Author Archives: i4lead

When I started my career as a content writer, one of my biggest mistakes was underestimating the importance of systems and frameworks.

Despite working tirelessly to achieve my goals of booking clients and expanding my skill set, I struggled to make meaningful progress.

Over time, I learned that while goals were important, a structured approach to setting and achieving them was vital. It wasn’t until I began using a SMART goal template that I saw real progress.

But what exactly is a SMART goal, and how does it differ from a regular goal? In this post, I’ll explain how to set SMART goals and walk you through four free templates to help you get started.

Table of Contents

• What is a SMART goal?
• What does each aspect of the SMART acronym mean?
• SMART Goal Templates

What is a SMART goal?

The letters of SMART stand for:

• Specific.
• Measurable.
• Attainable.
• Relevant.
• Time-bound.

The SMART acronym is a framework that will enable you to write goals that drive greater impact. Write goals with these aspects in mind, and you’ll be able to quantify how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go against your goal.

When you reach each milestone you articulated in your SMART goal, you can celebrate knowing that you achieved something tangible and impactful.

What does each aspect of the SMART acronym mean?

While I explain each aspect of the SMART goal framework, I’ll apply the framework to a real-world example.

Let’s start with a basic, non-SMART goal as our example and transform it into an attainable and measurable goal — “I want to get fitter.”

1. Specific

Goal setting is often associated with striving toward our highest aspirations, and reaching those aspirations can seem daunting. Specificity helps us determine the path between where we are and where we want to be.

→ Ambiguous goal: “I want to get fitter.”

There are innumerable ways to get fitter, and everyone has their own definition of fitness. For instance, do you want to lose weight? Do you want to complete more push-ups? Or do you want to cut a minute off your mile time?

When a goal is vague, it is impossible to tell whether your actions will help you achieve it. If your fitness goal is to increase the number of push-ups you can do, following a running plan will not help you achieve your true goal.

→ Specific goal: “I want to be able to do more push-ups.”

A specific goal makes your next steps clearer or, at the very least, narrows down the next steps you’ll need to take.

2. Measurable

When a goal is measurable, you can easily track your progress. Typically, this means that a number will be attached to your goal.

→ Immeasurable goal: “I want to be able to do more push-ups.”

→ Measurable goal: “I want to be able to do 25 push-ups in a row.”

A numerical goal is valuable for many reasons. In addition to giving you something to strive toward, you’ll be able to celebrate a victory when you reach the final benchmark.

If you say that you just “want to do more push-ups,” does that mean that you want to complete just one more push-up per session or that you want to double the number of push-ups you can do overall? One goal will take a lot more time and dedication than the other.

Let’s say I can do 10 push-ups in a row right now. To measure my progress against my final goal and to determine whether I’ve reached a milestone, I’ll edit my push-up goal to read, “I want to be able to do 25 push-ups in a row.”

3. Attainable

Big aspirations are admirable, but balancing long-term goals with more achievable, short-term goals is important.

Setting attainable goals involves evaluating your progress and adjusting your goals to be more realistic relative to your benchmarks.

To consider the point in more concrete terms, think about business growth rates if your company has been selling 2% more product each month for the past 12 months:

• Unattainable goal: Sell 15% more product next month.
• Attainable goal: Sell 3% or 4% more product next month.
• Unattainable goal: 25 push-ups.
• Attainable goal: 20 push-ups.

Keep in mind that 2% growth is the status quo. Selling 4% more product would still be doubling your month-over-month growth.

Attainable goals are useful because they help you maintain momentum. It can be discouraging to miss huge targets, but consistently making small gains will encourage you to continue delivering wins.

Each month, you’ll aim for the familiar satisfaction of hitting your target rather than dreading another seemingly major miss.

Of course, a significant amount of work is still required to get to where I want to be. Still, I’ll be able to celebrate a huge achievement like doubling the number of push-ups I can do and use that momentum to drive me to set a goal of doing 25 push-ups soon after I achieve my goal of 20.

Consider what you’ve done in the past in relation to the goal you’re in the process of setting, and adjust it accordingly.

4. Relevant

Relevant goals will help you move in the direction you truly desire. You can allocate your time to infinite activities, but which activities will push you closest to your ultimate goals?

It’s a common trap to feel like we’re being productive when we’re busy, even if our action isn’t creating a meaningful impact.

In the beginning, our example goal was to “get fitter.” To ensure our goal is relevant, we need to ask ourselves if following through on this goal will help us get to where we want to be.

In the case of our push-up goal, the answer is yes.

• Irrelevant goal: “I want to be able to do 20 push-ups in a row.”
• Relevant goal: “I want to be able to do 20 push-ups in a row to improve my overall muscular fitness.”

Push-ups engage several muscle groups, including your back, arms, shoulders, and core, and consecutively doing a significant number can elevate your heart rate.

Executing this goal will improve my muscular strength and perhaps even my cardiovascular strength, which are key elements of overall fitness.

Ask yourself if the goal you’ve set will have a real impact on your overarching targets, and if the answer is no, adapt it or identify a way to track its impact.

5. Time-Bound

The final letter of the SMART acronym stands for time-bound. You should always aim to accomplish your goal within a specific time period. Adding a time frame will motivate you to take consistent steps every day toward your goal.

In addition, setting a timeline or time boundaries allows you to track how much progress you’ve made toward your goal based on the amount of time that’s passed.

• Goal that isn’t time-bound: “I want to be able to do 20 push-ups in a row to improve my overall muscular fitness.”
• Time-bound goal: “I want to be able to do 20 consecutive push-ups two months from now to improve my overall muscular fitness.”

If I aim to increase the number of push-ups I can do from 10 to 20 in two months, I can set a midpoint milestone of adding five more push-ups in the first month.

However, if a month passes and I’ve only increased the number by three, I’ll know I need to ramp up my efforts, re-evaluate my strategy, or perhaps adjust the time frame I initially chose.

A time frame can help you chart your progress. Now, I have a goal that clarifies the path to where I want to be.

Before I made my goal SMART, it would’ve been easy to make excuses. It wasn’t clear how I’d measure my progress or keep myself on track toward my goal.

Still need some help creating your SMART goals? There are various templates at your disposal to help you establish SMART objectives. Here are some of my favorites.

1. Hubspot’s SMART Goal Template

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What It Is

HubSpot’s SMART goal template helps you design effective marketing goals with measurable, time-bound results. It’s particularly useful if your key objectives are related to increasing traffic and conversions across your online properties.

The template lives on a Google Sheets file, which makes it ideal for collaborative SMART goal setting. Everyone on your team can access, comment on, and edit the file with a Google Workspace account.

Each tab on the Google sheet walks you through a step of the goal-setting process with clear instructions included alongside each field you need to complete.

For this demonstration, I’ll create a SMART goal based on the broad objective of “building an email list.”

How It Works

Step 1: Write your initial goal. For this example, it’s “I want to build an email list.”

Step 2: Make the goal more specific. The prompt suggests setting a goal you could “share with your CEO in 10 seconds that clearly explains what you’re trying to improve.” My specific goal is: “I want to build an email list of qualified leads from our blog to promote our upcoming Black Friday sales.”

Step 3: Make the goal measurable. The prompt is to attach a number to the goal so you can track your progress while working toward it. My measurable goal is: “I want to collect emails from 50 qualified leads per month from our blog to add to an email list of prospects to promote our upcoming Black Friday sales.”

Step 4: Make the goal attainable. The prompt is to set a realistic goal based on your past performance and existing capabilities. My attainable goal is “Since we currently generate around 200 leads per month from our blog, I want to collect emails from 50 leads per month to add to an email list of prospects specifically qualified for our upcoming Black Friday sales.”

Note: On the next tab in the Google sheet, there’s a calculator to help you set realistic numbers for your customers, visits, and lead goals based on your current performance. This is a great resource to consult if you need help.

Step 5: Make the goal relevant. The prompt is to clarify why you’re setting the goal and how it relates to overall business impact. Here’s what I came up with: “I want to collect 50 qualified leads per month from our blog to add to an email list of prospects to promote our upcoming Black Friday sales because a recent similar promotion to a targeted list for a different offer converted at 3x our typical rate for promotions to our general email list.”

Step 6: Make the goal time-bound. Here, you need to set a timeline for achieving your goal. I simply added this bit to the end of my goal: “I’ll have 250 leads on my email list in five months.”

Step 7: Evaluate your SMART goal. The third and final tab in the sheet is designed to help you reflect on the goal you’ve just set. It’ll prompt you to the following answer questions:

• Is this goal realistically attainable in the time frame you’ve set?
• How many hours per week can you dedicate to inbound marketing?
• What is the biggest marketing challenge preventing you from achieving this goal?
• What steps can you take to reduce or remove that challenge and succeed in reaching this goal?

Here’s how I filled out this section:

What I like: This template is easy to follow, with clear explanations, examples, and even a calculator to guide your input at each stage.

2. Organized 31’s SMART Goals Template

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What It Is

This simple SMART goal worksheet by Organized 31 is an excellent fit if you’d like to create your SMART goals as quickly as possible. It provides five boxes to fill out, each dedicated to a letter of the SMART acronym.

A big plus? You can use it both at work and home.

How It Works

Step 1: Set a clear and specific goal. The template prompts you to consider the following: who is involved in the goal, what exactly you want to accomplish, where the goal will take place (if applicable), which resources and skills you will need, and why the goal is important.

Let’s use the same goal as our previous template. So, my clear and specific goal is: “I want to use targeted lead magnets on our blog to build an email list to promote our upcoming Black Friday sales.”

Step 2: Make the goal measurable. The template instructions are to set a number that determines when you’ve achieved your goal. This is also the benchmark against which you’ll track your progress. Ask yourself, “How many?” or “How much?”

For my example, I’ll specify that my goal is to collect 250 email addresses.

Step 3: Review your goal to ensure it’s achievable. While the template encourages you to set challenging goals, it also emphasizes the importance of realistic goals based on the resources, skills, and available time.

For my example, I already considered this while filling out the previous template.

Step 4: Make sure your goal is relevant. This template defines a relevant goal as supporting and aligning with your mission.

Step 5: Set a deadline or due date for your goal. For my example, I’ll modify my goal to include a deadline of December 2025.

What I like: This is a very simple, no-frills template that is versatile and adaptable for a variety of goals, both personal and professional.

Also, the worksheet includes an extra page for creating an action plan for achieving your goal.

3. Hirebook’s SMART Goals Template

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What It Is

This SMART goals worksheet from Hirebook lives on a Google Docs file, making it an excellent choice if you want your team to collaborate on one document.

It also offers the simplicity of Organized 31’s template with a more workplace-friendly color palette.

How It Works

Step 1: Decide what you want to achieve. It’s okay if your goal is a bit broad at this stage. Let’s go with “Getting a promotion” as my goal for this walkthrough.

Step 2: Get specific. The template includes a few questions, such as “What do you want to accomplish?” and “Who needs to participate in this with you?” to help you narrow the focus of your goal as much as possible.

Here’s how I made my goal more specific:

Step 3: Define how your goal will be measured. Determine how you will quantify the goal. How much do you need to increase or decrease a metric to reach your goal? How will you know that the goal has been met? Write the answers to these questions here.

In this example, my goal is already measurable because getting promoted to the senior marketing strategist role is the marker of success.

Step 4: Make sure it’s achievable. After making your goal measurable, review it carefully to ensure it’s achievable. Ask yourself the following: What past experiences have you had that make you capable of achieving the goal? Do you have access to the resources you need to accomplish the goal? Is this goal realistic when you consider time and financial limitations?

Step 5: Be certain your goal is relevant. After confirming that your goal is achievable, review it again to ensure that it is also relevant to you, your business, and your long-term needs.

Here’s what I’ve written as my reason:

Step 6: Set a deadline. Finally, to keep yourself accountable, you need to set a deadline for accomplishing this goal. When should this goal be completed? What can you do today to work towards achieving your goal?

For example, I could set a target of accomplishing this goal within 12 months and set deadlines for tasks I must complete.

What I like: This template encourages you to think deeply about your goal. Rather than simply modifying it at each stage, the sections are designed to make it more tangible and actionable.

4. SpriggHR’s SMART Goals Worksheet

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What It Is

SpriggHR’s goal-setting worksheet is available in three file types: a fillable online PDF file, an Excel spreadsheet, and a Word document.

Because it offers three flexible options, it’s a great choice if you don’t want to use a Google Docs document or force your team to use a certain file type. You and your team members can choose what works best individually.

How It Works

Step 1: Set a “simple goal.” This goal will be the basis of your SMART goal.

My simple goal for this walkthrough is to “create a marketing video for an upcoming launch.”

Step 2: Specify your goal. After creating a simple goal, the next step is making it specific. What exactly do you want to accomplish, and why? Who should be involved in this process? Where will the process take place? Write the answers to these questions in the provided box.

Here’s how I answered some of these questions:

Step 3: Make your goal measurable. How will you measure progress? How will you know when you’ve successfully attained your goal? The template suggests that you set milestones to mark the start of the project, track your progress, and determine the successful completion of your goal.

I decided to focus on milestones rather than a single outcome for this specific goal. Here’s what this looks like:

Step 4: Check feasibility. Make sure your goal is attainable with your current skills and resources. If not, can you obtain new skills and resources to help you attain the goal?

Step 5: Look at the big picture. Decide if the goal is a priority and how it aligns with your team’s objectives. In my example, we’ll assume that the answer is yes.

Step 6: Establish a timeframe. Finally, after ensuring your goal is relevant, the next step is making it timely. Specifically, what is the deadline to achieve this goal?

In my example, I’ll add deadlines to each milestone I created earlier.

Step 7: Rewrite your goal. The last step of this worksheet is taking your answers from the previous sections and rewriting your simple goal as a SMART goal. Here’s mine:

What I like: This template is an excellent resource for setting project goals because it helps evaluate the practical steps needed to achieve your goal.

Start practicing smarter goal setting.

Each template in this post is a great resource for setting SMART goals, so where should you start? Well, it depends.

HubSpot’s SMART Goal Template is fantastic for marketers. Organized 31’s template is a simple yet versatile option that works well for personal and professional goals.

Hirebook’s and SpriggHR’s worksheets strongly emphasize the practicality and actionability of your goals, making them perfect for setting project-based goals.

Ultimately, the best template for you will depend on your specific needs and objectives.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

We integrated AI into our website chat and our KPIs flew off the charts. Here’s exactly how we did it and what we learned along the way.

Key Outcomes:

• 43% increase in chat conversion rates
• >50% improvement in the value per chat
• CSAT scores matched human-led interactions

I like to joke that one of my dumbest moments in early HubSpot history was realizing that potential customers preferred to talk or chat to us directly about buying our product, instead of filling out forms or sending emails.

