HOW WE SCHEDULE OUR SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS

We've given you the rundown on WHY you should be scheduling your social media posts (check out the article here), so now, we'd like to share HOW we personally plan and schedule our social media posts at AMR Digital.

WHY WE PLAN AND SCHEDULE OUR CONTENT AHEAD OF TIME:

The idea of sitting down and scheduling out 15-30 social media posts at once can be a bit intimidating. I mean, who has the time to actually do that? Well, the truth is, scheduling your posts can be a huge time saver because you can knock out a month of content in one sitting. It also allows you to create more consistent content and stay on-brand with your design, tone, etc.

And you know those days where you sit down to create a post, and you just can’t think of any good ideas? We’ve all been there before. However, when you get in the habit of planning content ahead of time, it allows you to take advantage of those waves of inspiration and take a break on the days where you’re just not feeling it. The result is better content and less time spent agonizing on what to post next!

HOW TO GET STARTED:

There are plenty of scheduling apps out there that will do the trick, but we personally like to use HootSuite. HootSuite is a Social Media Management System that helps you manage all your content for all the different social media platforms in one place by connecting to apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. 

HERE IS HOW WE SCHEDULE OUR POSTS ON HOOTSUITE:

1. Go to wwww.hootsuite.com and create a free account. They will walk you through the steps to link all of your social platforms.
2. Once your account is set up, you can start drafting content. We recommend picking one primary platform (where your target market is most likely to be) and creating a series of original posts for that platform.
3. You can then take those same posts and adjust/optimize them to fit on your other platforms (i.e., rewording the captions and cutting the length so that they are the right amount of characters for each platform). It is important to note that every platform has a different character limit. For example, Instagram's is 2,200, Facebook's is 2,000, LinkedIn's is 1,300, and Twitter's is 280. You also want to adjust the tone of voice to speak to the different audiences on each platform. For example, Instagram is casual and conversational, Facebook can be a bit more personal, LinkedIn is formal and professional, and Twitter is short and to the point!
4. Next is hashtags. For posts to really perform well, hashtags are essential. But don’t go overboard with the hashtags, but at the same time, using too many can actually lower engagement. We recommend the following number of hashtags for each platform: 2 per Tweet on Twitter, 7-10 per post on LinkedIn, 0 on Facebook, and up to 30 on Instagram. Within these parameters, you want to pick hashtags that are A) Relevant to your content, B) Actively being used by your target market, and C) small enough that you can rank on the top/trending page for those hashtags.
5. Now it's time to adjust the photo or video for each post. For us, every post gets a cover image or video. And we try to adjust the visuals for each platform. This means cropping images to fit the recommended size specifications, clipping videos to highlight different parts on different platforms, etc.
6. Schedule and publish! Once we've created a post, it's time to schedule a time, date, and press publish! We always refer back to our analytics for this part so that we can schedule each post according to when our audience is the most active on each platform.

Whether you're building a business, a brand, or a personal account, regularly posting high-quality content is the key to success, and scheduling that content makes this infinitely more manageable. It also allows you to diversify your content across multiple platforms without recreating the wheel each time. Happy scheduling!