As a leading Social Media agency you’ll often hear or read from us useful information in order to help you with your social media strategy, today is no different as focus on scheduling content.
We bang the drum repeatedly about why you should be consistent with your social media content, it helps to grow your brand, increase your exposure and generate leads along with helping you be one step ahead of your competitors.
When it comes to creating content there are many different types you can utilise in order to stand out and to drive your message to your potential customers, but how do you ensure you are being consistent with what you post. Well the answer is simple, scheduling.
Scheduling means that you “schedule” your content in advance in order to have your posts go out across all your platforms (whether that is just one or several) at specific times that you choose for them to.
There are many key benefits to scheduling content such as ;
- Saves Time – Planning a block of content for one/two weeks or even a month helps you know what direction you are going in and frees up your time to focus on other areas of the business.
- Allows for changes – With your content scheduled in advance should there be any issues on a particular day then these can easily be edited without having to think of a pot from scratch.
- Post whilst MIA – If you go away on holiday and have no one to manage your socials in the meantime you already have a bank of content being published meaning you can continue to enjoy those drinks by the pool.
- Multichannel posting – Rather than having to type out content over and over again you can schedule it across all your channels, tweaking it where necessary in order to reflect the platform you are using.
But how do you begin to schedule content?
We recommend picking a particular day of the week where you can sit down and focus on your social media content.
Drown out all the noise, tell your team not to disturb and make sure the coffee is hot before starting to look at a selected period of time that you want your content to cover.
Let’s look at how this would work, you’ve set yourself time on say a Wednesday afternoon, middle of the week and just getting over the hump into the home straight.
You have for example three social media channels, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for your brand, and want to post three times a week. That’s nine posts across your platforms along with any photos, graphics, memes etc that you want to add to it.
We suggest that you focus on the theme of each day that you are posting, is it educational, informative, recognition or a sales post? Remember, not every post has to be a sales post.
Start by writing the content for the first day on a word or google document for facebook, then when happy with it, rewrite to reflect the tone of voice for Instagram and Linkedin including the hashtags.
Then do the same for the rest of the week. Only when you’re happy with your content would you then start to actually schedule it.
How do I schedule?
In order to schedule content to your social media platforms there are many ways to do this, should you be using the three platforms set out in the example above we’d suggest that you use the following FREE platforms.
Business Suite (Linked to your Facebook business page) which allows you to post to both Facebook and Instragram. You can manage a lot of your business socials through this platform including comments, messages, insights making it easier.
TweetDeck – A platform dedicated to scheduling on Twitter, it can show you dedicated newsfeeds of particular accounts you wish to follow along with your inbox and notifications.
These platforms give you the opportunity to schedule your content in advance as well as allowing to tag other businesses that you may collaborate with should they be on social media (if they aren’t then send them our way),
If you’ve got more than these three channels or want everything all in one place rather than switching between different platforms then there are a number of paid scheduling softwares out there that can be used, we’ve used most of the big names in order to see how they work such as Hootsuite, Loomly, Buffer and ZohoSocial, but for a small business the cost can be quite high.
Now that you know how to schedule content and why it is important then pick a day and time for you to start planning what you will post for the next seven days, you’ll find it so much easier when it comes to content creation and getting the creative juices flowing.
Don’t worry though you can still post ad hoc content too should there be something you need to shout about for your brand.
Struggling with any of this or feel like your social media isn’t where you would like it to be? Phenomenal Group helps businesses of all sizes with their social media strategy including content creation and scheduling like we’ve spoken about today.
Let’s talk about socials and how we can help overcome the problems you’re facing.
📞 0161 464 3336