Post Scheduling and the art of making time

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Is what I usually hear from my clients, when we talk about social media strategies, actions and ideas we come up with together for their own social media marketing channels. So yet again, I’m here to offer some magic tricks and cheats to make sure you manage to make the most of your social media efforts with post scheduling.

There he goes with the magical secrets again…

No, you’re right, it’s nothing magical, and not even secret. I’m writing this blog post simply to illuminate those who have never heard of post scheduling and to make sure that those who actually do know about it, do it right.

So yes, the magic word here is post scheduling, which is written in italic for added dramatic effect. But how does one do that? Schedule a post, I mean, not write in italic.

First, what does post scheduling mean?

The main idea behind post scheduling is to let the computer do most of the work for you. Whether you are a content curator or a content creator, you basically feed your content into a robot who will post the content for you, all around the socialverse.

An important issue here is timing. You’re gonna want to make sure your followers will notice your posts and will actually interact with them. So let’s say that posting at 3 in the morning is off the table.

“Any magic tricks to find out the best hours?” you’re probably asking, and I’m gonna laugh and walk into the sunset.

The term Best posting hours is a sham. A marketing trick to convince you that you need fancy shmancy programs that will calculate that stuff for you. The fact of the matter is, the best time to post is when your followers are online and interact with you. So it’s gonna take some trial and error, but you’ll get the gist of it soon enough.

Ok, so what are the tools we are supposed to use?

Awesome question!

You could use the social media platform’s integrated scheduling option, like the ones Facebook and Twitter (on Tweetdeck) have.

BUT!

There are actually quite a few tools for good post scheduling:

• Buffer is one of these. It’s free with a premium option where you’ll have more options.
• Hootsuite is another one, which is considered less user friendly than Buffer, but is a little bit stronger and more well rounded.
• Post planner is another great option which will even help you out finding content to post.
• SproutSocial has a great integrated analytics feature.

The greatest part about using a 3rd party tool for your post scheduling is that you can choose to schedule the same post for different social media platforms, or social media accounts. That saves time and allows you to share the same link on different channels. Just make sure the post format is suitable for both platforms (remember Twitter’s 140 character limit, and LinkedIn’s allergy to hashtags).

What post scheduling apps help with most is actually the what they do best: schedule posts. In case you’re communicating with an international audience, you can schedule your Tweets, for example, to repost whenever your audience is most active in each and every time zone.

Author: Shay Stibelman

Digital marketing consultant in Milan, Italy. Born in Israel, raised in Germany by Russian parents. I help small and medium businesses get their digital marketing game on point. Perfect their website, landing pages, funnel marketing and social media strategies, in order to increase ROI and optimize that ever elusive marketing budget. View all posts by Shay Stibelman