This seemingly obvious insight was a key turning point, however, as it led to the integration of chat on our HubSpot website.

This simple change ensured that users could instantly connect with our sales and support teams. Since then, chat has been one of our most valuable channels for driving customer satisfaction and acquisitions.

Now, with the expanding capabilities of AI, we’ve been wondering: what would happen if we integrated AI into our chat process? Would AI be able to match the effectiveness of our human team?

In the latest episode of Marketing Against the Grain, Emmy Jonassen, VP of Marketing for Demand Generation at HubSpot, and I walk you through this exact experiment — and the lessons we learned along the way.

The Hypothesis: Using AI for Unstructured Data Analysis

Given AI’s particular effectiveness at interpreting unstructured data, such as free-form text in chat interactions, we hypothesized that integrating AI into our chat system would improve the customer experience by providing faster and more precise responses.

We also believed that this strategy would free up our human agents to focus on more complex inquiries and high-intent customers.

As Emmy explained during the episode, “If we could use AI to truly understand what people are looking for and be able to answer their questions when they come to our website, we anticipate meaningful improvement in user satisfaction.”

But we still were unsure about how significant these improvements would be — and whether AI would be able to capture the personable, empathetic tone of our support teams.

The Set-Up: Choosing Our Test Pages and KPIs

To set up the experiment, we first decided to integrate the AI chatbot on webpages with high traffic and lower risk.

“This would allow us to test, gather data, and iterate very quickly, without significantly disrupting the user journey,” Emmy explains.

Our knowledge base pages, where customers ask practical, straightforward questions, were the ideal candidates.

We then determined our key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Conversion rates: are we providing people with the information that they’re looking for, as fast as possible and as relevant as possible?
• Value per chat: how much benefit are we gaining from each chat interaction, e.g., lead qualification, customer retention?
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: is the chatbot delivering a positive, personalized user experience?

With these details in place, we were ready to launch our AI experiment and track its impact on customer interactions.

AI Chatbot Experiment Adjustments and Results

After launching the first AI chatbot, we initially saw a decline in CSAT scores — but this was more or less expected, as the model was new and needed training.

To improve this, a team member (shout out to David G.!), began manually annotating chat transcripts to improve the AI’s responses, editing each one to be more accurate and contextually relevant based on the users’ questions.

By the end of the experiment, the results were impressive:

• 43% increase in conversion rates
• >50% improvement in the value per chat
• CSAT scores matched human-led interactions

While both the conversion rate and value per chat were exciting, the CSAT score was a game-changer. “Any time you can get automation on par with a human experience, that is a huge win,” says Emmy.

Given the positive results of the experiment, we felt confident about integrating the AI chatbot onto other pages with different intents.

AI Chat Test Next Steps and Thinking Ahead

Our next major AI chat test is now happening on the pricing page.

Here, the AI chatbot has been trained to not only handle product-related questions — but also to help prospective customers understand our packages and pricing, even enabling touchless purchases in some cases.

While we’re still testing and analyzing, we’re very excited to see the final results and expect similar, if not better, outcomes.

We’re also hard at work developing an annotation user interface that allows more team members to participate in training the AI model.

“The annotation piece is really one of the most important pieces through all of this,” says Emmy. “But it’s also the most time-intensive.” So by involving more people in this process, we aim to speed up the AI’s training and improve the accuracy of our chatbot even further.

4 Tips for Using AI to Improve the Customer Experience

While the sheer volume of AI technologies can be intimidating, it’s critical for marketing leaders to stay current with these advancements and begin implementation now.

To learn how to incorporate AI into your workflow, download our AI Guide for Marketers and follow the tips and insights below.

1. Start experimenting now.

“Get your AI experiment to a good enough place, get it out in the wild, and then iterate based on real-world feedback,” Emmy says. “That’s where you’ll see the magic start to happen.”

While it may be tempting to aim for perfection, this will delay your progress and put you behind the competition. Put those concerns aside and get started now.

2. Aim for dramatic results.

There are still marketers who are optimizing for a 5% improvement. Those days are over. AI gives you the ability to build entirely new systems, programs, and automation that get you 100%, 300%, even 500% gains.

The potential for exponential improvement is there, and the opportunity cost of settling for minor gains is too high.

3. Be transparent with customers.

We made a choice early on at HubSpot to be 100% transparent that customers are speaking with an AI assistant in chat.

AI transparency builds trust and helps manage user expectations, which again improves customer satisfaction. This transparency can also help mitigate any potential concerns about privacy or data usage.

4. Start with chat.

If you’re really not sure where to start, I always say that chat is a great, low-stakes option. AI chatbots are key for curating a seamless user journey by giving users exactly what they need and, as we demonstrated in our experiment, can be tested without drastically interrupting the user experience.

To watch our entire discussion about our AI experiment, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into ideas shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they unpack growth strategies and learn from standout founders and peers.

AI-generated video content is turning the marketing world on its head. But what trends should marketers be focusing on to stay ahead of the competition?

If you’ve been following the latest buzz in AI marketing trends — and you should be — you know that AI video tools are at the forefront of this change.

Whether it’s trained ad avatars or hyper-personalized video scripts, these technologies are irreversibly changing how we create content and engage with our audiences. But with such rapid innovation, what’s actually worth the hype?

Kieran and I experimented with some of these new developments in a recent episode of Marketing Against the Grain, including a viral AI video on Twitter and an AI-generated ad created in less than 15 minutes.

Among the many AI video options available, these four trends have been particularly notable — and are worth paying close attention to.

1. Avatar actors and likeness licensing are the new norm.

Instead of hiring an actor to read a script or act in an ad, businesses can now license an actor’s likeness, use it to train an AI model, and then use that model to create ads and avatars. This enables marketers to quickly generate a variety of content, testing, and refining different approaches and messages without the logistical constraints of traditional video shoots.

For example, this viral video ad features a woman casually talking about a product while seated inside her car. What’s so significant about it, however, is that while she’s a real actress hired off of Fiverr, the video itself is generated by AI video, using tools like Arcads.

“This produces video content that is human-trained but AI-agent delivered,” Kieran explains. “That’s quite an unbelievable concept to think through.”

2. Low-quality but authentic content is driving engagement.

Polished, high-budget video ads are quickly becoming a thing of the past — or at least, less favored by audiences. Instead, low-production, personable videos are taking the lead, outperforming traditional ads on platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Take, for example, the viral video I mentioned above: it’s not polished or high-budget. Instead, it’s set in a poorly-lit car, with an unflattering angle. Yet people are more likely to engage with it. Why?

“Because it feels authentic, relatable, and personable,” Kieran explains. “It’s how a real person would talk about a product.”

For marketers, this shift means experimenting with AI tools like HeyGen and InfinityAI, which quickly create videos that drive engagement, despite — or even because of — their imperfections.

3. Video personalization and customization are must-haves.

Hyper-personalized videos that cater to customers’ accessibility needs, languages, and preferences are essential for successful marketing campaigns.

During the episode, we highlighted how AI tools can use customer data from your CRM platform — like call logs, support tickets, and emails — to craft personalized video scripts. This enables marketing teams to deliver tailored content that feels uniquely targeted and relevant to each individual viewer.

We also experimented with HeyGen’s groundbreaking Avatar in Motion, which creates customized avatars based on your own likeness. Move your hands, make gestures, or use unique tones of voice, and HeyGen will flawlessly track, translate, and lip-sync your video with any customizable input text.

4. Accelerated iteration is driving innovation.

AI tools significantly speed up the iteration cycle for creative video content and limit lengthy and expensive production cycles. For example, during the episode, I showed Kieran how I designed and launched a video ad in less than 15 minutes.

To stay ahead, marketers need to quickly and constantly innovate, as the ease of copying and templatizing creative work will lead to a rapid commoditization of content.

Standard approaches to AI-powered video content may outperform current methods in the short term because they’re new and different. But effectiveness is likely to peak within the first six to twelve months. Then, it will taper off as audiences get used to it and become aware of its widespread use.

“Your best-performing content will now be ‘best-performing’ for a much shorter period of time,” says Kieran. In other words: your iteration of ‘creative’ as a marketer will have to increase exponentially. Differentiation will rely heavily on the unique 10-20% of creative input, putting increased pressure on marketers to continually produce new and distinctive ideas.

Three Tips for Integrating AI into Your Video Marketing Strategy

Learn how to incorporate AI into your video workflow by downloading our AI Guide for Marketers and following the tips below.

1. Experiment. Experiment. Experiment.

Test different AI video tools to understand their benefits and limitations, helping you find the best fit for your campaign needs and goals. This keeps your team ahead of the competition, identifying new opportunities to capture the attention of your customers.

2. Enhance the Tools You Already Use

Not sure where to start? Try using AI video features that already exist in your current marketing tech stack. For example, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Mailchimp offer AI-powered capabilities that boost your marketing effectiveness by automating production processes and offering more detailed performance insights for iteration.

3. Monitor Legal and Ethical Considerations

As AI video production becomes more prevalent, legal considerations around likeness licensing and content use will become increasingly important. Invest in the proper training and resources now to ensure you are using AI effectively and ethically in the future.

To watch our entire AI video discussion, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

This blog series is in partnership with Marketing Against the Grain, the video podcast. It digs deeper into ideas shared by marketing leaders Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (SVP, Marketing at HubSpot) as they unpack growth strategies and learn from standout founders and peers.

Wondering how to use Medium and how to make money on Medium? You’ve landed at the right place.

I started writing on Medium in 2016 when blogging was my hobby. A few months later, I realized the monetary potential of this blogging platform, and it’s proven to be a great start for my writing career.

Although I ditched Medium years ago to solely focus on my blog, it is still one of the best blogging platforms to make money in 2024 — especially for the budding writers.

In this guide, I’ll show you the best ways to make money on Medium, how to effectively use Medium, and what I’ve learned in the years using the platform.

Here’s what this guide covers:

• What is Medium?
• How does Medium work?
• Writing for Medium
• Medium vs. WordPress
• How to Use Medium
• Getting Started With Medium
• How to Interact With Medium Content
• How to Write and Publish on Medium
• How to Get Paid on Medium
• The Medium App

Popular topics on Medium range from mental health to social media, from world affairs and trending news to productivity hacks. This makes it a solid choice for anyone who wants to start blogging.

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As Medium founder (and Blogger creator/Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams wrote when he launched the platform in 2012: “Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.”

How does Medium work?

The first thing you’ll notice on the Medium website is its site design.

As former HubSpot Senior Content Strategist Erik Devaney says, “It’s minimalistic, featuring lots of white space and limited formatting options. Want to change the header typeface to Comic Sans? You can’t. Medium won’t allow for such atrocities of design.”

This decision makes great writing the focus. But that’s just one of many nuances of Medium.

Medium is for two types of people — writers and readers — who are focused on online content publishing. When I started my career in content writing and strategy, I wasn‘t sure what that meant.

I discovered Medium because I was trying to figure out where to build my writing portfolio. I’d heard Medium was a good choice, but the first time I signed up, I wasn’t sure how to use it.

If you‘re just getting started on the platform, there’s a fair amount to learn before you hit publish. Let’s get into it.

Quality Leads to Discovery

Many writers go years without sharing their writing publicly. But once you decide to become a writer, whether you’re finishing a first novel or writing content for brands, you need to find a way to share your skills.

Medium is great for writers who invest time and energy in their work. It rewards in-depth, well-researched, and useful articles, not just popularity or brand awareness.

Platform-Enabled Reader Engagement

Comments and likes are popular in online media. But when you‘re new to writing, it’s helpful to know exactly what people are responding to and why.

To meet this need, Medium gives readers a chance to highlight and comment directly within the text of each article. This process is like the way professional editors engage with writers.

Curation and Publications

Medium has curators who review articles for quality. If a curator chooses your article for wider distribution, it gives you a chance to introduce your content to more readers.

This might include highlighting your article on the platform, showing your post to readers they think will want to read it, or adding it to subscriber emails.

Most curators are publication editors. Some of the most popular publications on Medium in 2023 include:

• The Startup.
• Towards Data Science.
• Personal Growth.
• UX Collective.
• The Writing Cooperative.

Medium’s curation and publication models aren’t just great for writers. They also give avid readers and fans a chance to support their favorite writers.

Paid Opportunities

Medium also gives writers the chance to earn money with their stories. As a member of the Partner Program, you can put stories behind a paywall to earn income.

In this program, you can increase earnings with repeat readers, engagement signals, and more.

Writing for Medium

Anyone who has a Medium account can write for Medium — there’s no other vetting process involved.

To get started, simply sign up for a free Medium account (or upgrade to a $5/month membership for unlimited access), and you’re ready to start writing from there.

It’s important to know that articles must adhere to Medium‘s content guidelines and rules. For instance, as a writer I can’t promote controversial or extreme content on my Medium account. I can‘t do third-party advertising. And there’s a separate set of policies if I want to write about cryptocurrencies.

Affiliate marketing links are allowed, but writers must tell their audience that they’re including these links. For the full list of rules for content, take a look at this post on Medium Rules.

As a marketer, Medium presents an opportunity for you to reach a new audience with your content. The platform is open, so some topics lean toward sharing longer-form, more well-thought-out content, while others are short and topic-focused.

In this way, Medium is like marketing on many other channels, because success in writing for Medium isn’t just about great writing. It takes some research into audiences and publications in a specific area of interest. So, what makes Medium a great channel for writers?

In the next section, I’m going to get into the topic above, and talk about how I chose between Medium and WordPress.

Medium vs. WordPress

This post offers an exceptional breakdown of WordPress vs. Medium for pricing, blogging, and SEO from a business perspective. So, I want to use this space to share my personal experience with the two platforms.

How I’ve Used WordPress as a Content Writer

I worked with a designer to build my personal website on WordPress and built a separate side project on my own with Elementor.

I‘ve also used WordPress professionally as a content manager and freelance writer. Altogether, I’ve been using the platform for 6+ years to create and promote content.

WordPress is an excellent platform for sharing content online inexpensively. It also makes it easy to add plugins, features, and tools to connect my sites to other relevant channels, like social media feeds or payment gateways.

I like WordPress as a content writer because it lets me run independent sites online that I can use to test ideas before widely broadcasting them.

That said, it took years of learning about search engine optimization (SEO) to begin generating traffic on my personal sites.

With the rapid recent changes in SEO, I’ve been investing more time in researching social channels for marketing and promotion.

How I’ve Used Medium as a Content Writer

As you can see above, I chose to go with WordPress for my portfolio. But, I started using Medium when I was managing content for a small ecommerce startup.

I was looking for effective ways to promote content for our blog. I wanted a channel that could help expand the influence of the excellent writers on my team. So, we started with Medium.

I asked writers on my three-person team to write an original piece for Medium once a month in addition to their scheduled blog assignments.

