You Need To Schedule Your Social Media Posts

Life is hectic, and no one knows this better than a small business owner. A well scheduled day can quickly get out of control and the little things can get forgotten. This is why automation and scheduling is a necessity in your marketing.

Did you remember to make a Facebook post today? How about a tweet? Did you remember to post that video to Instagram? You’ve probably asked one of those questions numerous times. What if you could spend a chunk of time and schedule out some of your social media posts so you didn’t have to think about it everyday?

Scheduling social media posts takes one task off your plate everyday and ensures you will never forget to post. Plus, it’s incredibly easy! 

What You Should Schedule

If you want to schedule out all of your social posts you can or you can choose to schedule out a few and still post some manually. It’s all up to you. Scheduling posts is a great way to make sure that they get out exactly on the date and time they should but that doesn’t mean you still can post something manually when you want.

If you have an upcoming sale or promotion, schedule those posts out and leave yourself some room to post some fun and spontaneous posts manually around them. You can do the same with holidays!

How Far Should You Schedule Into The Future

There is no set rule about how far you can schedule social media posts into the future. Start with just focusing on the next week and go from there. Generally scheduling a few weeks out should be fine. It all depends on whether or not things will change in your business in that timeframe.

The only risk is scheduling too far in advance that you either forget what you scheduled and things get published that are now incorrect or things have changed and you have to go in and make a lot of changes. 

Free Scheduling Tools

There are a million social media tools at your disposal to schedule out posts all with different features that you may or may not find helpful. Luckily there are some great free tools out there that are easy to use and easy to find.

Facebook Business Suite

If you want to schedule out your Facebook and Instagram posts your best bet is to utilize the free Business Suite tool on Facebook. Business Suite (which is also an app) is a tool with a variety of  bells and whistles designed to help you make the most out of your Facebook business page (and sell you ads, ultimately). 

Within the tool is a post and story scheduler. You can create both Facebook and Instagram posts and stories and schedule them out! This is a great time saver for businesses that primarily use Facebook and Instagram. You can also use the calendar function to see your scheduled posts on a calendar to better visualize what you have scheduled.

The only downside is you cannot schedule IGTV videos on Business Suite. For that you have to use Facebook Creator Studio, another content tool that functions nearly the same but does not let you schedule stories.

Buffer

If you utilize channels other than Facebook and Instagram or would like to see all of your social channels in one place you will want to use an external tool like Buffer. 

Buffer is a simple social scheduling tool that allows you to schedule posts to a variety of platforms at once. The free version allows you to connect 3 social channels and have up to 10 scheduled posts at a time. You can always use something like Buffer in addition to Business Suite to manage your non-Facebook affiliated channels like Linkedin and Twitter.

Planoly

If you are a visual business that utilizes Instagram and Pinterest you will get a lot out of Planoly. The free plan allows you to connect one Instagram and one Pinterest account and schedule 30 posts per channel every month along with some simple analytics. 

This social scheduling tool was created specifically for visual channels like Instagram and Pinterst and allows you to truly visualize your content before you hit publish.

TweetDeck

Is Twitter a big part of your social media marketing plan? If so you will get a lot of use out of TweetDeck. TweetDeck was originally created as an external app but was purchased by Twitter and integrated with its platform. This app lets you access, manage and schedule your tweets within an easy to manage interface. This is a great free tool for someone who spends a lot of time using and interacting with people on Twitter.

Final Thoughts

Scheduling your social media posts is one easy way to lighten your day to day burden. And who wouldn’t want to check one thing off their daily list?! All you have to do is set aside a chunk of time each week or every other week to plan, create and schedule your posts for the weeks ahead.

Switching from daily posting to weekly or biweekly scheduling will be an adjustment but you will see that it is a much more manageable system that frees your mind for more important tasks on a daily basis.