Are you wondering how to schedule social media posts? Or having issues with social media content you’re going to put out in advance?
Wouldn’t it be great to pop onto social media for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon to engage with your audience? When you post at the right time, you’ll increase traffic to your website, engagement, and social shares.
Posting content regularly on social media is critical, yet many businesses find it hard to do daily social media posts. The best solution to this challenge is through social media scheduling. It reduces last-minute posting and enables you to focus on other areas of your business. The idea is that you are able to make the most of your time on social media, especially for small businesses.
What is a Social Media Posting Schedule?
The social media posting schedule tells you everything you need to know about the content you plan to post. Creating a social media-posting schedule helps you automate links to your posts to go out at certain specific times of the day. This, in turn, will increase the quality of your content and boost follower engagement.
Various social media scheduling tools allow you to schedule social media posts ahead of time and manage audience engagement.
You can get more traffic from every social network following this process;
- Set your Objectives & Goals for your Schedule
You need to specify your goals and objectives. There are different strategies for different goals. It’s important you keep your goals clear in your mind before planning your strategy. Do you aim for brand awareness, customer engagement, or driving more traffic to your business? This will help you track progress and measure success. For example, if it’s customer engagement you are focusing on, then your attention should be on how you can get more comments and likes on your social media posts, or if your goal involves increasing Twitter likes, then aim for two-four tweets a day including retweets of other accounts. Don’t forget to set time frames to check in on your success.
- Audit your Social Media
Social media audit reviews your business’ metrics to assess growth and performance. When you perform a social media audit, you will be able to uncover your business strengths and weaknesses to develop a sound strategy based on data. It will allow you to see social media channels that bring in the most results and how your social media efforts are affecting your web results.
In conducting a social media audit, consider the following
- Track down all your social media accounts by creating an excel spreadsheet and listing all your social accounts, Its also best to set up a social media monitoring program to avoid impostor accounts later in the future.
- The number of followers for each account
- Demographic information: You could use a tool like Facebook Audience Insights or Hootsuite Insights to understand audience demographics across all channels. It provides you a breakdown of your audience by gender and age. For small businesses, start by focusing on one or two social networks. Facebook is a good starting place for small businesses; there are also lots of great networks to choose from, such as Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram
Research has shown that Facebook is the Largest sharing site for social media users and small businesses. Videos get more shares than all other posts. Twitter has 317 million unique monthly users, and 6000 tweets are posted every second. Linkedin is majorly on business and industry expertise and has 106million active users; 80% of B2B marketing leads sourced through social media come from LinkedIn while Instagram posts with hashtags get 13% engagement.
- Engaging Content: Track which posts are resonating with your audience. This will give you insight into what topics your audience is interested in and which content they prefer. You also need to learn the type of content that works well on each social media platform.
The information gotten from the audit is to improve your social media strategy continuously. Once you have all of the data from the audit, you should begin to make areas of improvement.
- Choose the Type of content to Post and When to Post
There are different types of content that you can share, such as Blog Posts, Videos, Images, Infographics, Company News, News, and eBooks. There are various social media scheduling tools that help you schedule your social content, such as SocialPilot, Hootsuite, Buffer, Sendible, Agorapulse, SproutSocial, CoSchedule e.t.c
Post attractive and engaging content to drive the audience’s attention. If your post on your social media is not engaging, you may not drive enough attention and end up losing your current followers. Also, concerning when to post, you may decide to post often but be sure to post on a consistent schedule. Know when people are most active on the media platform. For example, Facebook shows the most consistent engagement during the period of Tuesday through Thursday, 8 a.m.–3 p.m.
- Recycle Your Content
When you recycle old content, you’ll boost rankings, whether they’re already performing well or not. It’s a simple way to double your traffic. When Google crawls your website, it will recognize your content as fresh ones, which will cause a boost in search engine traffic for that page. It’s best to keep your promotional posts to a minimum of 20%. By doing this, your audience will see you want to provide value and not just sell your products.
5. Track your results
You need to track your results by identifying key engagement metrics such as comments, likes, and shares. When you know posts with the highest engagement metrics and those that are not, you would be able to make necessary adjustments.
Conclusion
Do not jump straight into content creation, and miss out on the engagement, get yourself organized by using a social media posting schedule. Choose one of the free social media scheduling tools and avoid the rush of finding the next piece of content to post. That feeling of rushing to find the next piece of content to post will melt away.