While some posts sat on our brand’s Medium page without much traction, a few grabbed valuable attention. Specifically, we had the most success with posts that we submitted to popular publications on the site.

For example, I submitted this post about Ecommerce Easter Eggs to the Marketing and Entrepreneurship publication curated by Larry Kim, and Bryce Patterson submitted this piece on the content writing process to the publication The Writing Cooperative.

These publications have dedicated audiences, which helped us show our writing to more people and build followers for our branded Medium account.

WordPress vs. Medium — which is right for you?

While these are both excellent platforms to showcase writing, they’re quite different. I use both platforms, but I spend more time on WordPress because of my goals as a creator.

But many writers will find that Medium is the best platform for them because of its focus on writer discovery, monetization, and community-building.

At this point, you may be ready to try using Medium. Let’s take the first step.

Getting Started With Medium

1. Create an account.

Anyone can view free Medium content. But to publish and interact with folks on the platform, you need to have an account and log in.

So, the first step is creating an account. Signing up was super easy for me.

I headed to Medium.com and clicked the “Get started” button at the top of the page. From there I had three different sign-up options to choose from: Google, Facebook, or email.

Image Source

I used my Gmail account to create an account first, which was super fast and simple. They even made adding my name to my profile easy, because it auto-filled based on my email.

I also set up a separate account, this time signing up with email. All I needed to do was click a link in my email to complete setup, and the process was otherwise the same.

During sign-up, it helped to remember that Medium is part social media. It‘s not just a platform to write blogs, it’s a space to share, comment, and curate content within a community.

So, I felt like some parts of the sign-up, like choosing topics, felt more like signing up for Twitter (X) or Pinterest than creating an account on a blogging platform.

I like keeping my blogging and social media accounts separate, but Erik Devaney recommends signing up for Medium using Facebook.

He says, “That way all of your existing connections from Facebook who are on Medium will automatically be following your account once it’s created. This saves you the trouble of having to build up a new audience entirely from scratch.”

Regardless of what you go with to start, you can always link your Twitter (X), Mastodon, or Facebook to your Medium account later in the “Security and apps” tab in the Settings menu.

The Settings menu is also where you can update your username, profile page URL, profile design, and more. You can also control what email notifications you receive from Medium in this menu.

To complete my profile, I added a photo and wrote up a short (160-character max) bio for my Medium profile page.

I use the same bio across my social media accounts, so I just copied and pasted this from my Instagram account, emojis and all.

2. Follow people, publications, and topics.

In a Medium feed, the content that‘s surfaced comes not only from the accounts of the people and organizations you follow but also from publications and tags.

What’s more, when searching for content on Medium, people, publications, and topics all show up in the results.

People

First, figure out who you want to follow. Whose writing do you want to read? Who’s making content you can learn from as you begin your new writing adventure?

There‘s a wide variety of writers on the platform, and I’m interested in a little bit of everything, so this step was quick to complete.

Whether you’re interested in politics or people-watching, computer science or world travel, you’re likely to find some writers you want to follow too.

Publications

Medium publications are collections of stories based around a common theme. Anyone can create them — yourself included — and the way they work is fairly straightforward.

As the creator of a publication, you’re an editor by default. This means you have the ability to:

• Add writers to your publication.
• Edit and publish the stories submitted by your writers.
• Review the metrics for all the stories that are part of your publication.

As the publication‘s creator, you’ll also have the ability to appoint new editors (so they can do all that stuff I just mentioned).

Creating a publication is easy to do. First, I needed to submit payment to become a Medium member.

Then, I clicked on my profile image in the top right, and scrolled down to “Manage publications.” A pop-up appeared, and I clicked “Create a new publication.”

This led to a new page where I needed to enter information on the name, description, social accounts, and topic for my publication. I also needed images ready to add an avatar and logo.

The avatar image appears on featured pages around Medium, while the logo image appears on the homepage of the publication. You can learn about image sizes for these requirements and more in this Medium post.

Once I finished entering this information, I had a chance to create a custom design for the home page of my new publication.

This publication will give me a chance to not only share my own writing, but also connect with other writers on the topics I care about.

Topics

Once called “Tags,” Topics are the hashtags of the Medium ecosystem. When you publish a story on Medium, you get the option to add up to five topics, which appear at the bottom of your story.

So, when I click a topic it brings me to a page where I can see more stories with the same topic. It also gives me suggestions for other topics I might be interested in.

Instead of surfacing content based solely on the social graph (for example, the people/publications you follow), Medium uses topics to surface content that’s based on specific interests.

For example, this article from Beth Dunn, a recent Marketing Fellow at HubSpot, includes five topics:

• User experience.
• UX writing.
• UX design.
• Inclusive design.
• Content strategy.

Following topics like these can help personalize my Medium experience and make it easier for my readers to find more of my content.

Now that I‘ve set up an account, started following some accounts, built a publication, and followed some topics, let’s start engaging with content.

How to Interact With Medium Content

1. Recommend, share, and bookmark content.

Clapping hands are the “Like” of the Medium world. It’s a way to show that you support and appreciate the content that someone has shared.

When reading a story on Medium, you can support it at both the top and the bottom of the actual story, where you see the clapping hand symbol.

In either case, I just click on the clapping hand icon to support a story. Once clicked, the hands will change from an outline to solid black.

The first time I supported a story, I accidentally clicked the number beside the clapping hands icon. This was a happy accident because it let me see the full list of people who recommended that story.

Note: You can clap up to 50 times per post, and you can clap for as many posts as you want.

When you recommend a story, the writer, by default, will receive an email notification. (But that‘s something you can control in Settings). The more support a story receives, the more likely it is to be shared around the Medium network.

Stories that receive the most likes within a given time period get featured on Medium’s home page.

In the same two locations where you can recommend a story, you can also save, listen to, or share that story.

To save a story I wanted to spend more time reading, I clicked the bookmark icon, and it saved the story to my reading list. I can also create specific reading lists in this part of the platform.

To listen, I just clicked the play icon, but if you want to use this feature, it‘s good to know that it’s for members only. Finally, I shared the story by copying the link or sharing it on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), or Facebook.

When you bookmark a story, it will appear on your reading list, which you can access from your Medium profile page or from the Medium homepage at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.

2. Highlight specific words.

Now that I know how to support, share, and bookmark Medium stories, it’s time to unlock a second level of interaction. I do this by selecting sections of text with my cursor.

Once I highlight some text, a pop-up menu will appear that gives me four options:

Highlight

Clicking the highlighter icon (highlighter symbol) puts a green highlight around the text I selected. This is visible to my Medium followers. By default, a story’s writer will get a notification when anyone highlights a section of their stories.

Response

Clicking the speech bubble icon lets me write a response to the story I‘m reading. The section of text I’ve highlighted appears at the top of my response. (More on responses in a second.)

Text Shot

Clicking the Twitter icon generates a “Text Shot,” which is a tweet that automatically pulls in the text I highlighted as a screenshot.

Private Note

Some stories will also show a lock icon in a speech bubble. Clicking this icon lets me send the writer a private note. If you don‘t see this icon, it’s because the author has turned off private notes.

You can choose this on or off in your settings, but I chose to leave it on because I read that editors sometimes use private notes to offer feedback to writers before publishing.

3. Write responses

Unlike traditional blog comments, Medium responses are treated as individual stories. Besides appearing at the bottom of the stories I respond to, I can also publish my responses to my profile page.

This is helpful for me because it lets me engage with people on the platform without having to commit to writing a full-blown story. It also helps me come up with blog ideas or stories.

Medium’s approach to responses gives comments the potential to take off and get circulated just like traditional stories.

A quick note: Responses are engagement signals on the Medium platform. And, responding is a tip that shows up in many articles about how to promote your writing on Medium.

For me, this makes it important to respond genuinely. While responses are a way to increase my visibility on the platform, I work to be thoughtful in the ways I support and engage with the writers I respond to.

How to Write and Publish on Medium

1. Format text in your posts

Ready to start writing my first Medium post, I click “Write” at the top right-hand corner of the Medium home page. I can also get there by clicking on my profile icon at the top-right of the Medium page and then scrolling to “Stories.”

I can create a new story by clicking the green “Write a story” button. That action pulls up a screen that’s ready for my content that looks like this:

As Erik Devaney says, “Writing in Medium’s editor is highly intuitive and — from a stylistic perspective — nearly impossible to screw up.”

As usual, it’s the writing that’s tough, but a tool can help with the details. When I write, I often use a template, like one of these free blog templates.

Then, I copy and paste my writing into my chosen publishing platform. Medium makes this step easy. It retains links and other formatting from pasted text.

If I want to make a change to the text, All I have to do is highlight a section to reveal several basic format choices such as bold, italics, or hyperlinking. It also lets me designate text as an H1 or as an H2 using the big T or little t:

And I can choose between two different styles of block quotes —

Option A:

Or Option B:

If I really want to get fancy, I use Medium’s drop caps function.

Know those enlarged, stylized letters you sometimes see at the beginning of sentences? Those are drop caps. According to the Medium team, they’re useful for “pacing, starting a new chapter, or just a little typographical delight.”

Another option for creating some separation between different sections of a story in Medium is to use a separator. To insert one, I click the little plus icon that appears on an empty line of a story:

Clicking that plus icon will open up a menu with six options. The one on the far right — the icon with the two little lines — is the separator.

Here’s what it looks like on the page:

Check out this story for more formatting how-tos, such as adding inline code, mentions, or emojis.

2. Add images and media.

Adding images, videos, and embeds to a Medium story can be as simple as copying and pasting URLs into Medium‘s editor. The editor, in most cases, can automatically recognize the media’s format and render it accordingly.

For example, I want to add a couple videos to my in-progress post. For the first video, I just copied and pasted the YouTube URL, and then clicked “Enter.”

Then I added a TikTok video by clicking the video icon that shows up after clicking the plus icon. The final result was the same no matter which steps I followed.

You can add a range of media to your Medium story including:

• Uploading an image from your computer.
• Adding stock photos with Unsplash.
• Inserting a video with a URL.
• Inserting an embed code for approved media.

There are also different size and orientation options for displaying media.

For example, the options below appeared in a pop-up menu after I inserted my YouTube video. There are three choices for sizing a YouTube video on Medium:

3. Share drafts and publish posts.

When I finished my story and was happy with how everything looked, I headed up to the top navigation to choose between two options: “Publish” and an icon with three dots. The three dots highlight a range of choices for writers.

These include sending a draft link, checking the appearance of the post, unlisted publishing, and more.

For example, “Share draft link” generates a link to the draft of my story, which I can share with anyone — even if they don’t have a Medium account. And the people I share the draft with can also leave me notes.

Clicking the “Publish” button, meanwhile, opens a menu where I can choose up to five topics for my story.

It’s a sort of pre-publishing dashboard, with reminders to add a featured image and a link to learn more about what happens after publishing. I like that it also offers a chance to schedule my post if I want to share it later.

It’s also where I hit the “Publish” button to share my story with the world.

4. Measure your results.

I published my first Medium story and I’m set to earn money on the platform, but the impact I can make with Medium will depend on how my stories perform.

To see metrics for my Medium content, I clicked my profile icon in the top right-hand corner of the Medium homepage and scrolled down to “Stats.”

When I arrived on the “Stats” page, I didn‘t see much (yet). But soon, I’ll see the aggregate number of views and claps my stories and responses have received over the past 30 days.

There’s also a graph that provides day-by-day granularity, with details on follower counts and highlights.

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As I scrolled down the page, I had the option to click on specific stories to view individual stats. The Medium team is also making changes to the Stats pages.

It looks like most of these changes are for tracking payment metrics or helping writers tie payment to performance.

Here’s a quick rundown on what metrics Medium currently tracks:

• Claps — the number of claps a story receives.
• Responses — the number of responses a story receives.
• Lifetime earnings — the total amount a story has earned.
• Views — the number of people who visited a story’s page.
• Reads — tracks when someone views a story for 30 seconds or more. Scrolling to the bottom of the story used to be required but isn’t anymore. Views and reads for individual stories live on story detail pages.
• Member read ratio — tracks member reads divided by member views.

Quick note: Member-only and non-member activity is tracked separately in Stats.

How to Get Paid on Medium

Now that I‘ve gone through how to use Medium, I’m thinking about how to make the most of it. I’ve done some research and found a few ways writers monetize with this platform.

Medium Partner Program

First off, there’s the Partner Program. If you want to earn money with your stories, this is an exciting way to get paid on Medium.

The Medium Partner Program pays writers directly each month. To get paid on Medium, you’ll first need to become a paid Medium member. Then, it’s time to apply for the Partner Program. The requirements for this are simple. You need to:

• Be a Paid Medium member ($4/month or $40/year).
• Have published at least one Medium story in the last six months.
• Be 18 years or older.
• Live in an eligible country (here’s the list).

Once you’re part of the Partner Program, you can put new and already-published stories behind a paywall for premium members. However, you’ll have to earn a few badges before completely getting your articles behind a paywall.

Now, there are two ways to get your stories behind the paywall for premium readers:

• Total read time of the Medium article.
• Bonus earned when a non-member signs up within 30 days of reading your piece.

It uses engagement metrics to decide how much you’ll get paid for each story, connecting what readers love to what you make from the platform as a writer.

However, the money made through the Partner Program won’t suffice your needs. A vast majority of writers earn up to $100/month through the Partner program. Only a few reach the $1,000/month mark.

I’ve found this good guide to help you calculate your earnings on Medium.

Crowdfunding

While I‘ll be trying the Partner Program to earn on Medium, I’m also curious about other options.

This is a good way to make money on Medium if you have a large number of followers on the platform and you don’t wish to become a paid member.

Even if you’re a paid member, you can ask your subscriber for a tip for your valuable writing.

For example, I set up tipping by going to “Settings,” then “Publishing” and updating the settings under “Manage tipping on your stories.”

I can add a payment link, and I’ll be able to receive tips from readers. There are options to use Patreon, PayPal, and other popular platforms.

Promotions

The hidden gem to earn money through Medium is Affiliate marketing. If you’ve a large following or are good enough with SEO, affiliate marketing can turn out to be a lucrative option.

Here’s how it works: You write a blog mentioning the product or service. Next, you’ll place the affiliate link within the piece. When the readers learn about the product through your blog, they’ll be enticed to buy it using the link.

For every purchase, the affiliate vendor will pay you a commission. So, if you have around 20,000 reads in a month and say, 2% of the readers have purchased the product that pays you $70 in commission.

The total turns out to be $28,000 a month.

Well, that’s a massive amount of money to make!

Selling Your Products and Services

I’ve seen a lot of businesses, especially educators selling their courses on Medium. It all starts with showing that you are knowledgeable about the subject and winning your reader’s trust.

