Nowadays, It is absolutely necessary to put some type of social media schedule in place as a part of your company’s social media process. As busy business owners and marketers, you will go crazy without scheduling your posts in advance (trust me on this one). You may think it takes too much time to schedule posts in advance, but it’s worth every second. Just think of all the time you can save each day by NOT scrambling to compose a compelling post on your company’s account. Scheduling doesn’t have to be time consuming, but it needs to be done. If you still aren’t convinced, here are a few reasons why you should start.
1. Saves Time
Time management is the #1 reason why every business owner and marketer should take advantage of scheduling. Things come up out of nowhere, so it’s important to be prepared when life throws you a curveball. When you schedule your content in advance, you have more time to worry about other responsibilities and less on logging into social media to upload a post. You also have more free time to work on existing campaigns, engage with customers, and focus on business needs.
2. Reach Audience at Peak Times – Even When You Aren’t Around
Scheduling gives you the freedom to post at “peak” engagement days & times, even if you’re unavailable at those specific times. If you’re unable to post when your social media audience is most active and likely to engage with your content, you can rest easy knowing that material will still be distributed to your audience with or without you.
3. Brand Consistency
In order to grow your social media audience, consistency is KEY. Giving your followers a reason to come back to your page every day or week is extremely important when trying to attract & retain followers. For example, if you are a restaurant and have daily lunch specials, you might want to consider scheduling your menu to go out at the same time every day. This will give your customers a reason to check back to your page and interact with your posts. If you’re successful in doing this, your customers’ algorithms could pick up on your activity and show them more of your content.
How to get started with Scheduling Your Social Media Content
To create your schedule, think of a few relevant content categories your audience will react positively to. For example: if your company is a woman’s clothing store, it might be helpful for one category to include a gif or meme about shopping. Another category could be “new products” where you post your store’s latest arrivals. Once you decide on your content categories, think about when your audience is most active. Are they scrolling through social media in the morning or at night? Are they more active during the week or on the weekends? Maybe your audience is global and you have to post a few different times around the clock. You can experiment with different days and times to find the best fit. Once you find your “peak” posting times, schedule all of your posts in advance.
A free and easy tool you can use to create a social media posting schedule is Google Docs. Here at Bad Rhino, we personally like to label and color code each column and row to help us organize different sections. Some sections we typically use to keep track of our content include: content category, post copy, post date, and post time. It’s a really great tool to help you keep track of all of your content. Also, if you’re working on a team, you can “share” the document with other members so that everyone can collaborate on the same calendar and include their own input.
Social Media Scheduling Tools
Manually scheduling all of your Facebook posts, Instagram photos and Tweets is EXHAUSTING! That’s why the social media Gods created scheduling tools. There are a ton of tools out there for you to choose from to schedule your content. We have tried and tested a bunch ourselves, but have found that Hootsuite, SproutSocial, ContentCal, and OnlyPult are our favorites and the most user-friendly. However, if your company doesn’t have the budget for these tools, scheduling content right from the platform isn’t the worst thing in the world… All that matters is that you’re scheduling!
Scheduling is an awesome way to clear up free time and ensure that your content is being seen at peak times. You have to make sure that you’re being flexible with your schedule just in case something comes up like an event, breaking news, ect. Being able to change your schedule on a whim is just as important as scheduling your content in general. Are you having a hard time creating a schedule for your business? Send a message our way and we’ll see how we can help!
