How to Post to Several Social Media Accounts at Once, Issue #36

One of the tasks I spend a lot of time doing for clients is posting to their social media accounts. Sometimes I need to create the content from articles and information they’ve given me, other times I just do the posting.

If you’re new to this, the first thing you need is a social media scheduling application.

My favorite, after using many, is?Buffer . While you’re learning, set up your own free account. This will allow you to schedule up to 10 posts at a time, which is more than enough to learn the basics. (By the way, you won’t need a paid version in most cases.)

Once inside Buffer, connect your social media accounts by clicking “Add a Social Account” and follow the prompts to log into your accounts.

Then click settings and choose “Posting Schedule” and modify the times that are listed for each day you want to post your content. If you want to delete a time that is already there, hover over the time until you see an “x” and click to remove it, or “Add Posting Time” to add in additional posting times.

Now you’re ready to add content, but first we need to organize it. Set up either a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet as follows. You can have more than 4 Posts if there’s enough content.

It’s easier to look at an article or blog post and write many posts at the same time.

In Buffer you’ll see this window on the dashboard. Highlight the social media accounts you want this post to go to. In this case it’s Twitter and LinkedIn.

Copy the post from your spreadsheet, the hashtags and the URL. If there is an image associated with the URL (in a blog post for example) then it will show up in the post. If there’s none you can add your own image by clicking “Add image of video” at the bottom left.

When you click to customize for each network you’ll need to select an image for Twitter even if you’ve already selected one for the other accounts, so keep an eye out for that.

If you want to add your post to the schedule you set up earlier, just click “Add to Queue” and it will be added to your content and post at the next chosen time in your schedule.

If you want to share it now or manually schedule the post, click the down arrow next to “Add to Queue” and make a choice.

When getting started with a new skill, just choose one tool and figure out how it works before moving on to another. Most tools for similar applications have lots of overlap so if you learn to use one well, others will be easy to understand as well.

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Belinda Sandor is the Founder of The VA Connection where she works with new, aspiring, and established Virtual Assistants to help them build thriving businesses through her free online community, courses, and coaching programs. You can learn more here: https://www.thevaconnection.com/?