Once you’ve a significant engagement on your posts, it’s time to promote your products or services on Medium. For example, Jay Baer, the founder of digital media Convince & Convert has 55k followers on the platform.

While his posts gain massive attraction from the readers, what I liked here is his strategy to incorporate his service within.

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In the post about optimizing for voice search, Jay contextually promotes his digital marketing service, offering services to create your content strategy.

Once your creative ideas are flowing, try our blog topic generator to help build out a pipeline of standout content ideas for your audience.

The Medium App

I travel frequently, so consuming and interacting with content on the go is best for me. For this, I’m using the Medium app. The app includes the same stories and content I can find on my laptop, with the added bonus of a mobile-first interface.

On the app, I can surface content related to my interests. These curated lists depend on the tags, publications, or authors I follow.

I also use the app‘s Explore feature to find new, interesting content and to engage with fellow readers, joining conversations as they’re happening.

I was hoping I could start drafts in the app, but no. That said, I can check story stats wherever I am, which is helpful.

Use Medium for Writing and Sharing Your Best Stories

Medium is a powerful platform for writers and content creators to share ideas, engage with readers, and even earn money.

By following the steps I shared in this article, you can unlock the full potential of Medium. So, start writing and exploring the possibilities.

Your audience is waiting.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in August 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Though Mike Tyson meant that literally, his wise words certainly hold true in marketing.

And no marketer gets punched in the mouth quite as often as those who deal with user-generated content.

Need convincing? Just search for videos about Celsius on TikTok. While the drink brand does tout ingredients that “burn calories,” many TikTokkers falsely claim the fitness beverage contains everything from Ozempic to cyanide and will give you luscious locks, sturdy nails, and an early grave.

So what’s a brand to do when UGC goes off the rails? Does a smart marketer fight back or roll with the punches?

Below, I cover some real-world examples of how brands have encountered controversial UGC and then pluck out some takeaways to learn from.

But first, let’s check out what’s at stake …

When UGC Attacks

Despite the old adage that “all publicity is good publicity,” there are a few different types of user-generated content that can potentially damage your brand — even if it sounds overwhelmingly positive.

Misinformation

This involves outright false claims about your product or service. Even when users are trying to promote your brand, these posts can be damaging.

Diving back into the Celsius case I noted above, the “fitness drink” became a lightning rod for false information last year when drinkers posted TikToks alleging it contained the weight-loss drug Ozempic.

At its peak, the term “Celsius drink Ozempic” reached a whopping 11.7 million searches on TikTok.

The trend got so out of hand that a spokesperson had to give a media tour to Fox and other outlets to state “Celsius products do not contain, and have never contained, Semaglutide (the generic name for Ozempic and Wegovy).”

Even though the videos might feel positive, they could very well turn off health-conscious consumers who believed the false claims that the drink snuck prescription medication into its recipe.

Should the marketing team have stepped in before it got that far? Or was it a message that needed to come from an official channel?

Misleading Content

And what about claims that are simply harmless stretches of truth instead of outright lies?

Again, we look to Celsius. TikTok’s second favorite claim about the drink is that it helps people quickly grow hair and nails. Though Celsius markets itself as a health drink — and some ingredients may be linked to hair and nail growth on their own — this is still just a rumor that is unproven by testing. A rumor that Celsius hasn’t spoken out on. But, should they?

The claims aren’t hurting anyone, they’re hard to falsify, and they’re promoting the brand, right?

Before you think of this hard-to-prove rumor as a win, remember that 80% of consumers say that UGC impacts purchasing decisions. If customers come to a brand on false grounds, they could feel misled by both UGC creators and a brand when unchecked claims aren’t true.

While a harmless claim might be a gray area, it poses an ethical and moral dilemma that brands should consider.

Negative UGC

While most UGC is geared toward the positive, in this case, the false claims are actively working against your product or service.

In the last few weeks, a health influencer with over 2 million Instagram followers claimed that Celsius contains poisonous cyanide. And not just any old cyanide, but cyanide derived from human waste. (A claim that has been debunked by PhD nutritionist Layne Norton if you don’t trust Celsius themselves.)

(Side note: If you’re on the Celsius social team and find yourself in Asheville, let me buy you a sympathy beer.)

While you may be tempted to jump in and squash these claims immediately, anything that may be considered slander or libel is best handled by your legal representation.

Hoaxes

Finally, in the case of a hoax, the creator tries to pass off the UGC as officially sourced content.

Way back when iOS8 was released (and dinosaurs roamed the Earth), pranksters shared an official-looking advertisement for a new feature called Apple Wave.

According to the fake ad, Wave gave your iPhone the ability to charge your battery “using any standard household microwave.”

(In case it needs to be said: Please don’t microwave your phone.)

This led to a double handful of social media posts showing the charred remains of iPhones.

Though the joke’s actual impact is unclear, Apple took it seriously enough to make multiple statements across various platforms, like Twitter.

Navigating User-Generated Chaos

Let’s rip this part off like a bandaid: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for how and when to respond to off-course UGC.

Ultimately, a response (or lack thereof) greatly depends on what’s at stake for a brand and what’s being said. (Is it just your reputation on the line or a customer’s life?)

I’m not your PR or legal team and recommend that you consult trusted brand experts when and if the unthinkable happens.

But, here are a few takeaways we’ve gathered from brands who successfully navigated these scenarios:

• Prep a crisis communication plan. Despite Mike Tyson’s proverb, it’s helpful to have the skeleton of a plan ready to go. Who will handle the response? Who should be consulted? What channels will you use?

  With this in place, you can be ready for a scenario where your brand gets an influx of customer web chatter, press requests, or customer service inquiries due to UGC.

• Take a deep breath. Yeah, yeah. You’ve heard this before, but don’t just scroll to the next tip. Responding in anger or fear risks making the situation ten times worse.

  In a crisis, your first instincts will likely be emotional (which doesn’t always lead to the best response.) While timeliness is important, responding effectively is critical.

  Take a beat and consult your team or leaders in deciding the best next step.

• Don’t go on the attack. Even if you’re totally in the right. Even if they’ve insulted your mother. Even if the user is a total jerk.

  Attacking the user personally will never look good for your brand.

• Consider IF a response is even needed. If the UGC is coming from an obvious troll with 20 followers (mostly bots), responding will only bring attention to their message.

  However, if a harmful message goes viral, ignoring it won’t make it go away. In that case, work closely with your PR and legal teams to craft a plan.

• Have a goal in mind. Are you aiming to remind audiences of your brand values or are you just trying to correct false claims to re-earn trust?
• Explain the “Why” behind your response: Consider statements beginning with, “To reassure our customers …” or “We want you to feel safe with our products, so …”

Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice, nor an exhaustively proven public-relations guide for your company to use in times of marketing controversy or crisis. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand the cons of user-generated content and how brands have been documented to respond to it in the past. Any legal or ethical commentary or similar information is not the same as legal or PR advice, where an attorney or public relations expert applies the law or public relations tactics to your specific circumstances. We insist that you consult an attorney and seasoned PR executives if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.

In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.

In 2022, I did the impossible — I had an Instagram Reel go viral. So far, it’s generated over 5.5 million views, 173K shares, 99.5k likes, and 14.6 bookmarks, but the number of new followers? Minimal.

Though it wasn’t my goal, the experience got me thinking about how to get more followers on Instagram. (I mean, if a meme that got the attention of Instagram exec Adam Mosseri won’t do it, what will?)

Between over 2 billion monthly active users and features like shoppable posts, Instagram is an app of opportunity for a variety of businesses.

But here’s the thing: Unless you’re a household name, growing a following is hard work. I’m here to help.

Let’s discuss some proven, actionable strategies to help you get more followers on Instagram, whether they be your first 1000 or next.

Types of Instagram Followers

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, it’s important to know what the Instagram landscape looks like today. In your growth journey, you’ll likely encounter these three main types of followers:

1. Fake Followers

Fake followers are usually bots or dummy accounts that inflate a follower count.

You can typically spot them by their lack of profile pictures, posts, followers, or spammy alpha-numeric usernames.

Source

Fake followers may make the follower count on your profile look good, but they don‘t engage. Engagement is a huge factor in Instagram’s algorithm (i.e., getting on the Explore feed and in “suggested posts”) and getting brand collaborations as a creator.

2. Ghost Followers

“Ghost” followers on Instagram are inactive users.

They’re like disengaged contacts on an email list. They‘re real, but again, they don’t interact with your content, so they do little more than skew your metrics.

3. Organic Followers

Lastly, we have organic followers. Organic followers are your real, active audience; those who visit your profile, engage with your content, and are potential customers.

Organic followers can cross many demographics, but pay close attention to the following:

• Customers: These are people who have made a purchase. They already know and like your brand so you want to know when you’re talking to one.
• Competitors: These are followers who are in the same industry or line of business as you. They’re likely following to keep an eye on what you’re doing.
• Influencers: Here, we’re referring to micro/nano influencers or creators with 10-75K followers. If relevant, these niche influencers can lead to useful partnerships and increased sales for your business.

Out of these three types of followers, organic followers are really the only ones you want. So, how can you get more of them?

Even if you’ve never tried your hand at Instagram marketing, or you don’t have a team of content creators, you can grow your Instagram account by focusing on a few key areas:

• Instagram Strategy

• Instagram Content Creation

• Engaging Instagram Followers

• Promoting Your Instagram Account

The first step is ensuring your profile is complete and ready to make the best first impression.

Optimizing Your Instagram Profile

An incomplete profile is a huge red flag to potential new followers on Instagram. Missing information can raise questions about why it’s missing which hurts your credibility (Remember what we said about fake followers?) .

Here are a few best practices to make sure your profile is complete and optimized for a good first impression:

Choose a clear username.

Your Instagram username (or handle) should be recognizable and easily searchable — like your business name. In the example below, the UK business The Journal Shop uses the intuitive handle @thejournalshop.

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If your business name is already taken, experiment with related alternatives (i.e., something that includes your business name plus a branded item or a catchphrase).

For example, Peloton uses @onepeloton, while the Australian activewear line Lorna Jane uses @lornajaneactive.

While, ideally, you want to claim your name, variations like this still make your brand recognizable.

Have an on-brand profile picture.

This should be a clear, high-quality picture of your face or logo if you’re a business. Again, you want people to easily recognize and identify you when they come across your posts.

Add details next to your name.

Not everyone does this, but the name field on your Instagram profile is additional real estate you can use to introduce yourself on the platform. Use any extra space here to add details about your business or what you offer.

For example, HubSpot could put “HubSpot | AI-Powered Customer Platform.”

Style blogger Sarah Ramondt Lennon adds “Amazon Fashion” to hers.

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And financial advisor Andrew Lokenauth uses his to promote his newsletter and website.

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Adding these little extra details to your name field tells people what you’re about right when they land on your profile and also frees up some space in your bio.

Share your value and personality in your bio.

Instagram only gives you 150 characters in your bio. Use them to tell people why they should follow you. Include who you are and what you do, but also a hint of personality.

Here are a few examples for inspiration:

• @cheekbonebeauty: “🧡 Indigenous Roots 🌱 Sustainable By Nature 🌎 B Corp Certified 🐰 Cruelty-Free 🐰 Cruelty-Free 🇨🇦 @sephoracanada 🇺🇸 @thirteenlune @jcpenney Founded by @cheekbonejenn”
• @oreo: “Playful moments from your favorite cookie.”
• @sahilbloom: “Exploring my curiosity and sharing what I learn along the way.”
• @CalifiaFarms: “⁣Because life’s too short for one type of milk. 🌱”
• @coragedolls: “Instilling cultural pride with products & stories that finally reflect her. #blackowned”

Add a LinkTree.

Ever heard the line “check out my link in bio“? You can add up to five links here, but I recommend using LinkTree to bypass the limit.

You can use your LinkTree to guide people to your website and other platforms, content, offers — anything really.

Here’s a peek at mine:

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Your bio link is your most direct play to get followers to take action, and it’s the only place you can have clickable links without paying. LinkTree helps you get the most out of it (and it’s free).

Establish your unique brand.

Have a brand color palette? How about a specific font or typeface?

Use these to develop a visual brand for all of the Instagram content you create.

Not only does it make your feed look more organized, cohesive, and professional, but it also gives visitors a way to recognize your content even out of context.

Writing coach @the.plottery accomplishes this on her feed by using similar typography, vectors, and shades of purple in all of her content.

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Note: Use our Instagram templates to create a consistent look and feel for your images.

You’ll also want to develop a consistent voice on Instagram; one that is cohesive with the rest of your brand and company culture.

The last thing you want to do is to be snappy and super casual on Instagram but formal and stoic everywhere else.

Once you’ve got your voice down, make sure it stays consistent and natural in your videos, captions, comments, and messages.

With your profile set up for success, I recommend having 15 or more existing posts before you actually start making a play for followers.

This way, when new people find you, they’ll see a full screen of content and get a better idea of what you offer.

If you haven’t already, download this social media content calendar template to help plan out your posts.

Here are some other resources that may help when filling it out:

• Free Instagram Business Templates
• What to Post on Instagram: Photo & Video Ideas to Spark Inspiration
• How to Plan Your Instagram Posts [+ Free Instagram Planning Templates]

Now, on to the good stuff.

Instagram Strategy Tips for Getting More Followers

1. Have a dedicated content creator/personality.

Yes, people may follow some brands on Instagram, but they are more likely to follow and engage with other people. (Why do you think influencer marketing is so effective?)

While you can certainly collaborate with influencers (more on that later), a smart way to get more followers without the extra cost is to have a dedicated creator or creators in your Instagram content.

Think of these personalities as your spokespeople. Having one or a small handful of spokespeople in your Instagram content gives followers someone human to recognize and connect with rather than simply a cold, faceless brand.

Take Auberth and Javi on HubSpot’s Instagram, for example:

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They both regularly appear in HubSpot’s Instagram content, delivering our messages and representing the brand. They also give followers a face to connect with when they see HubSpot in their feeds.

Find someone with experience and passion for Instagram to appear in your content. Someone who understands user behavior and will stay current on trends, new features, and updates to Reels and Instagram Shopping.

Do you have someone inexperienced who’s interested? Have them dip their toes into becoming a digital creator by getting an Instagram Marketing certification and experimenting with content creation templates.

Learn How to Increase Followers with HubSpot’s Free
Instagram Marketing Course

Pro Tip: Mine your existing team for creators.

No one knows your brand, product, or service better than your team members. If they are willing, ask them to appear in your Instagram content whether it be in images, videos, or even audio.

Consider creating a system for curating content from your team.

For instance, establish a specific email address for folks to submit photos, short videos, and memes. Or if your team shares a Box or Dropbox account, create a shared folder where people can upload their content.

Think about how your team communicates and make it easy for them to get involved.

