassroots sports groups. By creating a plan and a calendar you can take control of the challenge and create a plan that is within your capacity to deliver.

A social media content calendar is a plan for what your organisation posts on social media. By helping you keep track of what you want to post, on which platform on which days, a calendar can keep you organised and up to date.

What is a social media calendar?

In the simplest terms, just a calendar, or even a list. You can download various tools, templates and guides, or just use your usual calendar, a spreadsheet or even a notebook.

You can pre-write all your posts for the campaign, or for the month ahead, then you have everything ready to go. By creating the content in advance, you avoid being caught out by life’s hiccups, and others could post if you’re unable to on any particular day.

Scope, scale and timeframes

Include brief details of what you’re going to post in terms of the content subject, the platform to post on (X, Instagram, TikTok etc) the date to make the post live and a list of hashtags to use.

Your posts can be long, short, include images and videos – whatever works for your group. Do keep things within your capacity – it’s better to post less often and consistently than have a big push then go silent for months.

By planning ahead and setting out a long term social media calendar you can ensure you add important dates such as the founding of your group and any dates of significance for your sport or area of interest. You can also share the workload and ensure that posting to social media continues when you have a holiday.

Supporting your funding bids

Your posting history can be a valuable tool for funders, helping them to see the work that you do. If you’re planning a new project and are considering applying for funding, your social media calendar could include key topics which align with the project and show how your group is already working in this area and building capacity to deliver the project.

For example, if you have a cricket project planned for next year, you might want to ensure that cricket features in your posts – photos of your participants playing cricket, mention the scores from competitions, talk about upcoming training sessions. By building a history of social media posts, planned ahead, you can demonstrate the need for your upcoming project and the funding you’ll require for it.

Keep the momentum

A calendar might seem like overkill for a small group – but it doesn’t have to include any more than you do already. It’s just a way to help organise things and ensure consistency and timeliness. By planning a year of social media posts, you save time and effort in the long run, and ensure your organisation is showing itself and the amazing work you do to as many people as possible.

Build your calendar

Plan the month’s posts in advance
Set aside some time to write the posts
You can pre-write all the posts and schedule them to upload according to your planned timetable
Create a core of posts – you can always add extras
Keep the momentum up after your planned campaign, perhaps at a less intense pace

Top tips

Jump straight into it – content should be fast paced and visually interesting to capture engagement
No fade in – go for immediate engagement with a high intensity intro – you have less than 5 seconds to capture viewers’ attention
Make it authentic, your current participants are your best advertisement
Ensure you have consent from any participants you show in videos and photos.

Hashtags - your route to building your following

This is how the TikTok algorithm (For You page) reads what viewers are interested in. So if your group delivers basketball use #basketball and #hoops as well as more general #sport and #fyp.

Don’t be shy in using lots of hashtags, they’ll drive engagement and point more people to your page. You could even try this hashtag generator.