Social media automated posting: why and how?
Whether you’re a veteran creator or a rookie, you know there are many moving pieces involved in growing your business. And, a major key to your growth is social media. Unfortunately, it can be one of the most time-consuming parts of scaling your business. If want to keep your social media presence thriving while taking back time for important tasks such as creating valuable content for your students, social media automation is the answer. After all, the key to using social media for business is posting with intention and not getting lost in the clutter. And, what better way to do that than through automated posting?
From batch-creating content to scheduling months of content in advance, going on autopilot is probably one of the best ways to run your business. Particularly for social media, preplanning and prescheduling can help build consistency, gain leads for your business, and save valuable time in the long run. Luckily, there are many tools available to you to get you going on autopilot. From native tools built into the social media platforms you know and love to pro tools, here are some of the automated posting best platforms.
Keeping it in the family: native tools
If you’re new to the idea of social media automation, the good news is that you don’t necessarily have to look too far to get started. Nowadays, many social media websites have scheduling and planning built into them. Typically, they don’t require you to do much more than setting up your social media profile as a business page, which you should always do to get analytics on the content you post and your audience. The best part of these built-in automated posting tools is that they’re all entirely free.
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook has owned Instagram for some time now, which of course, means a lot of the tools for the two respective sites are integrated. So long as you have your Facebook and Instagram set up as professional/business pages, you can utilize Facebook Business Suite to plan content and even engage with your audience on both platforms.
Facebook Business Suite, which you can access through Facebook on desktop or the dedicated Business Suite app, even has helpful tools built in such as “Moments.” This lists holidays and national days relevant for your content. You can also search trending hashtags and save them for future use in planning,
Chances are, if you’re an active Twitter user, you don’t typically tweet from desktop. However for the sake of venturing into scheduling Tweets, you may want to consider it. On the web, you can schedule Tweets right from Twitter.com. Although you can’t schedule engaging Twitter Threads, automated posting can be a helpful way to schedule promotional Tweets without venturing off into a new platform that requires some use getting to.
If you’re not on Pinterest, you should be. This “visual search engine” is a goldmine for sending traffic to your site and converting content consumers to customers. Similar to above, a Pinterest Business account gives you access to some pretty valuable features such as in-depth analytics and, of course, the ability to schedule pins. Scheduling a pin is as simple as plugging in a date and time.
Canva
If you’re using social media to share your expert insights with your audience and promote your business, you may use Canva to create eye-catching graphics. But, did you know that in addition to creating striking visuals, you can also use Canva to schedule the content? Canva’s Content Planner (free with the pro plan) provides you with a calendar with Holidays and Key Dates plugged in to help you plan out the content you create on the site.
Thinking outside the box: pro tools
Once you’ve given the native scheduling tools a chance, it’s time to get into the more robust tools that live outside these apps.
TweetDeck, $0
In addition to being a platform that easily allows you to share clickable links, Twitter is an excellent place for social listening and staying in the know. Whether you’re following trending topics or hashtags or even Tweets from particular users, TweetDeck allows you to customize your interface and user experience to best suit your business needs. Best of all: TweetDeck is free to use and available to anyone who has a Twitter account. Did we mention you can also manage multiple Twitter accounts at once using this tool?
Planoly, $0- $35 per month
When it comes to Instagram, making sure the grid is aesthetically pleasing and regularly updated with valuable, engaging content is a pain point of many creators. Planoly has grown in popularity amongst creators for its ability to help visually plan content on Instagram. But, it also works with platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. One of the most innovative functionalities of Planoly is the ability to create shoppable links on virtually any platform. This is ideal for creators like you looking to sell digital products.
Sendible, from $29 per month
If it seems like you’re always finding yourself trying desperately trying to find the time and bandwidth to manage a growing number of social accounts, Sendible may be the platform for you. This particular scheduler and planner supports Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Youtube, and WordPress. This pretty much allows you to manage everything in one place. From recycling evergreen content to monitoring keywords and scoping out the competition, Sendible offers a robust selection of tools to help you plan out content and scale your business through your social media.
Tailwind, $0-$39.99 per month
With Instagram and Pinterest as the top visual social media platforms, it makes sense to take back valuable time by creating and scheduling content for the platforms simultaneously. And, that’s where Tailwind comes in. One of the standout features of Tailwind is the SmartScheduler, which suggests the best times for your automated posting. This scheduler can also help you spruce up imagery with its built-in auto design tools.
CoSchedule, from $29 per month
If your blog is a core part of promoting your business, your social media posts have a logical connection to what you post on the blog. CoSchedule is a content marketing platform that also supports blogging and social media scheduling. CoSchedule is great because it allows you to create blog content and convert it onto WordPress or HubSpot. Additionally, it will preschedule the post plus any social media content related to it in advance. If you draft blog posts in other places such as Google Drive, CoSchdule integrates with that as well.
The most important thing to remember with automated posting is the goal is to help you utilize your time wisely and creatively.
Do you really need to be on every social media platform? This guide can help you narrow down where to put your efforts.