2. Share educational content with Instagram carousels.

The best way to get more followers on Instagram is to offer value. In this case, education.

Instagram carousel posts actually have the highest engagement of all content on the platform (3x more than solo images), but they only account for about 19% of posts.

(Think we can blame Instagram’s 2022 video push for that.)

Think about what you can educate your audience on. Then, create a simple Instagram carousel post with an engaging title enticing users to click through to the next slide.

Grammarly does a great job of sharing educational carousels on its Instagram:

3. Be mindful of diversity and inclusion.

Instagram is a global platform that reaches people from all walks of life.

Thinking about diversity and inclusivity can help reach more of these people by looking past preconceived notions of gender, age, race, income, and sexuality to highlight how your product or service can offer value.

How do you do this? It comes back to focusing on common pain points and experiences, which are often universal regardless of topical traits.

Inclusive marketing challenges rigid ideas of who a brand’s buyers are and how their product is used to cast a wider net — one that may include demographics they may have never considered before.

Recently, I’ve been impressed by Urban Decay Cosmetics’ inclusive content on Instagram.

While, historically, many makeup brands have primarily targeted women and showcased conventional Western beauty standards, Urban Decay’s content features a wide range of individuals using their products.

This opens them up to many other markets (and followers) that may currently be ignored by their competitors.

4. Post consistently.

If you want people to follow you on Instagram, you have to give them something to follow. This means posting high-quality, relevant content regularly.

The easiest way to get into this habit is to commit to a posting schedule.

Having a set time on your calendar to post content on Instagram gives you a deadline to abide by, and it gives your audience a specific time to anticipate hearing from you.

Heck, they may even plan for it like I clear my schedule for new episodes of House of the Dragon at 9 PM ET on Sundays.

Ok, maybe your posts won’t ignite this kind of commitment, but having an Instagram schedule does set expectations. And expectations build a sense of reliability, community, and trust with your followers. But what time should you post?

Optimizing your schedule for your specific audience might take time and experimentation, but recent HubSpot research found the best times to post on Instagram to be 12-3 PM or 6-9 PM.

Friday is considered the best day for engagement, followed closely by Saturday and Sunday. The evening 6 PM-8:59 PM is frequently noted as having high engagement levels.

Experiment with these guidelines to see what works for your audience and persona. Your target persona can drastically impact your posting timing and frequency, especially if they are in a different time zone.

Download this free template for buyer personas, if you already have a few.

Pro Tip: Use a social media management tool to help maintain consistency.

Get Started with HubSpot’s Social Media Tool

You can always post manually, but scheduling your posts in advance can help plan ahead and save time. Here are more articles to help you choose the right tool and learn how to schedule Instagram posts:

• Best Social Media Management Tools
• Scheduling Instagram Posts: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know
• When Is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?

You can also use a social media content calendar to plan your Instagram posts. Here are some resources you can use to jumpstart your Instagram content creation process:

• What to Post on Instagram: Photo & Video Ideas to Spark Inspiration
• Best Instagram Captions: Good, Cool, Funny, & Cute
• How to Plan Your Instagram Posts [+ Free Instagram Planning Templates]

5. Diversify your content mediums.

Do you typically only post static image content? Or just Instagram Reels?

If you want more Instagram followers, try diversifying the mediums on which you create and share.

Different people enjoy consuming information in different ways, so if you’re only creating one type of content you may be getting ignored by many in your target audience.

Your audience probably comes from different regions of the world, has different interests and hobbies, and likely has different careers.

Rather than post all-encompassing content that will satisfy all of your followers at once, conduct some research to separate them into smaller groups. Then, plan different posts to appeal to each subset of your audience.

Airbnb uses a healthy mix of short-form videos, Stories, single photos, carousels, and even graphics to diversify its feed and highlight offers in different ways:

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Pro Tip: Monitor Instagram Insights to know what’s working.

What type of content is actually getting engagement? With an Instagram business profile, you get access to Instagram Insights, which show you what content is generating the most views, likes, and followers.

Look at these regularly to understand what content you should create to make progress against your follower growth goals.

Instagram Content Creation Tips for Getting More Followers

6. Lean into trends and current events.

Instagram is a trendy place.

Finding relevant ways to incorporate trends, memes, and current events into your content is a great way to stay top of mind and get in front of new people there.

While known for its quirky original content, even Dollar Shave Club is not immune to memes. The razor company posted this playful image to capitalize on the hype surrounding Taylor Swift’s album “The Tortured Poet’s Department.”

They also create content around holidays, like this post from Father’s Day in the U.S.

Pay attention to what topics and formats earn your audience’s attention, and meet them there.

7. Create templates, filters, and “add yours” stickers.

Today, many Stories trends are centered around filters, but “Add Yours” stickers and “Add Yours” templates are gaining popularity as well.

If you’re an Instagram fan like me, you’ve likely seen a variety of “add yours” content making the rounds among your friends.

“Add Yours” are stickers with a short prompt for something users should post with the sticker in their Stories. The templates are typically interactive frames allowing users to insert a video or photo into them.

Everyone who views or uses the sticker can see who else has publicly used it and who created it.

Recently, I’ve seen many creators of these stickers, templates, and filters (i.e. Artist Ming Ted Chin) amassing large followings awaiting their next creation.

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It’s a fun, engaging way to start a conversation and reach new audiences. Why not create one related to your business?

For example, if I were Yelp, I’d create a sticker asking people to drop photos from their favorite ice cream shop. If I were Spotify, I’d tell folks to share the song they’re currently listening to (Possible with the “Add Yours” music sticker).

Create one of these elements and add it to your own story to get your followers to spread it to their own audiences.

8. Follow photography best practices.

On Instagram, post quality matters. A lot. Your X followers might forgive a few bad tweets, but a bad photo on Instagram is a big no-no.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a professional to have a great Instagram feed. You simply need to get familiar with basic photography practices and photo editing apps.

Photography Best Practices

If your budget allows, investing in professional photography will elevate your profile. However, as a mobile app, people understand that much of your content may have been created on a mobile device.

In fact, lower production value can make your content look more human and relatable. That said, a smartphone will do, but follow these tips to give your photos a more finished look:

• Follow the rule of thirds.
• When all else fails, center your subject.
• Look for symmetry.
• Capture small details.
• Have light facing your subject.

Editing Photos Before You Post

Instagram has some basic editing capabilities, but oftentimes, they aren’t adequate at making visuals stand out. Most of your photos should go through at least one or two photo editing apps on your phone before you open them on Instagram. Some options include:

• Canva
• Photoshop Express
• VSCO Cam

 

9. Start a conversation with your captions and comments.

Captions are an essential part of your post. They give your content context, can humanize your brand, and offer additional value to your audience that makes them want to read, engage, and follow.

Using your captions to spark conversations can boost engagement, triggering the Instagram algorithm to show your content to more potential followers so give them the time and attention they deserve.

Here are a few things you might see in a winning Instagram caption:

• Personality
• Emojis
• Hashtags
• Questions

Personality

Many successful brands and influencers show personality or humor to connect with their audiences and attract followers.

Kelly Hendrickson, a Director of Social Media at G-P/Globalization Partners and HubSpot’s former Head of Brand Social, loves Netflix’s account for this.

“They have such a clear brand voice, and you laugh along with them. They’re in on the joke, just like one of your friends,” she says.

Netflix’s voice is casual, trendy, and humorous while still staying on brand. In the post above, the caption is just three words, but it makes you laugh and takes followers back to the Stranger Things scene shown in the post.

It’s a subtle, yet effective post, and it’s also a reminder of the entertainment value Netflix offers.

Emojis

An emoji is worth a thousand words.

Don’t believe me? Adobe’s 2022 Emoji Trend Report found that 50% of emoji users are more likely to respond to a message if it contains an emoji while 75% feel more connected to people who use emoji.

92% of U.S. emoji users also agree that emoji can communicate across language barriers.

So, if you’re still sleeping on using emojis in your content, it’s time to wake up.

Adding just a few relevant emojis can add even more personality to your posts and make your brand appear more relatable. Visually, they can also make your posts more noticeable on Instagram feeds and make your captions more digestible.

For example, my friends at Brown Girl Magazine often cleverly use emojis as bullet points to guide your eye and make their captions stand out.

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Get creative with it. Along with the items listed above, you’ll also want to include hashtags. (More on those shortly.)

Pro Tip: Ask for tags and shares.

Another way to trigger engagement from your followers is to add a playful call-to-action.

For example, you might write, “Double-tap if you find this funny,” or “Share your story in the comments.”

Writing something like “Tag a friend who does X” or “Share this with a friend who needs X,” helps your follower goal by getting your content in front of new people.

In the example below, we asked followers of the HubSpot Instagram account to drop a tip on measuring social media ROI in the comment section:

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Questions

The best way to get a response from people? Ask a question. Indo-Western fashion line HoliChic by Megha Rao used this strategy effectively when designing its new collection last year.

Need help writing your captions on Instagram? HubSpot’s Free AI Content Writer can help.

Pro tip: Comment and engage with others’ content.

Half the battle of gaining Instagram followers is getting seen. One way to increase visibility, even if your content isn’t hitting Explore pages or Suggested Posts, is to comment and engage on the posts of others.

Hit like. Share and tag other accounts in your Stories. Make comments on the posts of people you’d like to follow you (i.e., Influencers or potential customers) or content popular with those already following you.

Show your personality or start a conversation, and people will take notice (and be more likely to follow).

Engaging Instagram Followers

We’ve talked a lot about engagement, but let’s talk about how you can directly boost engagement.

10. Encourage and post user-generated content.

If I see a regular person talking about a product on Instagram, I’m more likely to believe them than if the brand account itself said the same thing. This is true for most consumers.

Posting user-generated content (UGC) is an effective way to use this in your marketing. UGC shows appreciation for existing customers and delivers social proof at the same time.

Photo editing app VSCO regularly shares content created by users on its Instagram profile.

This delights customers by giving them exposure on VSCO’s large platform and also highlights the value of the app in action.

11. Use Stories Stickers.

We already know Instagram Stories get eyes with their prime real estate at the top of the app’s home screen, but the benefits don’t stop there.

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With the ephemeral nature og Stories, brands get to share more casual, timely content that can show personality. And Instagram Stickers add a whole new dimension to engagement.

Use Instagram Story stickers to create more dynamic content and interact with your audience and potential followers in an entertaining way.

Instagram Stories Stickers currently include:

• Links: Use these to link to content outside of Instagram (i.e., Your website, an event page, or a product page)
• “Add Yours”: Use these to create a prompt viewers can use to build their own stories. As a bonus, these are often used long after your 24-hour story expires.
• Hashtags: Use these to draw more visual attention to your branded hashtag or another campaign you’re involved in.
• GIFs: Add visual fun to your Stories.
• Music: Add trending audio or popular music to your Stories.
• Emoji Polls: Use polls to gauge your audience’s opinion on something.
• Questions: Field questions from your audience or use them to gather short feedback/answers to your own.
• Quizzes: These are a fun way to test your audience’s knowledge or tease upcoming content.
• Countdowns: Use these to promote upcoming events or announcements. Audiences can click a button to be reminded.
• Donation Links: Request donations for your cause or one you care about.
• Shopping/Buy Now: Get sales!

Bonus: How Brands Can Use Instagram Stories

Still working on your Instagram Story strategy? Two things to keep in mind:

• Be authentic. Your grid is where content can be perfect and polished. Instagram Stories are for the raw, unscripted, and unretouched. Use them to share the other side of your brand that followers might not be able to see elsewhere.
• Go behind the scenes. These are by far our favorite types of content for ephemeral video sharing. Do you have a dog-friendly office? Is your team trying the latest challenge? Start filming to showcase the more human side of your brand.

  Show followers what goes into the planning of an event or the launch of a product, and make it fun. You can also use Stories to cultivate a brand loyalty program that only rewards people who check out your content.

Hartford Prints, an independent print shop from my home state of Connecticut does a wonderful job of both these points in its Stories. They regularly show behind-the-scenes and “day in the life” moments while incorporating elements like contests and stickers:

12. Go Live on Instagram Live

Instagram Live, allows you to film and broadcast real-time video on your Instagram profile from a mobile device.

It also lets viewers engage with you in real time by leaving emoji reactions, asking questions in the chat, or even requesting to join you directly.

This kind of one-on-one, candid interaction and engagement builds a personal relationship with your audience. It also gives you the chance to show people who you are and why they should follow you.

If your live content is good, people will also want to share it, giving your Instagram presence even greater reach.

What should you do on Instagram Live? You can host a virtual press conference, make announcements, and host a live Q&A session. Live allows you to have up to four accounts on one broadcast so you can host an interview.

 

13. Collaborate with influencers and creators

According to Matter Communication, 69% of consumers trust information from influencers, friends, and family, over brands. In other words, you need others to vouch for you.

Dive into which influencers, creators, or even other businesses your buyers follow. Are they relevant to your brand or offering?

If so, consider collaborating with them to get in front of new potential followers. This helps with discoverability, reach, and social proof.

Learn more about your options for influencer marketing.

Health and grooming brand Bevel does an admirable job with collaborations and UGC. Here, the brand posted a collaboration with entrepreneur Selvyster Brewster using and recommending their products to their 1.4M followers.

Collaborating with Brewster is a smart move.

Firstly, the product is designed with Black men in mind. Having Brewster, who is part of the brand’s target demographic and also a professional hairstylist, recommend the product serves as the social proof the brand wants.

Furthermore, part of Brewster’s audience will likely fall within Bevel’s target audience. It’s a perfect win-win.

14. Run a contest/giveaway

Another great way to expand your reach and gain followers is to run an Instagram contest or giveaway.

I mean, come on. Who doesn’t love winning free stuff?

Offering an entry to win a relevant prize in exchange for a follower and tagging a friend is common across Instagram these days. It’s also a highly effective way to get more followers.

The Freebie Guy uses this strategy regularly on his Instagram:

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Promotion Tips for Getting More Followers

15. Use relevant hashtags, geo-tags, etc.

Hashtags foster conversation. They unite posts on the same topics in one place so anyone from anywhere can find them and engage — even if they don’t know the creator.

Using relevant hashtags on Instagram is an easy but effective way to get in front of new followers.

Do some research to find the hashtags your audience is using. Start by navigating to the Explore tab and searching for a keyword related to your business or industry.

When you search for one hashtag, it shows you a list of related hashtags and the number of posts that already use them.

For example, when I search for #digitalmarketing on Instagram, relevant hashtags like #digitalmarketingagency, #digitalmarketingtips, and so on appear.

Once you build up a following, you can try creating your own hashtags — like your company name or a slogan that applies to your content. This is a great way to build up your brand on the platform and also foster user-generated content.

