How To Schedule a Whole Month of Social Media— In One Day!
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Businesses simply have to be active on social media these days in order to connect and engage with their customers, grow relationships, answer questions and concerns, and boost their branding.
But there’s a problem with social media: finding the time to post every day is a hassle. If you log in once a week and post 10 times in the space of half an hour, you run the risk of annoying your followers. And they will forget about you for the rest of the week when you’re silent.
The answer is to schedule your posts. So how do you go about scheduling an entire month’s social media posts in a single day?
Carry Out an Audit
First of all, you’ll want to carry out a social media audit. So what does this involve?
Essentially, it means taking a look at what you are currently doing and establishing what is working well, and what isn’t. This will help you to streamline your social media strategy.
Which social platforms do you use? Where and when do you get the most engagement? How often do you post? Are there any platforms that do not work for you?
This does not have to take long, and it can be as detailed or as basic as you like. It may be revealing and help to direct your future social activity.
Collect Your Items to Share
Next up, you’re going to need to gather together all the content that you want to share on social media over the next month. This is the most time-consuming part of the process, and unfortunately there’s not getting around it.
What type of content do you want to share?
There are lots of great options for things to share, including articles, videos, and tips. Use what you have learned in your audit to come up with a better idea of what to post.
If certain types of posts get more shares and likes, focus on them, but try to include a good mix of different content types.
One thing you will want to do is share a mix of your own content and curated content. Don’t just talk about your brand and don’t just sell your products. People will get bored of that pretty quickly. You can browse online businesses for sale and check out what other businesses in your niche are doing with their social content and how this links to their products and website. Sneaky tip: Facebook will show you a store’s current ‘info and ads’ if you click on its profile and select this option.
Curate content from your industry. Find useful videos, articles, and other content that will provide value to your audience. Gather user-generated content as well, including product reviews.
Find out what your competitors are sharing. Which of their posts get the most traction?
If you want to schedule a month’s worth of posts, you will need at least 30 items to share so you can schedule in one a day. But on some platforms you might want to publish more than once a day. You could either gather more content to share or repost your content multiple times, which is often recommended.
Create a spreadsheet containing all the resources you want to schedule and the links to the content you want to share as well as the comments you will make when you share them.
This also takes a bit of time, but once you have done this, the hard work is done.
Choose Your Posting Times
You should already have a good idea about the social platforms you want to use. Now decide whether you want to share everything on every platform. You might have some content that you only want to share on Facebook, for example. Write down next to each link which platforms you want to post it to.
Next, you will want to decide when to post each piece. When is the best time to post? You should have an idea about the best time to post from your social media audit. Do early morning posts get more engagement? Or is it posts in the late afternoon?
Write the times down next to each piece of content. You may want to repost the same content multiple times at different times of the day.
Use A Social Media Scheduling Tool
Once you’ve got everything written down and you know where and when you want to share each piece of content, you are ready to schedule it all in. This is the easy bit. Simply choose your tool of choice and plug in the links.
Buffer is one of the best tools for this. While the basic version is free, you will need a paid account to post a month’s worth of posts. There are plenty of others out there such as Hootsuite or Loomley, so find one that suits you best.
It shouldn’t take too long, considering that you’ve already done all the hard work. Then you can sit back, relax, and watch as your social links are automatically posted for you.
Don’t forget to use additional tools like Tinycc when you’re posting to shorten your links, analyze clicks and stay on brand.
Get in the Habit of Collecting Links
The process above covers everything you need to do in order to schedule a month of social media in one go. But there are a few ways you can speed up the process.
One is to collect links throughout the month as you go about your daily tasks. When you see something interesting, add it to Pocket or copy the link to a spreadsheet. When something makes you laugh and you think it will make your followers laugh too, collect it.
Get into the habit of doing this. When the time comes to plan another month’s worth of social posts, you will already have everything ready and waiting, considerably shortening the process.
Plan Ahead for Seasonal Holidays and Important Events
If you know an important event is coming up, plan around this and create content you know will do well at this time of year. Create a calendar of the year ahead and mark off the important dates and seasonal holidays.
This will not only help you to prepare the type of content you want to share, but it will also direct your content creation process. You can plan to post a blog on the topic of the event at the right time and then add this to your social calendar.
Track Your Results
Finally, make sure you track your results so you can find out what is working, including the topics, days, and times that get the most engagement.
This is easy to do when you use a social scheduling tool. Find out how many retweets, likes, and shares your content gets, then adapt your plan going forward.
By doing this, you can grow your number of social followers by providing them with more of the content they love.
As you can see, scheduling your social media posts doesn’t have to be time-consuming or dragged-out. If you plan it well and use the right tools, you can easily schedule a whole month of social media into one day, and save your valuable time for something else.
Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on ecommerce and how writers can hone their craft. She is passionate about using her experience to help other businesses grow their brands online through great content, both on social media and beyond.