# Hermoso: How to plan a month of social posts in one sitting > Machine-readable twin of https://hermoso.ai/blog/plan-a-month-of-social-posts/. Generated from the shipped page. Do not edit by hand. > Full agent guide: https://hermoso.ai/llms.txt · MCP: https://app.hermoso.ai/mcp [Blog](https://hermoso.ai/blog/) # How to plan a month of social posts in one sitting A simple method for planning four weeks of posts across several channels: pick a cadence you can keep, spread it across the week, rotate a few content pillars, then batch the work. With a free calendar generator that does the dates for you. By the Hermoso team · Published November 12, 2026 · 6 min read Most posting schedules fall apart in week two. Not because anyone ran out of ideas, but because every post was decided on the day it was due, and the day it was due was also a busy day. The fix is boring and it works: decide the whole month in one sitting, then spend the rest of the month making things instead of deciding things. Here is the method, step by step. The free [content calendar generator](https://hermoso.ai/tools/content-calendar-generator/) does the date arithmetic for steps 1 to 4 and gives you the plan as a spreadsheet file and a calendar file. ## Step 1: pick a cadence you can actually keep Start from your capacity, not from what a channel supposedly rewards. Count how many posts you can honestly make in a week, then share them out. It is better to post twice a week for a year than every day for a fortnight. A worked example we will use through the rest of this post: a small brand posting on three channels. - Instagram, 3 a week - TikTok, 3 a week - LinkedIn, 2 a week That is 8 posts a week. Over four weeks, 8 × 4 = **32 posts**. Write that number down, because it is the size of the job. ## Step 2: choose your posting days Tick the days you will post on. For most teams that is Monday to Friday, so nobody is working weekends to hit a schedule. Then spread each channel evenly across those days. With five days ticked: - 3 a week lands on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - 2 a week lands on Tuesday and Thursday. - 1 a week lands on Wednesday. Spreading beats bunching for a practical reason: posts on Monday and Tuesday leave the rest of the week empty, which feels like the account went quiet. Evenly spaced posts keep the account visibly alive with the same amount of work. One rule keeps it sane: at most one post per channel per day. If you want more posts than you have days, add days rather than doubling up. ## Step 3: give each channel a time Pick one time per channel and keep it for the month. Your own analytics are the best guide here, because the right time depends on where your audience lives and what they do, and no general rule knows that. If you have no data yet, pick a time you can stick to, post there for a month, and compare. Consistency makes the comparison fair. If your audience is in a different time zone from you, plan in their time. ## Step 4: rotate three to five content pillars A content pillar is one of the few things your brand keeps talking about. For a clothing brand it might be: - Product in use - Customer stories - Behind the scenes - Tips, how-tos and FAQs Hand them out in turn down the list of posts. With 32 posts and 4 pillars, each pillar comes up 32 ÷ 4 = 8 times, spread across all three channels. That does two things. It stops the month from quietly turning into 32 product shots. And it turns a blank "what do we post on Wednesday?" into a narrower "what is a behind-the-scenes post for TikTok?", which is a much easier question to answer. The generator rotates pillars for you. If you only have two pillars, that is fine: each one comes up 16 times. ## Step 5: write the ideas in one pass Now open the plan as a spreadsheet. The CSV from the generator has a row per post with the date, day, time, channel and pillar, an empty Post idea column and a Status column set to Planned . Go down the list and write one line per row. Do not make anything yet. One line each is enough: "customer in Lisbon wearing the sand shirt", "three ways to fold a linen shirt for travel". This is the step people skip, and it is the one that saves the month. Thirty-two one-line ideas take far less time written in one pass than decided one by one on the day. ## Step 6: batch the making Group the rows that share a setup and make them together. All the product-in-use photos in one session, all the talking-to-camera clips in another, all the carousels in a third. Batching works because the slow part of making content is usually the setup: the light, the location, the template. Do it once, use it many times. Size things for where they are going while you are at it. Meta recommends 9:16 for Stories and Reels ads and 4:5 for feed ads, and TikTok recommends 9:16. Our [guide to aspect ratios for every placement](https://hermoso.ai/blog/ad-aspect-ratios-every-placement/) has each platform’s own numbers, and the [aspect ratio calculator](https://hermoso.ai/tools/aspect-ratio-calculator/) works out the pixel sizes. For captions, the [caption length checker](https://hermoso.ai/tools/social-caption-counter/) shows where each network cuts you off. ## Step 7: put it where you will see it A plan in a spreadsheet nobody opens is not a plan. The generator also gives you an .ics file, the iCalendar format that calendar apps import, with one event per post at the time you chose. The times are written as floating times, which means a post planned for 12:00 shows at 12:00 in whatever time zone the calendar is in. Each event carries the channel and the pillar, so the calendar doubles as the daily to-do list. Update the Status column as you go (Planned, Made, Scheduled, Posted), and at the end of the month you have a record of what went out, which is the starting point for next month’s plan. ## Step 8: review, then plan the next month At the end of the month, sort the posts by pillar and look at how each pillar did on each channel. Compare posts within the same channel rather than across channels, since each network counts engagement its own way. Keep the pillars that earned their slot, swap the weakest one for a new idea, and plan the next four weeks the same way. ## What a month looks like, in numbers Channel Per week Days Posts in 4 weeks Instagram 3 Mon, Wed, Fri 12 TikTok 3 Mon, Wed, Fri 12 LinkedIn 2 Tue, Thu 8 **Total** **8** **32** ## When you want the posting done for you A calendar tells you what to post and when. It does not post. Hermoso is an AI marketing agent: it makes on-brand image and video ads and posts, and its [social media scheduler](https://hermoso.ai/social-media-scheduler/) publishes them to your own accounts across ten networks, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn and X. You can pick a minute for each post up to 365 days ahead, or drop posts into your brand’s posting queue, whose default slots are 09:00, 13:00 and 17:00 and which can hold up to 24 slots. There are no recurring posts: every scheduled item is one post at one time, which suits a month planned this way. It works in the web app, through the [API](https://hermoso.ai/docs/api/), or inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor through its [MCP server](https://hermoso.ai/mcp/). ## Questions people ask ### How many posts should I plan for a month? Start from what you can make each week and multiply by four. Three channels at 3, 3 and 2 posts a week is 8 a week, or 32 posts in four weeks. A cadence you can keep matters more than a high one. ### What are content pillars? The three to five recurring themes your brand posts about, such as the product in use, customer stories, behind the scenes and tips. Rotating them across the month keeps the feed varied: with 32 posts and 4 pillars, each comes up 8 times. ### How do I spread posts evenly across the week? Divide your posting days by the posts per week. With Monday to Friday, 3 posts land on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and 2 land on Tuesday and Thursday. The free content calendar generator does this for any combination. ### Can I put my content calendar in my calendar app? Export it as an .ics file, the iCalendar format (RFC 5545) that calendar apps import. The content calendar generator creates one event per post, with the channel and pillar in each.