This article covers how to plan a social media calendar in one monthly session of about ninety minutes. You audit last month, choose your posting slots, give each slot an owner, fill the drafts and then review the result before anyone schedules. Run the same session at the end of every month and your company stops posting in bursts. Everything below happens inside the Social Planner on the levelpartner.ai platform, so the plan and the posts live in one place.
Why a fixed monthly session works
Planning that happens whenever someone has time does not happen. A fixed session on the last Thursday of each month, with the same agenda and the same people, turns planning into routine. It also creates a natural checkpoint: if the session is cancelled twice, you know social media has stopped being a priority, and you can decide that deliberately.
The session should include the person who runs the calendar, someone from sales and whoever writes most of the posts. Three people is enough. More turns it into a meeting about opinions.
Before you start
- Access to the Social Planner under Marketing, with every company account connected.
- Last month's published posts visible in the planner, plus any comments and enquiries they produced.
- The coming month's known dates: events, launches, offers, holidays in your markets.
- An agreed posting frequency for each network, even a modest one.
- Ninety minutes blocked in the diaries of the people attending.
How to plan social media calendar sessions, step by step
- Spend the first twenty minutes reviewing last month: which posts led to comments, messages or form submissions, and which went nowhere.
- Note one thing to repeat and one thing to drop next month.
- List the fixed dates for the coming month.
- Lay out the posting slots for each network according to your agreed frequency.
- Give every slot a named owner who will write the draft.
- Agree a topic for each slot in a few words, starting with the fixed dates.
- In Social Planner, save a draft post per slot with topic and owner.
- Set the draft deadline as one week before each post's publish date.
- Book a fifteen-minute review a week later to check which drafts are ready.
- Schedule ready drafts during that review and chase any that are missing.
Auditing last month without vanity numbers
The audit is the part most teams skip. It is also the part that improves the calendar over time. Look at what each post did for the business: did anyone message, comment with a question, book a call or fill a form? Those signals are in the unified inbox and on the contact records, not only in the network's own analytics.
Likes and reach are worth a glance but tell you little about whether social media is helping a firm with flat revenue. A post that led to two conversations with prospects beats one with a large reach and no replies.
Say the session covers two networks, three posts a week on one and two on the other: twenty slots for the month. Suppose the audit shows that posts answering a client question started a few direct messages while event announcements started none. The obvious move would be to plan more question posts and fewer event posts next month. Split across three attendees, that is six or seven slots each, with drafts due a week before each date.
Choosing slots you can actually fill
The posting frequency should match the hours you have, not what a guide said was ideal. If your team can write six good posts a week, plan six. A calendar full of placeholders that never become drafts is worse than a short, reliable one, because it trains everyone to ignore it.
Start lower than you think and add slots after two months of filling every one. For help deciding a sensible rhythm, the social media posting schedule guide covers frequency and timing in more depth.
Planning sessions often end with topics but no owners. A topic without a name next to it does not get written. Never leave the session with an unassigned slot; drop the slot instead.
What the session replaces
It replaces ad hoc requests to the one person who knows the social logins, last-minute posting on a Friday afternoon and the slow drift into silence after a busy month. It also gives sales a regular, short way to ask for content that supports what they are selling.
If you want to tie the session to quarterly campaigns, combine it with a social media marketing calendar. For drafting help, AI generated social media posts can produce first versions for each slot, which the owner then edits.
When to skip it
If you post fewer than a handful of times a month, a full session is too much. Spend twenty minutes on the audit and the slots, and let one person write everything. Bring back the full session when more people contribute or when you increase frequency.
Troubleshooting
The audit takes the whole session. People discuss every post. Limit it to the top three and bottom three posts by conversations started, and move on.
Owners miss the draft deadline. The deadline was not visible. Put it in each placeholder draft and send a reminder from a workflow two days before.
Fixed dates are forgotten until the last minute. Nobody keeps a running list. Keep a shared list of known dates for the year and copy the next month's into the planner at the start of each session.
The calendar fills with the same post types. Owners default to what is easy. Assign topic types to slots during the session, not just topics, so each week mixes expertise, proof and invitation.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a social media planning session take?
Around ninety minutes for a monthly session with three people. The first session may run longer while you set up slots and owners; later ones settle quickly.
Who should attend the planning session?
The calendar owner, the main writer and someone from sales. Sales attendance keeps posts tied to what the business needs, without turning every post into an advert.
What if we miss a month?
Run a shorter session at once and plan two weeks rather than four. Then return to the normal monthly rhythm. Skipping planning entirely is how calendars quietly fail.
Can the platform remind owners about their drafts?
Yes. A workflow on a set schedule can send each owner a reminder by email or SMS ahead of the draft deadline. Keep the message short and include the date the post is due.