So many business owners claim they don’t have the time to devote to social media, so they’re simply not using social media. I encourage every business to use some type of social media for marketing purposes. However, some social media platforms aren’t for every business. If your business isn’t on social media and you aren’t sure where to start take a look at my previous blog “Which Social is Your Social”.
Social media is so important because it allows you to interact with your audience and become a part of the conversation that’s already happening around your brand. The problem is where do you begin. You finally come to terms with the fact that social media marketing is important but you don’t have enough time to manage it yourself, or you don’t have a large enough marketing budget to hire a marketing firm to manage it for you. What you don’t realize though is that you do have the time. If you could set aside a few hours a week you could schedule it and get it done.
How to schedule posts
There are so many different ways to schedule posts for social media. Facebook has a scheduling feature built right in. Twitter doesn’t have a scheduling tool build in but here are free third party services that allow you to do so. Unfortunately, there is no way to schedule posts for Instagram, but there is a great little free app called TakeOff that will remind you to post. Within the app you can choose your image, create your caption and choose your hashtags and the app will remind you when it’s best to post.
Before you schedule
Before you set time aside to schedule posts for your social media first study your analytics. Determine what is the best thing to post and when is the best time to post it. Within Facebook you can look at the Insights tab and determine what type of posts work best and when is the best times to post. For Twitter you can go to analytics.twitter.com and get some basic analytics as to what works and when you get the most engagement. Here you can take a look at the best days, times, and content to post on Instagram.
Why scheduling is important
Scheduling is important for so many different reasons. It allows you to reach your target audience at the times they’re online, even if that time is inconvenient for you. If you get sick, or are unable to post at a specific time each day scheduling allows you to have an active social media account. This is important because if people go to your account and see that it is inactive that reflects badly on your business. Many people will look at that and assume you don’t care enough about your audience to keep them updated on new products, or other important information.
Being a part of the conversation around your brand is so important and scheduling social media posts helps you do that. Don’t forget to share other business’ content and reply to private messages, reviews, and comments. Scheduling is just one piece to a bigger puzzle but if you schedule posts that puzzle becomes a bit easier to put together.