Should you schedule your social media posts?

To Schedule or Not To Schedule

That is the question I get all the time. And then it’s usually followed by this one, “If I’m scheduling my posts, then I’m not engaging, right?”

When we first started using social media for marketing, most of us couldn’t imagine anyone telling us that we should schedule our messages. We’re constantly being bombarded with the idea of engaging with our fans and commenting with our followers. So we have to be hanging out in our social programs, right?

And that’s where the familiar feeling of overwhelm sets in. How can I spend my time posting, commenting and sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin and all the other places your company has a profile AND do everything it takes to run your business every day?

I get that feeling because I’m a solopreneur too. I live in the world of trying to figure out how to find the balance in my day.

What’s the answer?

Let me go ahead and answer that question everyone wants to know, “If I’m scheduling my posts, then I’m not engaging, right?”

The honest answer is that if you’re scheduling your posts, you’re not truly engaging with your customers. You’re not in there the moment that they’re reading and hitting the LIKE button.

The truth is, you really can’t be there all the time. You have customer projects to work on, meetings to go to, kids to pick up, dinners to make and everything else you have on your daily to-do list.

It’s just not physically possible to be constantly engaging on social media and still run a business.

There, I said it.

Now let’s focus on how you can schedule your content while still keeping a social presence. There are lots of programs out there to help you schedule your posts but these are my two favorite ones to use. Both are free and very easy to use.

1. Facebook Internal Scheduler

Most people don’t know that Facebook has its own internal feature to help you schedule your posts for your fan page.

I log into Facebook every Monday morning and schedule all of my fan page posts for the whole week. It usually takes me about an hour to make sure that I have at least 2 messages posted on my fan page every day.

To use Facebook’s scheduler, do the following:

• Go to your fan page wall
• Type in your status update and if you have an image/photo/video, click on the Photo/Video button, browse your hard drive for the image and upload
• Click on the clock button
• Set the year, month, day and time in hour and minutes
• Then click schedule!

To view your scheduled posts, just click on Edit Page in your fan page Admin Panel then go to Use Activity Log. Some important things to note about the scheduler:

• You can change the date or the time of the post by clicking on the small down arrow
• You can NOW change the actual copy in the post without having to delete and re-schedule the whole post! {this change just happened!}

2. Hootsuite

My other favorite program to use is Hootsuite. I use the free version which allows me to add in three (3) different social programs like your Facebook fan page, Twitter account and Linkedin profile.

You can upgrade to a premium version to give you more detailed analytic information and add more than five programs but honestly, I’ve been quite content with the free version. I use my Google Analytics to monitor my traffic so I use Hootsuite to help me schedule my messages across all of my social platforms.

Hootsuite is just as easy to use as the Facebook’s program. To schedule your posts, do the following:

•  Click “Compose Message”
• Type your message and include links if you have any
• Click to select a profile(s) from the profile picker
• Click the calendar icon
• From the calendar, select the date for the message to be sent
• Select the time for the message to be sent
• Click “Schedule”

Once all your posts are scheduled, you can review and revise either the text, links, dates or scheduled time in the HootSuite Dashboard. You’ll see them listed in the scheduled posts stream in each of the social program’s tabs.

If you don’t see the scheduled posts sections, look at the top of your Dashboard and you’ll see the button to Add Stream for each social media program. You’ll just click on that button and add in the scheduled posts stream.

Got my scheduler, now what?

Now that you’ve figured out how to schedule your posts, how will you make sure that you’re still doing that engaging thing? Here’s my little secret – I make time in my day to log in for 15 minutes and check everything.

Never ignore anyone’s comments or questions. If you don’t have time to write out a complete response, at least hit the LIKE button or click the Favorite star in Twitter to show that you saw their message.

I usually log in twice a day. I do my first check-in sometime in mid-morning after I finish the big thing on my to-do list. I do my second one at the end of day either before I shut down the computer or after dinner where I’ll use my phone or tablet to log in.

If I don’t have any comments to reply to, I use my 15 minute check-in time to Retweet someone’s post or share another company’s Facebook page’s message to my fan page.

 

Photo credit: Clock