TikTok Content Calendar for 2024: How to Create & Plan (+Template) (2024)

Browsing for a solid TikTok content calendar template? Look no further — it’s right here.

A TikTok content calendar isn’t just nice to have. It helps you keep your strategy sharp and on track. It also helps you create a confident platform presence to boost audience engagement and gives you the flexibility to weave in trends rather than solely rely on them. Plus, scheduling TikToks is much easier when everything is planned on a calendar.

In this article, you’ll find a handy TikTok content calendar template and a handful of tips on organizing content to go from sporadic to spectacular.

What is a TikTok content calendar?

A TikTok content calendar is a strategic planning tool designed for organizing, scheduling, and managing content for a brand’s or individual creator’s TikTok profile. It outlines upcoming video posts, themes, and marketing campaigns in a structured timeline to ensure consistent content delivery.

A content calendar eases the content creation process, aligns your content with overarching marketing goals, and helps you stay on track.

Why do you need a TikTok content calendar?

TikTok is one of the most dynamic social media platforms. That’s why a TikTok content strategy is often more packed than those for other platforms (no wonder — TikTok itself recommends postingone to four times a day).

Here are five pain points a TikTok content calendar helps you solve:

• Ensures consistent posting.Tracking your TikTok content planning is much easier when you have all your posts laid out. Consistency is key, and a calendar keeps your feed active.
• Helps you jump on the trend train.A calendar allows for swift adaptation to trends, so you can post relevant content that boosts your metrics while it’s fresh and trending.
• Improves content quality.Even on TikTok, quality > quantity. Planning TikTok posts gives you time to produce more videos without compromising on quality.
• Streamlines the content creation process.A sound content calendar helps social media managers and influencers create content faster, approve content ideas in advance, and get a better overview of their efforts.
• Aligns content with goals.Using a TikTok content calendar, you can strategize content to meet marketing objectives, ensuring every post has a purpose.

How do you create a content calendar for TikTok?

Before going through the step-by-step guide to creating your TikTok content calendar, keep in mind these simple instructions on how to use it to its full potential:

• Prepare in advance

Plan and schedule your TikTok content in advance to stay organized. Plans are not set in stone, but they help you navigate market shifts or emerging trends without compromising the consistency of your posting.

• Give importance to what matters most

Identifying and focusing on your TikTok strategy’s key drivers ensures that your content makes the most impact. Examples include major product launches or significant events that resonate with your target audience.

• Initiate your campaigns ahead of time

Launching your campaigns a bit earlier gives you more wiggle room for adjustments based on initial audience reactions and feedback. You can also leverage spontaneous trends.

Now that we’ve set some ground rules, let’s go through each step for creating a TikTok content calendar:

Step 1: Define your content goals and audience

Start by clarifying what you want to achieve with your TikTok presence. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or kickstart lead generation? Understanding your objectives will shape your content strategy and spark some initial content ideas.

At the same time, get to know your target audience. Research their interests, behaviors, content consumption patterns, and when they’re most active on TikTok. This data will guide your TikTok content creation and ensure your videos resonate more effectively with your followers.

Step 2: Research and plan content themes

TikTok is all about trends, and some content ideas emerge out of the blue based on what’s trending. However, your TikTok strategy should have core content pillars that come from your overall marketing strategy and work towards your business objectives.

Say you run a TikTok for a skincare brand. Your strategy can focus on three primary content pillars: educational content (explaining skin types, ingredients, etc.), product highlights (showcasing your products and their benefits), and customer testimonials (user-generated content and reviews).

All your videos revolve around these three core topics, and you can additionally weave in trending formats and sounds to amplify your presence.

Pro tip: When creating your TikTok content calendar, assign a label to each content pillar to see whether you’ve covered all your topics. To make things even easier, use a social media management tool like Planable. Apart from multiple calendar views, Planable also has colorful tags that give you a bird’s-eye view of your content plan.

Step 3: Set a posting schedule

A balanced schedule — neither too sparse to be forgotten nor too frequent to overwhelm — is key to maintaining audience interest and engagement.

Determine your posts’ optimal frequency and timing by analyzing when your audience is most active. TikTok’s built-in analytics tool provides insights into your followers’ activity patterns.

TikTok recommends posting up to four times a day. However, most brands cannot maintain such a schedule. Three to five posts a week is a more realistic benchmark you can use as a reference and iterate from.

Pro tip: Start with as many TikTok videos as your capacity allows you to create without sacrificing the quality. You can always add more videos once you get the drill.

Step 4: Create and organize content

With your themes and schedule in hand, start creating content that aligns with your goals.

TikTok is a goldmine for content ideas. Explore the “For You” page, check out trending hashtags and sounds, and follow popular accounts in your niche. This gives you a glance into what’s resonating with your target audience.

Organize your content in advance, ensuring a mix of topics and formats to keep your feed interesting. Lay out your plans and schedule videos to go live automatically using a visual content calendar like the one Planable offers. This dramatically reduces stress and allows you to concentrate on the content creation process instead of manually handling TikTok videos.

