When it comes to social media scheduling, the key is to first understand the best places for your business to be. Here’s a hint: It’s not everywhere. Once you’ve identified if it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and/or Pinterest, begin to curate and create content that you can share. Here’s a quick guide based on our experience and conversations with our network of digital marketing referral partners:
- Facebook for business to consumer (B2C) businesses.
- LinkedIn for business to business (B2B).
- Twitter for high content producers like bloggers, media, and digital marketers.
- Instagram and Pinterest for visual businesses like crafters, artists, and real estate agents.
If you’re thinking it’s going to be easy to post every day, think again. It’s time to think about social media scheduling.
You probably want to take a day off or go on vacation which you won’t be able to do while maintaining an online presence unless you can schedule ahead of time.
Not only that but you have to run your business and take care of clients so what will you do if you’re too busy to post? Your community wants to hear from you; it’s better to be consistent than just post here and there.
You’re building a brand not a hobby so let’s talk about how to get social media done without taking focus away from your business.
Facebook can be scheduled right from your page.
In our experience, this is the best way to get the best results on Facebook. Keep in mind that photos, Facebook Live, and uploading video directly also help your page get seen by the most people. Facebook is always changing its algorithm making it important to take time to study trends or simply hire a social media management firm.
For all of the other social media platforms, use a social media scheduling tool like these.
Hootsuite recently announced that users can schedule Instagram posts. Previously, Instagrammers had to manually post making it a bit of a nightmare to post consistently. You can also use this scheduler for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn so all of your posts can be scheduled in one place.
Buffer is an affordable scheduler that’s user friendly and offers the option for re-buffering (re-posting) past content so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
Meet Edgar offers a cadillac of options (that you pay for starting at $49 per month) including putting content into topic buckets and/or setting certain days to post particular topics. For example, publish your own blog posts on Monday and Wednesday, news on Tuesday, etc. If you don’t have anything scheduled, Meet Edgar reposts past content which is great for the busy business but you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a lot of content loaded or your timeline is a bunch of re-runs.
Most of these social media scheduling tools have free or nearly free options available so you can find the one you like best.
Once you’ve found and created content and set your social media scheduler, which can take some dedicated hours, you will spend 1-2 hours a week scheduling content for the next 2-4 weeks. If you’re focused, social media scheduling becomes part of your weekly tasks and you can easily manage your own online presence.