Similarly, tagging locations, brands, or personalities related to your content can grab their attention and get you in front of their audiences.

Pro Tip: Tag relevant users – but only if they already know you.

Another way to gain more followers on Instagram is to tag relevant users in your posts. Your posts will then show up in that person’s tagged posts, and they may even share the mention in their Stories.

This is also a great way to highlight creators or vendors your business collaborates with, like in the example from Therapy Stores below:

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Use this strategy sparingly. If the content you tag someone in is irrelevant or you’ve had no interaction with them previously, it can come off as spam.

16. Try Instagram promotions and ads.

So far, the methods we’ve mentioned are about growing organically — but organic growth takes time.

If you’re looking for rapid growth, Instagram promotions and ads may be the answer.

Instagram ads (using the comprehensive Facebook Ads network) let you get granular about the audience you want to reach and pay to get your content in front of them. You can use ads to generate leads or boost a high-performing post to earn more views.

Here are a few articles to get you started:

• The Ultimate Guide to Instagram Stories Ads
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Instagram
• The Guide to Instagram Ad Costs
• Instagram Ad Specs & Sizes: an Updated Guide

Pro Tip: If you run a contest, consider putting some ad dollars behind it to maximize the opportunity.

17. Share your profile link externally.

You’re doing the most to get noticed on Instagram, but don’t forget to promote your presence off the platform as well.

Have a website? Newsletter? YouTube channel? Make sure you include a link to your Instagram on your other platforms and properties. If your brand has brick-and-mortar locations, put your handle on signs or business cards with a QR code.

Embed posts in your blogs and mention it in your email newsletter.

In this example, wine company The McBride Sisters encouraged their email subscribers to follow them on Instagram with a simple CTA: “Join the community.”

Have a feed on your website, and link to your profile on your other social networks. If people are already following you on another platform, it’s much more likely they’ll be open to following you on Instagram as well.

The first place you’ll want to make sure to add an Instagram badge is to your website, specifically on your “about us” page or footer, like HubSpot does below.

Pro Tip: A link to your Instagram profile is built into HubSpot’s free Email Signature generator. Give it a try for your emails.

Using AI to Get More Followers on Instagram

I know what you’re thinking, “Can AI just do this for me? AI does everything.”

To that, I say:

1. Why would you want it to? So many of the spam accounts and fake followers we talked about earlier are bots. They don’t work long-term.
2. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but no, it can’t.

Just like a hammer can’t build a house for you, artificial intelligence (AI) cannot just get you more followers on Instagram — at least not the real, organic followers you want. AI is simply a tool.

What AI can do is help you execute some of the strategies I shared more efficiently and effectively. For instance:

• Adobe Firefly or other AI image generators can help you create visuals to post.
• HubSpot’s Free AI Content Writer can help you write captions.
• AI video generators can help you create Reels.

There are also a number of automation tools that can help expedite your engagement as well.

ManyChat, for one, can be used to set up an automatic response to comments on your Instagram posts or to send a personal message when people use a specific word or phrase.

But even with these aids, it’s important to remember that increasing your Instagram following, like any social media success, comes back to human connection.

People turn to social media to stay connected with the people and brands they care about. They follow what they’re interested in, get value from, and want to support.

Building a real, emotional connection is the most effective and lasting way to build a following and that is something AI cannot currently provide.

Concerns about plagiarism, bias, and inconsistent quality also make a solid argument for treading lightly with AI when it comes to your Instagram strategy.

How Not to Increase Instagram Followers

AI aside, you may be tempted to take other shortcuts to get more followers on Instagram.

Trust me, these tactics often do more harm than good (read: decreased engagement, penalizations, or even bans.)

Let’s unpack a few ways not to increase your follower count.

Don’t buy Instagram followers.

Eager for opportunities, some users resort to buying followers on Instagram.

At its core, buying followers is unethical and in violation of Instagram’s community guidelines. This can damage your brand’s reputation by eroding trust.

Then, there are the tactical impacts of this approach.

Fake followers can‘t engage. And these accounts won’t like, comment, share, or repost your content. This lack of engagement sends a signal to the platform that your content isn’t interesting or useful to your followers.

While inflating your follower count, fake followers will erode metrics like:

• Organic reach
• Likes
• Comments

An inflated follower count will also make it tougher for you to measure the actual effects of social campaigns and strategies. Instead, focus on growing organic followers who are excited about your brand and content.

Don’t overuse hashtags.

Using too many hashtags in your Instagram captions can have a negative impact on your follower count for a few reasons:

• It can dilute the message or storytelling behind your post by distracting viewers from the core content and making your captions appear less clear and cohesive.
• It can attract an audience that is not genuinely interested in your posts. This can lead to low engagement and a high bounce rate, because those followers are unlikely to interact with your content or become loyal followers.
• It can make your posts look spammy or desperate for engagement. This can deter users from viewing or following your account, as it appears less authentic or professional.

Instead of casting a wide net with numerous hashtags, focus on using relevant and targeted hashtags that align with the content of your post.

This way, you are more likely to attract users who are genuinely interested in your niche and increase the chances of engagement and follower growth.

Don’t post low-quality or unoriginal content.

Your account is unlikely to attract new followers if you consistently share low-quality content or content that can be found elsewhere.

Users’ feeds are oversaturated with content, and posting sub-par or generic content does nothing to add value to those feeds.

By producing visually appealing, unique content that offers something valuable to your audience, you can enhance engagement, foster a positive perception of your brand, and truly earn more followers.

Earning Your Instagram Followers

If you want a large, engaged, lucrative Instagram following, you need to earn it.

Ultimately, it’s important to focus less on the number of followers you have and more on the quality of content you create.

When you put effort and time into creating engaging, informative, or inspirational content without worrying about “quick fixes” for boosts in followers, your followers will come naturally and happily.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Have you ever been on a time crunch to create social media content? Most of us have, especially when trying to hop on a trend before it passes. It’s a stressful position — but a social media calendar template can help.

Creating content right before the deadline risks overlooking important goals and making mistakes. Your content may have typos or fall short of the audience’s needs. You may even miss key holidays or events.

Now, what if I said you could minimize the risk? In this article, I’ll share the best social media calendar template options for marketers and some tips for getting the most out of them.

Why do I need a social media calendar template?

Flori Needle, a HubSpot Blog writer, was a social media manager before joining HubSpot. She focused on Instagram and struggled to create a schedule.

She shared with me, “I found myself creating Instagram posts last minute because I didn’t know how to plan my strategy in advance.”

After some testing, she developed a strategy, but she said having a plan before posting would’ve lessened her time spent on trial and error.

That’s why a social media content calendar is so helpful. You can keep track of deadlines, better manage your individual duties or content creation team, and create transparency with stakeholders.

Creating a great content calendar is more than just adding a few Instagram or LinkedIn post ideas to your Google calendar. Let’s explore the benefits of having a social media calendar.

1. Better Organization

A content calendar keeps you and your team organized, which is essential when managing multiple social media channels.

Rather than coming up with content ideas on the fly, you can plan your content around your organization’s needs. It can also provide more time for creating content about trending topics and upcoming holidays and events.

For instance, if your company has a big event coming up (like HubSpot’s INBOUND), a content calendar will help you strategize how to promote it in advance.

A social media calendar keeps everyone on your team informed on when content will be published. When you’re transparent about what’s going live, it can help avoid miscommunications and confusion.

Pro tip: I know good content ideas can’t always come on command — even if you set time aside specifically for this task. But a topic generator might be just enough to kickstart your creative juices.

Even better, you can take it a step further and use these topics to generate blog posts, which can be repurposed into a series of social media posts.

2. More Mindful Scalability

Another benefit to having a social media calendar is that it can help you scale your content production without overwhelming your marketing team.

By planning content in advance, you can pace production around your team’s bandwidth and other duties your department is responsible for.

Pro tip: As you scale, I recommend tracking post analytics to see how your content performs. Keeping an eye on your metrics will help you and your teams determine what content engages your audience the most.

3. Higher Quality Content

Lastly, using a social media calendar ensures your team has plenty of time to do their best work. Planning your posts in advance allows you to check your work for typos or mistakes while ensuring everything is on-brand and optimized.

Perfecting your social media content calendar shouldn’t feel like a chore.

Below, I’ll walk you through the essential components of any social media content calendar that will give you the foundation to organize your social media strategy at a tactical level.

Key

A key or legend is a section of a graphic that gives meaning to its symbols or colors. An easy-to-read key helps your stakeholders understand the information in your social media calendar

As long as your key is clear, just about anyone in your organization can view your social media content calendar and understand what’s happening on all platforms.

URLs and UTM Parameters

URLs and UTM parameters are similar, but they’re not the same. URLs are the links you want to share from your website (or another website if you are curating content) on your social media platforms.

A UTM parameter is an extension of your URL that is needed for data purposes. It’s a string of tracking code appended to the end of a URL, and it helps social media marketers track how well their posts drive traffic to their websites.

By tracking and analyzing UTM parameters, you’ll see what content meets your conversion goals and what drives the most engagement on social media platforms. You can use a UTM generator to make this process easier.

Date and Time

Including dates and times in your social media calendar is helpful for planning and for stakeholders who rely on your social media content.

Your social team can easily see when they should schedule posts (and continue with their workflow) while those outside the team can know when ti expect them.

Message

Transparency and context are invaluable when it comes to social media content calendars.

Giving a brief synopsis of the message or even sharing the caption for a post can go a long way in helping others understand what the intent of the post will be.

Pro tip: If you‘re adding content to your social media content calendar that isn’t finished, consider adding a short Loom video to give an overview of what the design will look like.

Campaign

It’s too late to start tracking metrics once your campaign is over. Instead, start tracking your social media campaigns in your content calendar.

You can make this prescriptive by having a dropdown list of predetermined campaign names. Or if your campaigns are few and far between, simply copy and paste the names next to the corresponding content.

Pro tip: Align your campaign name with the campaign section of your UTM parameter for seamless tracking.

Your social media content calendar will become just another spreadsheet without some imagery. Since much of your social media content will probably be visual, add a thumbnail-sized version of the image you’ll include in the published post.

Coupled with the message, stakeholders who view the calendar images will have a pretty good idea of what will be shared and when.

To make editing your images for each platform easier, check out this cheat sheet for ideal image dimensions on each platform.

Regardless of which social media calendar template you go with, here are a few steps to follow when using one.

To expedite the process of creating a social media content calendar, download this free template that’s ready for you to fill out.

1. Complete a social media audit across all platforms.

Before creating a social media content calendar, I recommend a complete social media audit.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Which social media platforms are you on?
• Which platforms are you not on, but your competitors are?
• Which platforms get the most versus least engagement?
• Which content formats do you use most often and least often?
• Which types of posts get the most versus least engagement?

Auditing your social media presence will help you decide how to move forward as you create your social media content calendar.

For instance, you may be on TikTok, but maybe it’s also the platform where you get the least engagement and even fewer leads. That may mean it’s time to de-prioritize TikTok from your lineup and invest more time in a better-fitting platform.

Spend some time perusing your social media analytics to answer these questions. It’s essential to back your conclusions with data instead of a gut instinct.

Pro tip: Our social media report template is an excellent way to keep track of your findings. It contains a variety of charts that will make it easy to organize and, in turn, review and analyze the data.

Download Now

Recommended Reads:

• How to Conduct A Social Media Audit
• How to Conduct a Twitter Audit of Your Account
• The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics

2. Pick the top 3-5 social media platforms you’ll use.

Believe it or not, you don’t need to be on all the social media platforms to get a high social media ROI (return on investment).

Instead, you should focus on where your target audience is and the platforms with the highest ROI. This will save your team effort and time, resulting in a much more manageable social media content calendar.

I mean, imagine having to post on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr — that is… a lot.

Instead, choose the top three to five platforms that, based on your social media audit, yield the highest ROI for your business.

As you choose your platforms, you should also pay attention to trends and growing channels. Even if you’re a marketer at a small B2B business, it won’t hurt to test out a platform before all your competitors do.

If you’re a seasoned marketer or have a large team, you may find using all of the popular channels and even experimenting with a new one could benefit your goals.

However, if you‘re a team of one or your team is already stretched thin, it’s OK to start with a few social channels and work your way up to more.

Not sure where to start? Our Social Media Trends Report share insights and benchmarks you can start setting off.

Download Now

Recommended Reads:

• The 5 Types of Social Media and Pros & Cons of Each
• Which Social Media Channels See the Most ROI?
• Social Media Platforms Marketers Should Watch
• The Fastest Growing Social Media Platforms

Pro tip: Remember, every social channel is different. The content you post on each one should appeal to the platform’s layout and the users who use it. Cross-posting the same image and copy may be easy, but it’s not necessarily effective.

3. Choose your social media content formats and post types.

You’re now armed with your social media platforms to pursue, but what social media content types will you post?

Will you post mainly short-form videos, images, or text-based updates? Will you post informative, relatable, or funny content?

As always, we recommend using a mix of content types to maximize your ROI.

Plus, it will ensure that you’re serving content that serves different segments of your audience while increasing your reach.

For example, my mom is addicted to Instagram Reels.

I once took a peek at her screen time report and was astonished. But a majority of her generation spends the most time engaging with images, photos, and infographics.

Most businesses have outliers like my mom, so a diversified strategy helps you meet varied preferences.

Pro tip: Account for your team’s resources. If you have dedicated social media managers who can create content in-house, you have more leeway with your choices.

But if you only have a team of one, consider what is most realistic regarding content creation. Or try asking for a budget to hire a freelance content creator.

Recommended Reads:

• The Most Effective Types of Content on Social Media
• Social Media Content Ideas to Delight Customers

4. Create social media content templates, lazy hashtags, and lazy copy.

As you build out your content calendar (hopefully after downloading a free social media content calendar template!), remember that the purpose of your calendar is to make posting as easy and painless as possible.

In pursuit of that, take some time to create content templates, list the hashtags you’ll use most often, and even create “lazy” copy for you or your coworkers to use.

I find it helpful to store templates in an online bank, such as Google Drive or a tool like Canva, where I can quickly edit a template and adjust it to create a new post. Generally, you want to have various customizable image templates.

Featured Resource: 150+ Content Creation Templates

Download Now

Don’t forget to keep your most-used hashtags easily accessible for easy copying and pasting, along with lazy copy that only needs to be customized from post to post.

As you draft your templates, always keep your brand voice in mind. Whether you’re serious and corporate, or open and friendly, you want every post to embody your company’s branding.

Recommended Reads:

• 150+ Content Creation Templates
• Instagram Templates for Business
• YouTube Templates for Business
• Pinterest Templates for Business

Pro tip: Consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). Consumers care, more than ever, that brands support diversity and inclusion.

Ensure your content reflects and respects the values and experiences of your audience.