Step 5: Review and adjust strategy based on performance

Review your TikTok analytics regularly to understand which types of content perform best. You can use TikTok’s native analytics tools for this or specialized tools that give you more insights and customizable reports.

Pay attention to metrics like views, engagement rates, and follower growth. I also recommend monitoring retention to identify the weak spots in your videos that cause users to lose interest. Use this data to hone your hooks and adjust video length.

Refine your content strategy, adjust your posting schedule, and experiment with new TikTok content ideas based on your findings.

TikTok content calendar template

A TikTok content calendar template can streamline your planning process and elevate the quality of your TikTok content. It acts as a centralized hub for your ideas and simplifies everything to do with planning, creating, scheduling, and publishing content.

Ideally, your TikTok content calendar template should allow you to customize the following:

• Status: your content can be a concept, under review, on hold, ready, or published.
• Additional fields: organize content by objective, campaign, or target audience.
• Views: get different views for your calendar to streamline content creation and keep track of important milestones.

Here’s an example of an intuitive TikTok content calendar template from Planable that can help you maintain a steady content flow:

TikTok content calendar tools to use

Planable

If you value flexibility and aesthetically pleasing tools like I do, consider Planable. It is the ultimate content management platform for efficient collaboration. It’s powerful, easy to use, and made with the needs of social media managers in mind.

Planable’s content calendar allows you to easily plan and schedule your TikTok videos, as well as other social media posts for all major platforms.

I love that you can tweak and edit your videos until they’re just right and use Planable’s AI feature to help you find the perfect captions.

Planable’s TikTok calendar is neat and works right out of the box. Besides empowering you to rock your social media presence, its Universal Content feature helps teams create and collaborate on any sort of content, such as video scripts, blogs or newsletters.

Key features

• Visual content calendar

See all your TikTok efforts at once. Planable’s visual content planner helps you stay organized and navigate your content plans. You can see the post preview, its status, label, and the date and time it’ll go live.

• Automated content planning and posting

In Planable, you can schedule TikTok posts to go live automatically. Upload your video, write a caption (you can leverage Planable’s AI to make it on point), and choose the time and day to go online.

• Collaboration features

Planable is a content collaboration tool. You can use internal notes, in-context comments, annotations, and emojis to give real-time feedback to your colleagues. Beats tedious email exchanges every time.

• Customizable approval workflows

TikTok content should ideally be approved swiftly. Planable’s built-in approval workflows allow you to get a green light on your creative in just a few clicks and get your video rolling before everyone else jumps on the trend.

Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets is a familiar free option for organizing your TikTok content calendar. It’s easy to use and widely accessible, making it a solid choice for creators and brands taking their first steps in content planning for TikTok.

Key features

• Real-time collaboration

Team members can work together on the same document simultaneously, making it great for brainstorming and updating your content plan on the fly.

• Customization opportunities

You can customize your calendar with specific columns for posting dates, content descriptions, and hashtags and even track performance metrics after publication.

Drawback:Spreadsheets is a generic tool not tailored specifically to TikTok content curation. You’ll have to create the calendar from scratch or use a TikTok content calendar template to kickstart planning.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a practical, somewhat basic, tool for managing your TikTok content calendar. It’s free, widely used, and integrates well with other Google services, making it a decent option for tracking TikTok content efforts.

Key features:

• Color-coding

You can categorize different types of content or themes by using different colors, though this is a more general visual aid rather than a specialized feature.

• Shared Calendars

Share your content plan with team members and clients to stay on the same page and ensure everyone knows what goes live on TikTok and when.

Drawback:If Spreadsheets are generic, Google Calendar is twice that. It works well for basic planning but has no publishing or analytics capabilities.

TikTok content calendar vs. spontaneous posting

The difference between using a TikTok content calendar and spontaneous posting is the general approach. They are two different strategies that lead to different results in engagement and brand growth.

A TikTok content calendar is a strategic tool for planning, organizing, and scheduling content in advance. It helps you stay consistent and align posts with the brand’s marketing strategy. A TikTok calendar fosters long-term strategy implementation, ensuring content consistency that is crucial for your stable growth on the platform.

Spontaneous posting is great for reacting to real-time events or trends, and such authenticity is the cornerstone of TikTok. However, it can easily lead to erratic posting when you have three somewhat relevant TikTok videos a day and then go MIA for a week.

Brands and influencers on TikTok can and should jump on trends, but eventually, it’s about creating a cohesive narrative over time, where each post is a building block in a larger strategy. For a brand, I would always go for a strategically powered, thought-through TikTok calendar sprinkled with occasional spontaneous videos just to keep it fresh.

That’s a wrap: A Tiktok content calendar for a better online presence

Although we all love a spontaneous trending meme, a confident online presence requires a little more strategic approach. A TikTok content calendar is a must for creators and brands aiming for sustained growth and engagement on the platform.

But strategic doesn’t mean boring or complicated! Tools like Planable make your planning sessions simple, smooth, and organized. Collaborate with your colleagues to align your marketing goals with existing trends and turn cat meme TikToks into business assets.

Try Planable today and see for yourself! 🙂 50 free posts await.