Hootsuite & Content Calendars | 8 Answers You Should Know

Hootsuite gives users the whole nine yards when it comes to social media planning.

Aside from having a scheduler, Hootsuite has a Content Calendar, or Planner, built into the dashboard, which lets you plot out social media posts for different days and times.

The Content Calendar saves your posts into drafts, and are not automatically published, as compared to the Scheduler function.

Also, Hootsuite released a Content Calendar template that you may use for use outside Hootsuite.

Here are some things you need to know about the Content Calendar of Hootsuite:

Table of Contents

What is the Content Calendar Function in Hootsuite?

The Content Calendar of Hootsuite is a function of Hootsuite that lets you plot out the content of the social media profiles of your brand.

It shows you a weekly view of a calendar so you can identify any existing gaps in the distribution of your content.

How Does the Content Calendar work in Hootsuite?

The Hootsuite Content Calendar works like the scheduler function.

Instead of saving your content for scheduling or auto-scheduling, you save your content as a draft and set it for approval or action.

If you downloaded the Hootsuite Calendar template, you can change that file and use it as a basis for bulk uploading content.

How Do Templates Work with the Hootsuite Content Calendar?

You can integrate your templates using the CSV file format and upload it on Hootsuite through the Bulk Uploader function.

To do this, duplicate your approved Content Calendar, and save it as a CSV file.

The Bulk Uploader of Hootsuite needs the following information divided into three columns of cells:

Date and time of publishing, wherein you input in a single cell the date and time with this format: “MM/DD/YYYY HH: MM.” The time must use the 24-hour format.
Copy or caption of the post, wherein you consider the limitations of the intended social media accounts, and
Links, if any, for the third column.

Keep in mind that CSV files do not support emojis, images, and videos. You also can bulk upload up to 350 posts, including scheduled content.

Thus, if you upload 350 posts, 30 of them can be scheduled, while the rest is for queuing in the scheduler at a later time.

You save this CSV file and upload it to Hootsuite using the Bulk Uploader.

When uploading to the Bulk Uploader, you can select which social media profiles do you want them to appear in, and if you opt to have Hootsuite shorten these links.

If your content is tailored to a specific social media profile, you can also opt to have different CSV files for each social media profile and avoid editing each post to add or remove other profiles.

Once you upload the CSV file, you can proceed to add the necessary media, such as images, videos, and emojis.

Don’t forget to save your upload.

You can also upload this CSV file to other Calendar apps like Google and Apple.

Is it the Best Content Calendar out There?

It’s not the best, but the design of the Hootsuite Content Calendar gives you a good detailing of what contents are scheduled for publishing at a particular time and date in a week.

For what it is worth, it is a good content calendar, especially if you are using a free account.

Can I Integrate into other Content Calendar Systems?

You can download your Content Calendar and upload it to other calendar systems if it accepts CSV files.

You can only export to CSV posts that are marked as published or scheduled. Thus, this will not cover content plotted out and saved as drafts.

Also, you cannot bulk exporting, and as you can download per social media profile.

So, if you have 20 social media profiles that you want to export, you will need to do the process 20 times:

If you want to download the posts, go to the Publisher, and select Scheduled.
Choose the social media profile in the drop-down menu, and click the checkbox below the taskbar.
On the same taskbar, you will find an Export To button. Click it and select the CSV format.
If you are importing the file into Google Calendar, select Google CSV.
Wait for your download to finish.

Downloading posts scheduled before only covers the last three (3) months.

There are other export options available, but Calendar systems use CSV.

Take note that CSV files do not support images.

So if you will upload this to another Content Calendar system, either upload it in another file format or use CSV and reattach the images one by one per post.

What Should be Included in the Content Calendar?

To have an organized Content Calendar, you must include:

Which social media profiles will post
The kind of content
The topic of your post
The copy or caption, meeting the standards of the social media platform
Links to relevant materials, if any
Compatible media for uploading on Hootsuite, and the social media accounts concerned

Don’t forget to annotate any reminders for the content creators, should there be any specific instructions.