by Lee Dussinger
A robust social media calendar is the backbone of how almost any social team brings their content to market. Without a good calendar, making concrete plans and representing how your brand goes to market across different channels is nearly impossible. Of course, the best social media calendar software offers more than just basic names and dates…it improves every step of the process.
To help you find the best social media content calendar, we’re grading the most popular options for enterprise social marketing organizations. At Opal, we’ve brought our content calendar to the largest organizations on the planet. Naturally, we have a wealth of insight into the most prominent social media content calendars that enterprise marketing organizations consider.
Here, we’re listing what we’ve seen as the most popular social media calendars from the past 3 years, showcasing what they look like, their features, and their most noteworthy customers.
Enterprise Social Media Calendar Tools
We’re listing the social media calendar tools that our sellers hear about in the market. While this list is based only on our own experience in the field, it isn’t our own personal favorites – this is a real list of what we’ve come up against in the market the most frequently.
For each content calendar option we’re highlighting the following:
- What the UI actually looks like
- The essential features they have – learn more about these features here
- Their biggest listed customers
Option 1: Opal’s Content Calendar
Naturally, we put ourselves first. The Opal Content Calendar offers the best way to experience how your social media content is going to market across every channel. Another important aspect of our platform is that the social content created in Opal looks exactly like it will once it’s live. While this isn’t a requirement for a social media calendar tool, it does give you 100% confidence in how your brand appears to your audience.
What it Looks Like:
Essential Features:
Real Content / Content Authoring ✅
Visual Layout ✅
On-the-Fly Editing ✅
Multiple Views ✅
Labeling & Searching ✅
Connections to Project Management ✅
Top Content Publishing Integrations ✅
Listed Customers: Target, Starbucks, SAP, Wendy’s, GM
Unlike many other enterprise solutions we see, Opal was built for marketing content. That’s why our content calendar features social-specific features, such as icons representing the channels where content is being published in your calendar.
Option 2: Monday
There’s no question that Monday is one of the most talked about tools in the market. Its robust advertising and long history have made it a common contender for nearly every use case in business. However, as a content calendar, it has some gaps in terms of content and social media features.
What it Looks Like:
Essential Features:
Real Content / Content Authoring ❌
Visual Layout ❌
On-the-Fly Editing ✅
Multiple Views ✅
Labeling & Searching ✅
Connections to Project Management ✅
Top Content Publishing Integrations ✅
Listed Customers: Canva, Coca-Cola, Oxy, Lionsgate
Despite being graded as the best social media content calendar, Monday has a few holes – specifically around visually representing a brand going to market. The info displayed on the Monday calendar is no more tailor-made for social media campaigns than it is for software development or construction projects. Monday primarily functions as a task management tool, with project management features always close at hand. Another positive is that customers and prospects have mentioned that Monday tends to be very affordable.
Option 3: Asana
Led by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Asana is another high-profile task management tool. Like Monday, Asana is a task management tool that is so ubiquitous in organizations that it is often used as a social calendar. As with Monday, the visual touches on the calendar are missing. Additionally, there’s no way to build or display real social content on the calendar.
What it Looks Like:
Essential Features:
Real Content / Content Authoring ❌
Visual Layout ❌
On-the-Fly Editing ✅
Multiple Views ❌
Labeling & Searching ✅
Connections to Project Management ✅
Content Publishing Integrations ❌
Listed Customers: Amazon, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Dell
Once again, like with Monday, you see that there are some missing features that truly matter to social media marketers. While Asana certainly has the project management features to get a task over the finish line, there are key gaps as a social media content calendar software.
Plus, Asana doesn’t have as many calendar views as some of the other platforms.
Option 4: Workfront
Workfront is Adobe’s incredibly popular project management platform. Workfront is a fixture at enterprise organizations all over the world. Due to the omnipresent nature of the platform, it’s not uncommon for marketing teams to consider leveraging it as a social content calendar. While Workfront does have calendar views (with attached Workflows), even Adobe would likely agree that this isn’t the ideal use case.
What it Looks Like:
Essential Features:
Real Content / Content Authoring ❌
Visual Layout ❌
On-the-Fly Editing ✅
Multiple Views ✅
Labeling & Searching ✅
Connections to Project Management ✅
Content Publishing Integrations ❌
Listed Customers: T-Mobile, Xfinity, Prudential, Orvis
While Workfront is an unbelievably popular platform for project management, it isn’t optimized for social media calendaring. However, the robust project management features are extremely helpful for streamlining the production of social content for an enterprise org. That’s why the Opal + Workfront integration enables organizations to pair Workfront’s PM capabilities with Opal’s best-in-class social calendar software.
Option 5: ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the newer tools on this list. Like Asana and Monday, it is an affordable project management tool. With positioning that paints ClickUp as the ultimate jack-of-all-trades, some people consider leveraging it as social media calendar software.
What it Looks Like:
Essential Features:
Real Content / Content Authoring ❌
Visual Layout ❌
On-the-Fly Editing ✅
Multiple Views ✅
Labeling & Searching ✅
Connections to Project Management ✅
Content Publishing Integrations ❌
Like the two comparable tools listed above, ClickUp can organize your content on a calendar, but it can’t give you anything more than that. Given the affordable price tag, ClickUp is a serviceable platform for a lot of things. However, ClickUp is missing the specific social features to be the best calendar for social media planning.
Listed Customers: Cartoon Network, Chick-fil-A, Lids
Benefits of the Best Calendar for Social Media Planning
The reason that finding the best calendar for social media planning is key for marketing and ops teams is because it makes a real impact. The right social tools can make your teams more effective, while also making your content more impactful.
Aligned Brand in Market – When all messages going to market are planned in silos, there is a real potential for messages to clash or overlap. By seeing the entire brand in one place, you can ensure that different channels and accounts are telling a unified story.
Work Faster – The best tools help your team do more in less time. Many customers who bring aboard the Opal calendar and platform find that they create more content in less time. That comes from having one central place to check for everything – rather than needing to dig through countless emails, documents, decks, and more.
Discover how the PrizePicks social team created 400% content faster.
Better Planning – The best calendar for social media planning empowers you to develop better ideas further ahead of time. The entire org will feel locked into the brand voice and able to create new ideas to pair with that. In addition, the best social media calendars serve as a permanent archive of what you did before – to make reusing successful content effortless.
Learn more about recycling social posts.
Encourage Collaboration – Since the entire organization has insight into what the other teams and brands are doing, collaboration becomes more natural. Managers and ICs alike will see opportunities to cross promote or collaborate in a way they couldn’t before.
Discover the Opal Content Calendar
Want to explore Opal’s social media calendar software? We’d love to give you a walkthrough. After just a few minutes in the platform, you’ll understand the experience of seeing your entire social media strategy on the Opal calendar.