Moreover, the faces, voices, and stories you share on social networks should be representative of your audience and the larger community where your business operates.

This isn‘t something that can happen by accident, so you’ll want to plan for diversity and inclusion as you develop your content calendar.

If you’d like some guidance on creating diverse and inclusive content, check out our original research on the topic.

5. Fill in your social media holidays, events, and campaigns.

What is a social media content calendar that doesn’t show your forethought and planning?

Well, it’s still a content calendar — just not a very useful one. As you build out your social media content calendar, identify the holidays and events you’ll be participating in and note any future campaigns you may have planned.

If you’re attending an event or a conference, you should plan to broadcast that on your social media channels. If you’re doing a virtual event like a webinar, you should plan a series of posts around that, too.

Or if you’d like to create a holiday post or a paid social campaign — the possibilities are endless.

You should plan for each upcoming event with at least a month’s advance notice.

Pro tip: You don’t need to create a campaign for every single holiday. Most marketers in the U.S. plan for three main seasons: Winter/end-of-year holidays, Black Friday, and Halloween.

Recommended Reads:

• Social Media Holidays for Your Content Calendar
• Top Marketing Holidays of the Year, According to Marketer Data
• The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing Campaigns
• Social Media Campaign Ideas to Try

6. Determine a social media posting schedule.

It’s time to get into the most useful part of your content calendar: Determining your posting schedule. Your calendar should have a “Time” column that will allow you to proactively keep track of this information.

Different social media platforms require different posting times. You can easily fill in publish times by creating tabs for each platform or color-coding posts for different channels.

Consider also syncing publishing times to your calendar to get timely reminders.

We recently surveyed 1000+ social media marketers to get their take on the best times to post on social media.

Here’s a quick overview of the best times to post on each platform based on our findings:

• Instagram: 6 PM – 9 PM, 12 PM – 3 PM, and 3 PM – 6 PM
• Facebook: 6 PM – 9 PM and 12 PM – 3 PM
• X (formerly Twitter): 9 AM – 12 PM and 12 PM – 3 PM
• LinkedIn: 9 AM – 12 PM, 12 – 3 PM, or 3 – 6 PM
• YouTube: 6 PM – 9 PM
• TikTok: 6 PM – 9 PM, 3 PM – 6 PM, and 12 PM – 3 PM

But remember: there is no one-size-fits-all solution for posting times (sorry, wish I had better news).

For example, Sprout Social says the best time to post on Instagram is between 9 AM and 1 PM, and Hootsuite says 9 AM is the best time overall.

These differences don’t mean anyone is wrong; it just ties back to what I mentioned above about your audience: you should tailor the times you post content to your own business.

Pro tip: To determine your schedule, take a look at our research for each social media platform. This will give you a good sense of the best practices for posting. Then, compare that to the bandwidth on your team and the goals you want to achieve to come up with a schedule you can test.

The goal of a social media calendar is to create and publish a sustainable stream of content to your audience. It’s a marathon, not a race.

Recommended Reads:

• The Best Times to Post on Social Media
• How Often to Publish on Social Media for Business
• When Is the Best Time to Post on Instagram?
• Best Times to Post on YouTube
• Best Time to Post on LinkedIn
• When to Post on TikTok

7. Set up UTM tracking.

One of the most important parts of a social media calendar is actually the part you don’t see — tracking. And the easiest way to track how your social media content is performing is to use UTM parameters.

Yes, this is the second time I’ve mentioned UTM parameters, but for good reason. Can you imagine the nightmare of manually sorting through your campaign traffic to determine where each viewer came from or who engaged with your content?

$I don’t want to do that, and I’d imagine you don’t either.

UTM codes are simple to set up and use. Once you’ve implemented them for each link on your social media posts, you can review your social media content metrics.

Pro tip: Are you a professional or enterprise user of HubSpot Marketing Hub or Content Hub? Take advantage of the UTM builder natively available on the platform.

8. Schedule posts using a social media tool.

Publishing updates on multiple platforms, with different campaigns and holidays, at different times and days, can quickly get overwhelming.

I recommend integrating your social media calendar template with a social media management tool. (We’ll go through a few options shortly.)

This will help you schedule posts well before publication, limiting manual work.

Many tools allow you to cross-post across different social media channels. This can be useful, but, again, I recommend being cautious.

What might work on LinkedIn might not work on Facebook, and vice versa. Since each platform serves a specific audience segment, you want to ensure your posts are tailored to each one.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s social media management software allows you to schedule and publish posts to Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram and it’s free for everyone. Try it out!

Recommended Reads:

• Best Social Media Management Tools
• Top Social Media Tools

9. Monitor your social media posts’ success metrics.

Once your social media posting schedule has matured and you have a backlog of posts to analyze, it’s time to delve deeply into your social media metrics. Learn what worked, what didn’t work, and what you should change moving forward.

Hopping from platform to platform and looking at their individual analytics dashboards can be a good place to start.

But as you continue scaling your marketing efforts, you should consider investing in social media analytics software to compile all of your engagement data for you.

Try HubSpot’s social media analytics software for free.

As you analyze your success, link it to your company’s bottom line.

How many leads did you earn? How many of those leads turned into sales? How much money did you spend on paid social media versus how much revenue did you generate?

Here’s a guide on measuring social media marketing ROI to help you answer these questions.

The bottom line: Know and align on your goals.

The first step to building your social media content calendar is identifying your goals, which will determine how often you post, who will be involved in the content creation process, and which channels you’ll want to use. Align your team on them.

If you’re not sure where to start with setting up your social media goals, we cover that here.

Pro tip: Create an analysis tracker in your calendar for stakeholders who want to stay abreast of how well your social media content is performing.

Add a tab that shows clicks, views, engagements, and other metrics you plan to track to deem your content a success. Tracking analytics can be as simple or detailed as your team prefers.

For a full list of metrics to track and tools to do it, take a look at this year’s Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics.

Recommended Reads:

• The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics
• Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Marketers
• How to Create a Social Media Report

Now that you know how to use a social media calendar template, here are 10 of the best options for marketers.

Social Media Calendar Templates

1. HubSpot’s Free Social Media Content Calendar Template

If you don‘t have time to create your social media content calendar from scratch, start with HubSpot’s free social media content calendar template.

This calendar has everything you need to plan your social media content, coordinate campaigns, grow reach and engagement, scale posting schedule, and boost productivity.

Our template includes everything you need to scale your social media marketing efforts. You’ll gain access to:

• Social Media Content Schedule: See each of your individual posts and draft individual messages and images for each one.
• Monthly Planning Calendar: See your upcoming social posts for the month in a user-friendly, big-picture format.
• Content Repository: List out all of the content you’ll be sharing with your followers, from blog posts to offers to website pages.
• Platform-Specific Tabs: Plan out your updates for each specific platform, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

HubSpot Social Media Content Calendar Template Tutorial

In the following subsections, I’ll show you how to fill out each of the tabs in this template — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Step 1: Review the “Monthly Planning Calendar” tab.

The “Monthly Planning Calendar” tab is a snapshot of your monthly social media campaigns. It‘ll help you coordinate with other stakeholders and keep all the moving parts in order. Here’s what it looks like:

There are three sections to note when you edit this template.

First, the color-coding key. Each color represents a type of content or campaign you might coordinate, like ebooks, webinars, blog posts, or product launches.

Though only some of these might be relevant to you, they’re just the beginning of what you may want to include here — so be sure to add and remove categories that align with your own types of content.

The other two sections to edit are the “Month” and “Year” at the top of the calendar and the cells below each day of the week.

In those cells, you should enter the type of content you‘ll be promoting that day and color-code it to align with the campaign it’s supporting.

Instead of deleting all the content in this spreadsheet each month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times over to have a separate sheet for each month.

(If that gets too overwhelming, you can always save those tabs as a separate workbook.)

Step 2: Populate your first social channel in the calendar.

Now, let‘s get to the social media content part of the calendar.

For the sake of this blog post, we’ll use X as an example, but these steps will work for each social channel tab in the template.

Let‘s say you want to add some tweets to your scheduling template.

Scroll over to the Twitter (X) Updates tab in the content calendar spreadsheet, where you’ll see this:

Day, Date, & Time

The first three columns, Day, Date, and Time, are there for your convenience.

If you choose to use a third-party app for pre-scheduling your tweets (like HubSpot’s Social Media Management Software), then these columns will be useful.

Message

Now, let‘s move over to the “Message” column. Here, input the copy you’d like to appear in your tweet. Bear in mind you should cap it at 217 characters to allow enough room for a link. (Read this blog post for a full character count guide.)

This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the number of characters you’ve entered to keep you on point, turning yellow and eventually red as you approach 240 characters.

I find this to be one of the most useful parts of the template because it helps you make edits in real-time. Plus,this ensures you’re being as clear and concise as possible in your captions (to the benefit of your audience).

Link

After you‘ve composed your tweet, paste the URL you’d like to include in your tweet in the Link column. Be sure to include UTM parameters so you’ll know whether these tweets are driving traffic and leads.

This is an important step to remember if you’d like to demonstrate ROI from social media. You can also use the Campaign column to add an associated campaign which helps with more detailed tracking and reporting.

Image

Finally, in the Image column, attach the tweet’s image (if you have one). For Twitter, we recommend images that are 1200 x 670 pixels.

(Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.)

If you’re having trouble attaching your image to the spreadsheet, follow these steps:

Step 1: Click on the cell where you’d like to place your image.

Step 2: Click Insert in the top row, then click the Image button, and finally, click Image in cell to choose your image.

Step 3: In the Insert image window, choose the option your photo will come from. In this example, we uploaded an image from our computer.

Step 4: You’ll now see the image appear in the cell.

Pro tip: This process is just for organizational purposes. If you decide to upload the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software, it will not attach — you’ll have to do that manually.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can find details on how to bulk upload your Twitter content to the HubSpot Social Publishing Tool in the downloaded template.

2. HootSuite’s Social Media Posting Schedule Template

Another option is the social media posting schedule template from HootSuite.

This free template incorporates five popular platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• X (still referred to as Twitter in the document)
• LinkedIn
• TikTok

However, it can be easily edited to add or remove items as needed as a Google Doc.

What I like: Besides helping you plan your social media publishing, this template includes a helpful “strategy” tab. This makes your goals and content plan easy to refer to as you work through the rest of the document.

It also has a tab dedicated to “evergreen content,” where you can house timeless pieces you can plug into your calendar at any time.

3. Sprout Social’s Social Media Calendar Template

Sprout Social’s social media calendar template is broken down into four weekly tabs and designed to be used per month.

Each tab has columns for key information, including:

• Copy
• Media
• Publish Date
• Network (has a dropdown with Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, TikTik, YouTube, and Pinterest)
• KPIs

What I like: Sprout Social’s platform gets granular about details that others ignore, such as collaborators and KPIs. This goes the extra mile to ensure all social media content is well-planned and working toward a goal. As a Google Doc, the template is also fully customizable.

4. ClickUp’s Social Media Posts Template

If you use ClickUp for your project management, this template may be the one for you.

ClickUp’s social post template lets you plan and organize your content and track its status throughout the creation process.

It includes fields for the assignee, due date, channel, and URL and can be viewed as a list, board, calendar, doc, or “embed.”

Image Source

What I like: From idea to publishing, the “card” style of ClickUp makes it easy to host and see everything related to your social media posts.

You can make comments, attach files, and tag different users so each card serves as a single source of truth for any questions related to that post.

5. SocialBee’s Social Media Content Calendar

SocialBee’s Social Media Content Calendar is another fully editable Google Doc on our list, but one of few that covers a full year.

Image Source

The calendar has a tab for every month and includes dozens of fun and unique post ideas.

What I like: SocialBee really goes above and beyond with making its social media calendar value. In addition to the post ideas in the monthly tabs, it also has a number of extra tabs full of post examples to help get marketers’ creative juices flowing.

The bonus post example tabs include: fun, educational, inspirational, promotional, and interactive — just to name a view.

6. Iconosquare’s Social Media Content Calendar

Social media analytics tool, Iconosquare, has created a social media content that helps teams plan for an entire quarter.

Unlike the other simple spreadsheets on our list, Iconosquare’s social media content calendar template comes as an actual calendar view. While handy, it can only be used in Notion or Google Calendar, limiting its audience.

What I like: Iconosquare’s calendar has many global celebrations and “fun” holidays (i.e. World Chocolate Day) pre-populated. This is a unique and effective way to spark and inspire ideas in users as they are planning their content.

7. Semrush’s Social Media Calendar

Semrush’s social media calendar is another built as an easy-to-edit spreadsheet.

Image Source

It provides all the information needed to schedule or publish a post:

• Channel
• Day, Date, and Time
• Post Topic/Type
• Copy
• Visual Type
• Visuals
• Link to Assets
• Status

It also includes color-coding that allows users to get an idea of what content is coming up at a glance.

What I like: I love that this covers a full calendar year, allowing marketers to jot down ideas or important dates as they come up. And that the first tab shows an example of a great social media content calendar which gives newer marketers something to aim for.

8. Later Free Social Media Content Calendar Template

Later’s free social media content calendar template is an editable spreadsheet that can be used to plan for a week.

Image Source

It includes a tab with instructions and resources to teach new users how to use the template successfully and also shares an example of a well-planned day.

What I like: While every brand on our list has education on social media marketing available on its website, Later makes its users’ lives easy by linking to those someone would need right in its template.

This is a small but smart move that dramatically improves the user experience.

9. Monday Social Media Content Template

Is Monday your digital planning tool of choice? If so, they’ve got a social media calendar template to add to your workflow.

Image Source

This template is built specifically for use in the Monday software and houses essential information like post copy, date and time of publish, and visual assets.

It also uses color coding to differentiate content categories making it easier to see and audit your content mix.

What I like: I’m a big fan of any tool that lets you see all the conversation surrounding a project in one place. With comments, user tags, and file uploads, Monday makes that possible.

10. Canva Social Media Calendar Template

Last but not least, if you don’t like any of the templates we shared, Canva makes it free and easy to create your own.

How do you get started? Try these weekly or monthly templates created by the team at Buffer, or navigate to Canva’s Calendar templates gallery and play around with making your own.

What I like: Canva is a Godsend when it comes to design and data presentation. I like this option because you get to customize the information included in your social media calendar as you like and give the design a little extra flair.

Don’t forget to interact with your followers.

Whether you use this spreadsheet to plan your content or upload it to a third-party app, you’ll still need to supplement these updates with on-the-fly content.

Breaking news hits? Whip up a quick update to share it with your network. Did someone in your network tweet something interesting? Give it a retweet with some commentary.

Got a fascinating comment on one of your updates? Respond with a “thank you” for their interaction.

Coming up with and scheduling your social media content in advance is a huge time-saver. But it should go without saying that you still need to monitor and add to your social presence throughout the day.

