If you do any sort of content marketing or social media marketing, scheduling posts is a must. I do both of these things, but primarily the content marketing. Scheduling posts ahead of time allows me to work in batches. I don’t have to switch gears. Nor do I have to be at my computer blogging every Monday! Additionally, I get a sense of calm being several weeks ahead in my blogging.
What Does Scheduling Posts Mean?
Most social media platforms and website content management systems have built in schedulers. Using these, you can easily schedule posts out one or more at a time for as long as they have capacity to do so. Some will limit you to a certain number of posts.
Personally, I use WordPress’s blog scheduling and SocialPilot.co for my social media scheduling. I don’t like using each separate social media site’s scheduling systems. Additionally, SocialPilot is easier to use than Facebook or Twitter. SocialPilot is my favorite, but there are tons of different schedulers out there like Hootsuite, Loomly, and Sprout. Up until recently, I used Hootsuite, but they raised their price and offered a worse service, which was great incentive to leave. I don’t know how they’ve changed in the past six months or so.
The Big Picture
In addition to making things easier, scheduling posts helps you see the big picture. You should post mostly value-added content. A scheduler helps make sure that’s true because you can see it all on the calendar. If you have several days of promotional content in a row, maybe move one of them and put in a helpful article instead? Everyone has their own opinion for the perfect ratio, so I won’t bother you with mine. However, the schedulers help me stick to it. Post out blogs, images, and promos in the right order makes my audience stick around.
As you can see, I leave Mondays open for that particular profile. I do this because SocialPilot also follows my RSS feed and pulls my new blogs posted every Monday on that site. That way I’m not overloading my social media and splitting my audience’s attention away from my newest blog.
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