For this post, I’m using sample the file Excel4EngMajors_TheGreatGatsby.xlsx. If you want to follow along, you can download the file here or on the Resources page.
When I was a student, I thought Excel was something that only accounting majors used to keep track of their interest and dividends, or something. Now while that is actually true (I worked as an accountant for nearly two years, and did indeed track interest and dividends on Excel spreadsheets), that’s definitely not the only thing Excel is good for. Excel has the ability to make almost any job easier and more efficient.
Take, for example, marketing. As an English major, I never thought marketing would be something I could even do, never mind be good at and enjoy. But marketing is actually a really natural fit for English majors – it involves strong writing skills to write clearly, creatively, and persuasively, and always thinking critically about your audience to provide them with the most compelling piece of content for where they are in their own personal story. English majors are already great at doing that!
In this post, I’m going to share with you something I use in my marketing job literally every day – my Excel social media calendar. While this calendar won’t help you write exciting social media copy (that’s where you come in – but you’re probably already good at that!), it will help you stay organized and working efficiently, with the power of Excel formulas!
What is an Excel social media calendar?
When you work in marketing (like I do), having a social media calendar is really critical – it helps you to make sure you’re producing the best content you can to interact with your audience at the right moments. Even if you’re not in marketing professionally and are just looking to build your social media presence – maybe because you have a budding blog on Excel, for example – a social media calendar can help. Different tools work better for different people, but for me, Excel is the natural fit for a document like this. Why, you may ask?
- Excel can be sorted and filtered, so it’s easy to find what posts you’re looking for.
- Using cells make it easy to keep complex pieces of information all in one place.
- Many simple tasks can be accomplished with formulas, making your spreadsheet faster and more efficient.
- Excel spreadsheets can be easily shared and organized so someone else can pick up where you left off.
- Some social media programs even let you upload your spreadsheet directly, letting you schedule groups of tweets all at once!
Once you first get your social media calendar set up, it’ll make scheduling your tweets a snap!
Jay Gatsby’s Social Media Calendar
Jay Gatsby had one of the busiest social calendars in American literature, and you just know that if The Great Gatsby had been set today, Gatsby would have been all up in Twitter trying to show Daisy how great his life was. For this example, I’m going to use Gatsby’s social media calendar as a model to show you how the Excel social media calendar can work.
First start out by inputting the date in column A. For this example, we’re going to use June 10, 1922 (the day of Gatsby’s party). Now when we put in the date, column B automatically populates with the day of the week. What is this magic?!
No magic – just a formula. Since it’s already populated in, it’ll fill in automatically.
Description | Formula |
Lists the day of a week for a specific date | =TEXT([cell with the date], “dddd”) |
Next, go through the rest of the columns and input the date, time, and campaign (columns C-E). Now the exciting part, time to write your tweet in column F! Gatsby would be really excited for his party, so he’s going to write a tweet builds buzz, using hashtags that put his content in front of the right people.
And then, magic happens again! In column H, the character shows automatically. This is because there is a formula that is already set up to show this:
Description | Formula |
Count the number of characters in a specific cell | =LEN( ) |
Since we’re working on Twitter (platform), we know we want the tweet to be under 140 characters, so this formula is particularly helpful.
Finally, if your tweet is going to include a link, list that in column G. And you’re done!
For just one tweet, this calendar is helpful – but where it really shines is when you’re working on lots of tweets all the same time, for different campaigns or across different days. For me, writing all my posts at the same time helps me work as effectively and efficiently as possible, so having a calendar to keep me organized really helps!
I hope that the Excel Social Media Calendar can help you too! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below (or even on Twitter!).