How do I use the Publishing Calendar?
New to Sprout Social? Learn more about Sprout's social media calendar here.
Sprout’s Publishing Calendar enables you to visualize and manage your social campaigns. Whether you’re on a large team and need to collaborate more effectively, or you’re a one-person show and want to see all of your planned messages at a glance, the Publishing Calendar gives you the big picture and provides one place to manage each individual post.
Rather watch a video? Check out the tutorial: Using the Publishing Calendar
This article contains the following sections:
- Publishing Calendar Overview
- Publishing Calendar Views
- Internal Publishing Calendar Comments
- Publishing Calendar Notes
- Publishing Calendar FAQs
Publishing Calendar Overview
To navigate to the Calendar, click Publishing in the left menu bar, and then click Calendar at the top of the left navigation bar.
Customize the date range by clicking the date range selector in the upper-left corner of the Calendar. Use the Filter Menu to filter by Sources, Content Types and Tags.
Download or send a PDF of the calendar by clicking Share at the top of the screen.
Users on Professional and Advanced plans can filter by Tags at the top of the right panel, as well as perform bulk scheduling of posts. To learn more about bulk scheduling, check out this helpful article.
Publishing Calendar Views
Sprout’s Calendar offers three separate views: List, Week and Month.
Toggle between these in the upper-right corner of the Calendar. In List and Week views, clicking hides the daily message volume bars. Click
and then click Toggle Volume Chart to show the daily message volume bars.
Unpublished posts don't appear in the Publishing Calendar.
List View
This view is best when you want an idea of the order your posts will be released. Messages in List View display whether they are Scheduled, Queued or Sent in the upper-left corner of the message. If applicable, Drafts, messages pending approval and messages with descriptive text appear with extra visual indicators.
Click an image thumbnail to expand the preview. With scheduled messages you can:
- Make edits to the post, by clicking
- Send the post immediately, by clicking
- Delete the post, by clicking
- Duplicate the post, by clicking
- Preview the post, by clicking
- View all Approval Activity by clicking
- Reschedule a post by clicking
-
Duplicate Queued messages by clicking
- Review sent posts and preview video media by clicking
on the video
To manage queued content, visit the Sprout Queue section in the left navigation bar.
You can also share your list view with stakeholders and team members. For more information, see Calendar Link Sharing.
Week View
The week view makes it easy to identify gaps on a day-by-day basis within your Publishing Calendar. You can view all weeks 13 months prior to the current week and 13 months ahead of the current week.
Click an image thumbnail to expand the preview. With scheduled messages you can:
- Make edits to the post, by clicking
- Send the post immediately, by clicking
- Delete the post, by clicking
- Duplicate the post, by clicking
- Preview the post, by clicking
- View all Approval Activity by clicking
- Reschedule a post by clicking
You can also toggle the Week View between expanded and compact. The Compact Week View removes spaces between posts that represented hours where no posts were scheduled on a given day and enables you to see more posts at-a-glance in a single screen. You can drag and drop posts in both views for easy rescheduling.
Month View
You can also toggle between a compact and expanded month view. The compact view is great when you have a smaller volume of posts per day, so you can quickly view the activity for a given month. The expanded view shows the first five individual posts per day without any additional clicks, so you know exactly what to expect.
In the expanded view, you can also drag and drop non-Sprout Queue posts to a new date and keep the original publishing time or drag and drop a post to a new date with a new publishing time.
Click an image thumbnail to expand the preview. With scheduled messages you can:
- Make edits to the post, by clicking
- Send the post immediately, by clicking
- Delete the post, by clicking
- Duplicate the post, by clicking
- Preview the post, by clicking
- View all Approval Activity by clicking
- Reschedule a post by clicking
Users on Professional and Advanced plans can hover over to see tags applied to posts.
Calendar Conversations
New to Sprout Social? Learn more about Sprout's social media calendar here.
You can discuss messages with your teammates before they’re published through the Calendar. For example, you might see a piece of media in Scheduled, Drafts or Queued in your Publishing Calendar that doesn’t quite fit your brand standards.
Publishing Calendar Notes
From the List and Week view of the Publishing Calendar, you can add relevant notes. Notes are a great way to share ideas with your team, call out anything happening during a particular day or week and to provide extra details for anyone scheduling or reviewing content.
Any notes you add to the Publishing Calendar are viewable by everyone in the Group.
For example, you might be running a holiday campaign during the first two weeks of December. However, you might have one day that’s reserved for a flash sale that you’re promoting. You could add a note to your Publishing Calendar to ensure your team knows why more posts are scheduled during that day. Or, you could add a note if you’ve got an idea for a post, but aren’t sure when to schedule it.
If you create a note that relates to a particular campaign or content type, you can add an internal tag to the note. This way, you and your team can see which notes relate to particular scheduled posts to stay more organized. Additionally, you can update the color of your notes using the drop down at the top of the note pop-up for easy classification. You can add notes up to 13 months in advance.
You can send notes directly to Compose by clicking . The body of the note gets added to the text box in Compose.
You can tag your notes by expanding them in the Content Calendar, delete them, copy them or edit them whenever you need.
Video Guide
Publishing Calendar FAQs
Which Calendar views display Sent messages?
Sent Messages can be viewed in List, Week and Month views.
I'm editing a post from the Calendar. What happened to the Stamp icon?
You can only initiate approval requirements when a message is originally created in Compose.
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