The public holidays are once again upon us – hoorah! I know some people have been struggling to maintain consistent social media posting over weekends, holidays, business trips and hectic work periods, so I thought I’d share a very short post with three of the most important rules for scheduling your social media content.
1. Use a social media management tool like Hootsuite to easily schedule, edit, view and manage your posts and responses
Once you’ve created an account for your social media management tool, add all of your social media accounts.
I prefer to use Hootsuite, and would highly recommend creating streams on the dashboard for all scheduled for each channel, as well as mentions, tags, private messages, and keyword searches. This will allow you to easily see what is happening in your online sphere in one glance, as well as being able to quickly see a timeline of scheduled content (which can then easily be edited or rescheduled if necessary).
2. Use the full functionality of the dashboard – edit your photos, add emojis, tag people, use hashtags and more
For some reason, when people start scheduling content, they don’t treat the content in the same way. Take ome time to explore the functionality of posting on Hootsuite and you will see that there is a lot of capability to edit your photos, to add emojis and tags/hashtags/comments, as well as find free Pixabay stock images and gifs from Giphy.
The other easy fix you should be using on Hootsuite is resizing your pictures for optimum fit for the timeline of each channel, so that people do not have to click and open them to see each picture.
3. Don’t think you can just schedule content and walk away!
Scheduling your content certainly takes a lot of pressure off. During busy periods or when you have limited resources, it’s a way of ensuring you have good quality, strategic content and messaging going out at the peak times for your audience, without compromising your efficiency and productivity at work.
However, the whole ethos of social media is that it is social – authentic, responsive, reactive as well as proactive. You need to be taking part in conversations and actively involved in the community, not just broadcasting your messages about your company. Therefore scheduling these broadcasts alone is not enough, even during weekends and holidays, as a bare minimum someone needs to be checking your channels at least once a day and responding to comments. In an ideal world, they’ll be proactively getting involved in conversations in the community and industry, and sharing content to support local partners and networks.
There’s a lot to think about initially when setting up your social media strategy and processes, but it’s a fantastic investment of time, particularly for those with limited resources. Once you have everything set up, it’s much easier and less time consuming to post consistently – and you can ensure your content is more effective and works towards an agreed strategy and goals.
We run monthly workshops on social media, which include setting up your scheduling and social media management tools, with the next one to be held at Brambles, Barsha Heights on 19thAugust. If you’d like to know more about the workshops, or about managing your social media content, please email sam@footstepcommunications.com
Eid Mubarak!!
