Social Media Calendar Planner

A content calendar earns its keep by showing the gaps. A spreadsheet of captions tells you what you wrote; a month grid tells you that nothing goes out between the 15th and the 22nd, that half your posts are still ideas, and that the X post you drafted on Tuesday will not fit. This planner keeps every post on a Monday-first month view with a time, a platform, a format and a status, and counts each caption against the limit of the platform it is going to.

The first visit opens on a sample month for a neighbourhood bakery called Riverside: 10 posts spread over 8 platforms, two already posted, two scheduled, two drafts and four ideas. One of the drafts is a price-change notice for X that runs to 290 characters, so the counter shows it 10 over the 280 limit and the month summary flags one caption to trim. Rewrite it, change its status, or delete the whole sample with Clear Month and start your own.

Planning a Month Step by Step

1. Pick a day on the grid. On a phone each post shows as a coloured dot; on a wider screen you see its time and a two-letter platform code.
2. Press Add Post, then set the time, platform, format (text, image, carousel, reel, video, story, live or event) and status. The caption counter and the bar beneath it turn red the moment you pass the limit.
3. Move a post to another day by editing its date. The calendar jumps to that month so you can see where it landed.
4. Use the platform buttons above the grid to hide channels you are not working on, and read the four summary cards: posts this month, how many are ready to go, the longest run of days with nothing planned, and how many captions are over their limit.

Character Limits by Platform

• X: 280 for a standard account.
• Threads and Pinterest: 500 (a Pin description).
• Instagram: 2,200 for a feed caption.
• LinkedIn: 3,000 for a post.
• TikTok: 4,000 for a video caption.
• YouTube: 5,000 for a video description.
• Facebook: 63,206 for a page post.

The counter counts characters the way you see them, so an emoji counts once. X is stricter than that: every link costs 23 characters whatever its length, and many emoji and CJK characters count as two. Treat a caption within about 20 characters of the X limit as needing a check in the composer before it goes out. Platforms also cut long captions behind a "more" link well before the hard limit, so the first line matters more than the total.

Export Format Notes

Export CSV writes one row per post in the month you are viewing, with columns date, time, platform,type, status, characters, limit andcaption. Captions with commas, quotes or line breaks are quoted, so the file opens cleanly in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

Export .ics produces a calendar file with one 30-minute event per post, titled with the platform, the format and the opening of the caption, with the status and full caption in the notes. Times are written without a time zone, so Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar place them at the same clock time wherever you import the file. Plans are saved to this browser's local storage only; export before clearing site data or switching to another device.