Introducing a New Social Media Calendar

We already had our first social media calendar. We were excited to introduce a new way of scheduling and scheduling to Buffer, and it turned out to be a popular feature with customers.

Since then, Buffer has changed a lot. We have redesigned our user interface and added new planning functions, such as Story planning, Campaigns, and Hashtag manager. Inevitably, our calendar felt a bit dated and out of sync with the rest of Buffer. It even started to live on a completely separate code base, making it difficult for engineers to make updates and fixes.

What began as a silent call for improvement became a chorus of customer feedback. In fact, the word “calendar” has appeared 247 times in ours Feature request form since the beginning of 2020.

The most common topic? Make all social media channels visible in a global calendar view. Here are some examples:

So our design team got to work; Interview customers, examine existing usage patterns, and delve deeper into the ideal experience. This is how we summarized it in our Design Brief:

What we do today, many prototypes later, Introducing a brand new calendar experience this is available with free and paid buffer plans.

Let’s take a closer look!

Complete planning transparency

The new calendar is on your Publishing Dashboard and can be accessed from the menu on the left side of the Dashboard. You can choose between a weekly or monthly Outlook.

The week view shows you the most important details of each post you have planned for the week; the channel it’s scheduled for, a text preview, and a thumbnail of your picture.

The month view gives you a high-level overview of the month with timestamps for each scheduled post. It’s a great way to identify and fill gaps in your strategy.

If you want to exclude certain channels from the calendar, you can channels Dropdown to select which channels are shown.

To add a new post to your calendar, use the Create a post Button. This will open the composer where you can choose the scheduled time.

Note: We’re currently exploring other ways to add and rearrange posts. B. by clicking on a time slot and dragging and dropping it. We’d love to hear if this is important to you!

Check your calendar anywhere, anytime

The new calendar is integrated into our iOS and Android apps. It’s the fastest way to stay in sync with whatever you’ve planned and add content on the go.

There is still a lot to come

We look forward to your feedback and to making the new calendar more powerful. What should we add next? How can we do it twice as well? We have a few ideas including:

• Dragging and dropping posts on the calendar.
• Create a post by clicking on a time slot.
• View and filter campaigns.

Share your thoughts

Enthusiastic about the new calendar? Do you have any ideas for us? Send us a tweet @Buffer or use the Share Feedback button we added just above the new calendar in your buffer dashboard.