7 Social Media Templates to Save You Hours of Work

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 marketing plan 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 marketing plan 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

And it covers all of the major social networks and tactics, so think of it as a Facebook marketing plan template, social media campaign template, and more—all rolled into one.

Use our Social Media Strategy Template

To use the template, simply click File in the upper left-hand corner,
then select Make a copy from the drop-down menu. 

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 establish whether or not they’re 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:

1. Create a spreadsheet of your social profiles
2. Find other accounts that may be representing you or your brand
3. Create a mission statement for each profile
4. Ensure accounts are on brand
5. Centralize ownership of passwords
6. Create a process for how new channels will be established moving forward

Use our Social Media Audit Tutorial Template

To use the template, simply click the Download button
in the upper right-hand corner.

Use our Social Media Audit Spreadsheet Template

To use the template, simply click File in the upper left-hand corner,
then select Make a copy from the drop-down menu. 

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 tab for each month within Google Sheets or an 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 plan to promote it on 

The following is a very basic template of an editorial calendar. You should add columns or rows as required.

Use our Editorial Calendar Template

To use the template, simply click File in the upper left-hand corner,
then select Make a copy from the drop-down menu. 

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 use 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 social media calendar will solve some of the biggest issues that marketers face—continuing to post badly-performing content, ignoring certain accounts and overwhelming others, missing important dates or events, and gaps in publishing.

Use our Social Media Content Calendar Template

To use the template, simply click File in the upper left-hand corner,
then select Make a copy from the drop-down menu. 

5. Bulk upload template 

When you run your own business, it’s hard to find time to publish Facebook or Twitter 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 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 often 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

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 for each network. Why? A square is a square, right? Well, if you make your profile image too small, it may appear distorted. And it may appear in places you hadn’t thought of—so put your best foot forward.

Here are templates showing the optimal dimensions for profile images on each major social network:

Facebook Page image dimensions template

Instagram profile image dimensions template

Twitter profile image dimensions template

LinkedIn profile image dimensions template

LinkedIn company page image dimensions template

7. Social media analytics report template

Recording and analyzing social media metrics is key to proving the return on investment (ROI) of your social media strategy.

But where do you begin? We’ve created a useful template with a few of the key things you should record and with tabs to keep track of metrics for your different social channels. While the key figures may vary for your brand, these basics are important for everyone to keep track of.

This template gives you space to record social media analytics such as:

• Net followers
• Shares
• Impressions

Use our Social Media Analytics Report Template

To use the template, simply click File in the upper left-hand corner,
then select Make a copy from the drop-down menu. 

With these social media templates you’re one step closer to being a social media pro. Start using Hootsuite and take your skills to the next level.

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This is an updated version of a post originally published in December 2014. It has been updated with files from Michael Aynsley and Kendall Walters.