Social media content scheduling: the basics.

This blog was originally published on 31 March 2015. You can read the original blog here and take a look at the asabell company blog for all the latest tips and advice from our stellar social media team.

Putting in place a strong Twitter strategy is highly time-consuming but, thankfully, there are some great tools around that can make your life much easier.

Give them to me, you say, and tell me how I can maximise their effectiveness. Well, okay then. Here are my top tips for a superb scheduling strategy.

1. Make a content calendar.

Before starting to use a scheduling tool, it’s important to organise your content into a calendar. This will make sure that your content is well spread out; you don’t want five tweets going out on the same day about the same thing — it gets boring. Set a minimum number of tweets each day that you’d like to send out, and fill each day of your calendar with the topics and content you want to tweet about.

2. Pick your scheduler.

My two favourites are Buffer and Hootsuite. These are simple to use and very effective. Your tweets are clearly displayed and changing their ordering is quick and easy. Both schedulers have analytics capabilities so you can track the success of your tweets and campaigns and inform your future activity. They also have browser extensions so you can share or schedule a webpage in just a few clicks.

3. Set your tweet times.

You can set the time at which you’d like each tweet to be sent. When you schedule an update it will fall into the schedule at the next available time slot that you’ve set up. Do some research into your peak engagement times — you’ll maximise the effectiveness of your tweets if you set your time slots according to when you typically receive the most engagement. This will vary day-to-day; you’ll almost certainly require different schedules for the weekend, for example, as the behaviour of your audience will change according to what they’re doing on a given day.

4. Include media.
Schedulers allow you to include images and videos with any tweet. When using a scheduler it’s easy to see how diverse your content is. Make sure you mix it up when it comes to Twitter and have a good variety of links, visuals and other content.

5. Check your links.

If you’re scheduling tweets with links, make sure you test them out before they go live. This is particularly important if you’ve set your scheduler to automatically shorten links, as there can occasionally be errors and can result in a HTTP 404 ‘page not found’ notice.

6. Be careful when scheduling to multiple platforms.

The ability to share the same update across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on is a useful feature — but bear in mind that your updates won’t be optimised for each platform. If you plan on publishing to more than one medium at a time my advice would be to check your update as soon as it goes live. You can always delete it and re-upload if it doesn’t appear quite as you had hoped. It's important to tailor your copy for your audience on each platform you use.

So, by following these tips, you can save yourself a load of time (to put back into your content strategy, right?) and prevent some of the most common scheduling mishaps — a combination for real social success.

Getting Twitter right is only one part of a robust, ongoing social media strategy to support your business in achieving its goals. If you’d like to find out more about how we determine and deliver ongoing social media support for businesses like yours, get in touch — email me at [email protected] or have a look at how we can help you with your social media objectives.