I encourage you to experiment with your social media publishing. This template provides publishing dates and times for each social network, but perhaps you need more or less.

If this is the case, you should adjust your social media publishing frequency as needed.

Now that you’ve got the ins and outs of a social media content calendar, download the one below for free and start planning your content.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

Back in 2015, I worked for a medium-sized British software company. My job was to increase the number of leads we generated from our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.

To help, I was handed around £5,000 and asked to create a few click-worthy Facebook ads.

Feeling a little short on inspiration, I Googled “best ads of all time.”

Here’s what I saw.

The “Think small.” ad is considered the best ad of the 20th century (Ad Age). It’s tremendous. It broke the norms for newspaper advertising with an overwhelming amount of white space that caught attention and challenged the industry norms, showcasing the car’s unusually small design as a benefit, not a drawback.

But it didn’t help me come up with a lead magnet Facebook ad. My ideas were lousy.

Turns out, staring at great ads didn’t help me create great ads.

Instead, I should have learned the psychology behind great ads, which can provide simple tips anyone can use to make an ad more effective.

In the eight years since, I’ve interviewed dozens of ad experts on Nudge and now have three scientifically proven tactics I use whenever I’m creating an ad.

So, time to stop staring at the Volkswagen, and instead try following this simple advice.

Scientifically Proven Tactics for Creating an Ad (With Examples)

1. Create scarcity.

Back in 2019, KFC Australia ran a promotion. Chips for $1 across Australia.

To promote the offer, KFC devised a giant Facebook experiment. They created 90 different promotional messages, including creative copy like:

The Colonel has never been so generous, chips for a dollar.

Loved from Perth to Brisbane. They’re just $1.

Australia’s favorite chips for just $1.

All 90 different variations were published on Facebook ads in one mammoth experiment to see which was most effective.

Each of the ads was shown to thousands of Aussies, and the KFC team measured how many clicks each individual ad received.

The ad that won was deceivingly simple. It read:

“Chips for $1. Limited to four per customer.”

Out of all 90 variations, this got the most clicks and drove the most sales. But why? KFC was limiting the promotion. KFC restricted the amount customers could buy.

So, why did it drive sales?

It’s due to scarcity.

By limiting the amount available, KFC made the chips seem like a scarce resource. We’re wired to prefer scarce resources over abundant resources.

When we read that the chips are limited to four per customer, we quickly assume the deal must be good — why else would KFC limit it?

This experiment shows that scarcity will often beat the most creative ad slogans.

So, with the ad you’re creating, try to add a bit of scarcity. Perhaps limit the amount a customer can buy. Maybe you should display low stock levels or a limited-time offer.

Do it ethically and truthfully and you’ll probably create a better ad.

2. Leave a letter out.

In a 2020 study by Leo Burnett, Mike Treharne, and Richard Shotton (cited in Richard’s book), participants were shown ads with brand names containing missing letters, for example, “HS_C.”

It was obvious to readers that the bank was HSBC, but by removing one letter, the ad became more engaging. And thus more effective.

Shotton, Treharne, and Burnett found that brand names with missing letters were 14% more memorable.

This is due to the generation effect.

By removing one of the letters from the brand name, the viewer is forced to think to find the answer.

It’s not hard. Everyone in the study knew that the bank was HSBC, but that extra bit of engagement made the ad more effective.

The charity Cancer Research UK has applied this exact principle in some of their ads.

They ran this major billboard campaign.

It takes viewers just a second to discover the answer is OBESITY. But that extra bit of engagement made the ad more memorable.

The American Red Cross has found a smart way to apply this same bias.

They removed the letters A, B, and O from their ad to highlight the need for those blood types and create a memorable ad.

The jumbled slogan forces the viewer to pay attention and makes the ad more effective.

In the lab, it’s shown to boost memorability.

And I reckon, it’s worth testing out yourself in your ads.

Try using incomplete brand names in your marketing materials, introduce quizzes or puzzles in your ad design, or test an interactive ad format that requires some form of user input.

It’s proven to make your ad more memorable.

Read more:

• What Makes an Ad Memorable?

3. Ask a question.

Rohini Ahluwalia and Robert Burnkrant in their 2004 study showed several hundred participants dozens of different ads.

Ahluwalia and Burnkrant wanted to see if certain types of language made for more effective advertising copy.

They found that ads with questions in the copy were rated 14% more favorably than ads without a question.

Simply adding a question mark made the ad more engaging.

The two researchers hypothesized that audiences feel more connected to an ad when it poses a question.

The questions engage the audience, making the ad more effective.

A few years back I tested this exact Nudge ad.

I ran two Reddit ads.

The first ad (the control) had no question attached.

It said, “Ditch boring business podcasts. Try Nudge.” Next to that copy, I put a few of my 5-star reviews.

The second ad was identical to the first, except, I added a question.

“Bored of boring business podcasts? Try Nudge.”

I found that Ahluwalia and Burnkrant’s finding was real.

The ad with the question was 17% more effective than the control ad.

It drove far more people to my podcast and resulted in many more listeners.

A 17% improvement from changing just two words and adding a question mark is impressive. It shows that questions engage viewers — and they make an ad more effective.

These three tips won’t help you create an award-winning ad. They won’t spark the same creativity behind Volkswagen’s “Think small.” campaign.

But they will improve your ads. And, they’re simple, actionable steps you can use on any ad to nudge it that bit closer to perfection.

This blog is part of Phill Agnew’s Marketing Cheat Sheet series where he reveals scientifically proven tips to help you improve your marketing. To learn more, listen to his podcast Nudge, a proud member of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Graza. Fishwife. Brightland.

If you’ve never heard of them, just walk into a local specialty store — you’re guaranteed to spot some of these brands, with packaging so aesthetically pleasing they make you feel like walking inside an Instagram feed.

Gander helped build the Graza brand from scratch, an olive oil that comes in a squeeze bottle. Source: GoPuff

Marked by bright colors, bold fonts, and creative illustrations, this style of packaging is now moving beyond specialty stores and into big retail aisles.

“If you walk into almost every major retail chain grocery store in the US, there would be at least one product that we designed, if not two.”

That was Mike McVicar, co-founder of Gander, a Brooklyn-based design studio behind Graza, Magic Spoon, and a dozen of other “viral” brands.

I tracked him down after obsessing over Gander’s visual style, and asked him about the latest trends in packaging design.

Except he’s not a fan of following trends or virality — not surprising for a die-hard creative.

“We get all the time that our work is trendy and that we’ve set a certain visual tone with our work, but we don’t intentionally do that,” Mike confessed. “It can feel limiting and annoying sometimes.”

But he still shared his take on why we’re seeing this phenomenon.

The Design Pendulum

Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, good design wasn’t a priority for consumer packaged goods (CPG).

Packages with call-outs and stickers that scream “33% less fat” were the mainstream, a style that Mike endearingly described as “over the top, ugly, and kind of extra.”

When the 2010s rolled around, branding design went to the other extreme — the blanding trend.

Packages became minimalistic and generic, often featuring sans serif fonts and pastel colors.

And now with the rise of social shopping, many brands are catering to the dopamine-charged, color-forward Instagram aesthetic.

It’s also a renaissance of the Y2K style, with bold colors and playful textures.

“The pendulum has swung toward ‘it can be fun again!’” Mike said.

Big brands love this trend, too.

From Jell-O to 7UP, they’re redesigning to dial up the dopamine, and creating a visual identity that spreads fun and joy.

The Downside to A Trending Style

The problem with this trend? 

It has led some companies to prioritize “doing it for the ‘gram” when they come to Gander. 

“You find brands that just have very decorative design, or only feel interesting aesthetically. It won’t pay off for them in the long run, or even in the short run,” Mike said.

It’s problematic for brands to emulate what everyone else is doing, or recreating a trend, because:

• You’re assuming that someone else’s solution is your solution
• You’ll be easily replaceable
• You’re not focusing on communicating your own brand values and differentiation to customers

He also doesn’t believe the current dopamine packaging trend will stay for that much longer.

It’s a pendulum, after all. 

Differentiate Brands Through Design

Back in 2015, Gander worked on the rebranding for Banza, a pasta made from chickpeas.

Contrary to the popular style on the pasta aisle back then (think Barilla’s simplistic blue packaging), Gander went for a bright and expressive style. 

Source: Gander

Banza was one of the early brands to make a bold statement with packaging, which impacted the food industry as a whole. 

“Our ethos was to take an alternative food, and turn it into a brand that has subverted what was expected for gluten-free pasta,” Mike said.

And it worked.

Banza went from anonymity to one of the top pasta brands in the US. It’s now in 25k retail locations nationally, including Target, Walmart and Costco.

Since then, Gander’s helped many other CPG brands get on big retail shelves. Graza, whose design they helped build from scratch, hit $48m+ in revenue and can be found in 13k+ locations.

Looking back at their big wins, Mike gave three simple tips for any brand who want to stand out through design:

• Start with your story and history as a brand, instead of following trends blindly;
• Understand who your customer is, what kind of world they live in aesthetically, and what’s pleasing to them;
• Look at your competition, and see what opportunities align with your product and company that others aren’t doing yet.

What Else Is Trending in CPG Design?

As anti-trend as he is, Mike did get excited about one particular trend — the inclusion of “next-level delicious food photography” on packages.

The “bleh” to “yum” transformation. Source: AdWeek

You’d think it’s a no-brainer, but a decade ago, it wasn’t mainstream to put high-quality food photography on the packages.

“It never prints right, it doesn’t look that great, and the investment of creating something really good can be difficult for small brands,” Mike said.

But the tide has shifted.

Influenced by social media, younger consumers prefer packaging that actually stir up their appetite, and major food brands are trying to make their products look extra tasty.

Now that’s a trend we can all get behind. 

When considering who to learn from in the marketing space, one brand stands out: Liquid Death.

They’ve mastered the art of turning healthy beverages into a sought-after brand, making them ideal marketing mentors.

But they’ve done more than reinvent water — in many ways, they’ve reinvented marketing, as well.

I spoke with Greg Fass, Liquid Death’s VP of Marketing, to learn how he’s cultivated an anti-marketing approach, why some of his favorite campaigns involve Tony Hawk and Martha Stewart, and his belief that Liquid Death’s success comes down to understanding people aren’t “brainless consumers of products”.

How Liquid Death Wins at Anti-Marketing — And What You Can Learn from Them

1. Don’t overcomplicate your target audience.

Most target personas are awfully specific: “Marketing Melvin likes long walks on the beach, reading true-crime thrillers, watching videos on TikTok, and is interested in budget-friendly ways to grow his e-commerce startup.”

And there’s power in identifying a few key characteristics of your buyer – but it’s also inherently limiting.

Fass believes there are plenty of reasons why someone might connect with your brand.

For instance, Fass believes his target audience could be any of the following:

• Someone who likes entertainment and humor
• Someone who appreciates the sustainability angle (i.e. “bringing death to plastic”)
• Someone who acknowledges that Liquid Death is the reason their child is finally excited to drink water
• A sober-curious individual who wants to have a fun-looking drink while at a party
• People who like skulls

I’ll add one just for fun: Thirsty people.

Granted, water arguably has the biggest demographic of any product out there. But his point still holds true: Get too hyper-focused on building up your ‘target persona’ and you could be missing out on all the different reasons someone might connect with your brand first – and your product second.

2. People aren’t brainless consumers.

Here’s a fun fact: At Liquid Death, they don’t use the word consumer. Ever.

Instead, they have a team called “human insights”.

Fass is proud to work against the mindset that people are just “brainless consumers” whose sole purpose on Earth is to consume products. (Yep – that’s a direct quote.)

Instead, he says, “At Liquid Death, I’m proud that we think of our audiences as people. And when you think of them as humans, you understand they’ll get a piece of copy that isn’t straightforward, or jokes other brands are afraid to make. They’re intelligent, and have a sense of humor.”

It’s a philosophy that has served them well. Just consider the commercial where Martha Stewart is a serial killer chopping off hands to make candles — not exactly something that would go over well in a standard marketing pitch.

Liquid Death has done more than reinvent the better-for-you beverage category — they’ve reinvented marketing, as well.

Embracing their anti-marketing approach can help you discover fresh and novel ways of connecting better with, well, other humans.

3. People will buy your product if you can make them laugh.

A Liquid Death marketing meeting sounds like the beginning of a very odd joke: The lead singer of a punk band, an ex-Onion writer, a co-creator of adult cartoon Mr. Pickles, and a former competitive snowboarder all walk into a conference room. 

Fass says it resembles an SNL writers room more than a marketing department.

“We’re not just a brand that’s a funny brand,” Fass tells me. “We put out true comedy. That’s the bar for us. I’m proud to work on projects that compete with real entertainment that exists on the internet, because that’s why most people are on the internet in the first place. Not to buy a product.”

You’ve got to hand it to them: It’s not easy to create a hilarious ad for water or iced tea. But it works because Liquid Death’s content isn’t really about the product. The product is an aside to grandiosity and playfulness. That’s what they’re selling.

Like their recent campaign where a fan could win a $400K fighter jet along with six months of free hangar space (pilot not included); or Ozzy Ozbourne reminding youths not to snort Liquid Death’s new hydration powder.

For Fass, it’s simple: “When you can make someone laugh, they’re more likely to give your product a try.”

4. Don’t post if you don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

Fass hates the conventional wisdom that you should “always be posting.” For Fass, an obsession with quantity can very quickly diminish good content. 

At Liquid Death, they won’t post for two weeks if they don’t feel they have anything worthwhile to say.

“There’s celebrities and hilarious meme accounts on social media — that’s why people are on there,” he says, “The bar on social is very high. So you need to be competing at that highest level with everything you do.”

He also tells me he can’t believe when big brands push aside social as a “nice-to-have” or something for the interns to lead. 

“You should be putting your top brains in creative on social,” he fervently believes. “There’s a feeling like, ‘Well, it’s just social.’ At Liquid Death, social is a major priority for our entire brand and creative team.”

5. Humor comes down to tension.

Fass believes there’s a certain comedic science behind Liquid Death’s success, and it’s relatively simple: Tension.

In other words — two things that shouldn’t go together, but do.

Case-in-point: A healthy beverage with a skull on it; e.l.f. Cosmetics and black metal corpse paint; plush sea creature stuffed animals that have been heavily mutilated by single-use plastic.

You get my drift.

“What it comes down to is we have these ideas that other people would never try,” Fass says. “They’d think, ‘no way a client would ever approve of this’, or ‘our CEO will shut it down’. Those ideas never get to see the light of day — but at Liquid Death, we’ve created a culture where we celebrate those ideas and go forward with them.”

And you know,“ he adds with a grin, ”Sometimes we end up winning the internet that day.”