Who, How, When, Why, and What of Social Media Posting - Spilling the tea, Once and For All

Someone asked this question in an entrepreneurs' community today

Who do you guys use to post your social media content? I’m finding it difficult to post consistently across platforms and at the same time quite expensive to outsource the job to someone else.. any suggestions are welcome

Here's my response to them

The first question you would ask is what are your goals from posting?

The how/who/when can be adjusted based on this.

Though I don't really know what you're selling, I would imagine you have leading and lagging indicators of success from social media posting that you can tie directly to your goals.

Leading Indicators (Sometimes also called vanity metrics)

For example, while likes, comments, and shares may be leading indicators, it is in no way going to guarantee success, even if you post extremely valuable content 5 times per day.

If on the other hand, you have a CTA for commenting on your post, in a way that an automation picks up the comments, and adds the user in a messenger flow, now you have leads coming in, which you can then personally chat with, and convert.

Which becomes your lagging indicator.

Another lagging indicator is people actually messaging you or filling out an inquiry form on your website.

Based on these, you should determine what is your ideal posting format going to be, and who will do it?

If it is in-depth content that only you can produce in order to generate those results, then you cannot get any value from a GBP99/month service.

The 3 Stages of Social Media Mastery

If I were you and wanted to post every day on my social media, I would do it in three phases.

Phase 1: I would only focus on posting enough content for two days, but I will do this religiously for the next 30 days.

Every morning, I will put together content that is good enough for the next two days only. Over 30 days, I will have enough content that I can go without posting for the next 30 days.

Phase 2: In the next 30 days, I will post enough content every day for 1 day, so I always am 30 days ahead of the curve.

I will spend the rest of my time, putting together my process in a way that I can automate part of it with AI/ChatGPT and then auto-post it with a cheap integration like Make.com

Phase 3: The 3rd phase is when you basically use the automation for scheduling for the most part, including comments, etc. but you are focusing primarily on business conversions.

Getting Results From My Posting

One thing to note here is that just posting content will not get you any results.

Social media platforms are aggressively rewarding people who are engaging in other peoples' content like I am engaging with this post here.

While I am not a very active social media user myself, if I was only posting stuff on my profile, without interacting with other people's content, it would not mean much to get my content in front of others.

So, in addition to posting content every day, remember that you will also have to budget a part of your day to engage, interact, and communicate with the community in order to build your actual social media presence.

Remember, it is social, not a billboard, so it has to be interactive.

What will you add to this?