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Social media wields a massive potential when it comes to digital marketing. Currently, there are approximately 4.7 billion social media users globally.
With such a massive reach, getting your social media campaign right can mean opening your business to a world of endless opportunities.
But, leveraging the social media potential requires being intentional with your approach by ensuring that you create quality content and post it regularly and on a consistent schedule. This can be challenging, especially if you juggle it with other management tasks.
This post focuses on social media scheduling for 2020 and what you can do to stay on top of your social media campaigns.
What Is Social Media Scheduling
The definition of social media scheduling is in its name. It involves creating a schedule for social media publishing, which helps bring organization and consistency to your social media handles.
Maintaining a social media schedule lets you stay up to speed with what is posted, what’s in line for posting, and future posts. Also, it helps you prepare content promptly before it is due for posting.
Must-Have Social Media Scheduling Tools
The truth is creating a schedule for your social media from scratch can be hectic and can only result in very little, if any, change in terms of time spent and efficiency.
Luckily, you can incorporate some tools to make your scheduling efforts much easier.
Here are some of those tools:
Content Calendar
A content calendar is one of the basic things you will need to streamline your social media scheduling. It allows you to plan and attach an activity and social media content to a specific date. This is especially helpful when running campaigns on different social media platforms.
Besides letting you plan when to post, a content calendar can guide you through content creation and curation. The good thing is you can plan on the topics you want to post about on a specific date.
Also, a calendar helps you categorize your posts by type. For example, you can put educational, promotional, contest-based, “how-tos,” and “for fun” posts in different categories.
Automated Publishing Tools
Having a calendar for your posts is great. Still, a calendar isn’t sufficient to ensure consistent and timely updating of your social media accounts because you may need to post the content manually.
The best way of overcoming this challenge is to put your social media publishing on autopilot by incorporating third-party social media publishing tools. Some content calendar tools have auto publishing capabilities, so you may not need another tool.
Investing in an automatic publishing tool can be an excellent idea if yours doesn’t have the feature. When using an automatic publishing tool, you only need to feed it with all the content you want published, the dates and times of publishing, and then it does the rest.
Content Performance Tracking Tools
Publishing content is half the job done. The other half is tracking your content to know its effectiveness. The best way to know how well a post performs is by incorporating a social media analytics tool into your social media strategy.
Social media analytics tools help gather more than the effectiveness of a post. Also, they help gather essential data to help you fine-tune your social media campaigns more effectively.
After conversion, you may also need to follow up with a client to know how much value they are getting from your products and services. If you are a software developer, you could want to set up a mobile app tracking tool like Smartlook to help you identify the areas in your app that could be problematic to users. Getting such information helps in creating updates that can help improve user experiences.
What to Consider When Scheduling Posts
Different social media platforms have varying advantages and disadvantages. Also, they use different algorithms when ranking posts. Understanding the different needs of a specific platform is essential because it helps create a schedule that best fits the platform.
For example, if you run a campaign on Facebook and Instagram, ensure that you stick to one to two daily posts. For LinkedIn, one post a day is enough. You can do up to 50 posts for Twitter, but the recommended figure is 15. On Pinterest, you can do up to 30 posts, but 11 posts are what marketing experts recommend.
Timing is also important. After all, you do not want to publish a post at midnight when most of your audience is asleep. The ideal time to publish is morning hours, around lunch break up to 4 pm.