Tips For Scheduling & Creating Social Media Content

Before delving into how best you can schedule your social media content, let’s talk about why you should do it in the first place.

Scheduling your social media content provides many benefits to your business. Firstly, you’ll be prepared. If you know what’s going on in your business, for example you’re launching a new product, it makes sense to plan when you will start shouting about this on social media. Once you’ve created your other marketing materials (if necessary) you can then manipulate this artwork so that you can use it for your social media content to keep everything consistent. By scheduling your content ahead of time allows you to clearly plan and ensure your content is going out at the right time in line with everything else that is taking place in your business rather than rushing to create below par content and shoving it out on social media last minute.

Another benefit is that by leaving yourself enough time to plan your content, you will be less likely to make errors and typos when you’re writing your captions. There’s nothing worse than an accidental misspelling – consumers trust will decrease if this happens a lot.

Consistency. I have said this before, but the only way to grow your social media following is by consistently posting on your accounts. If you schedule your content you know exactly when you’re posting so naturally consistency will be achieved.

And finally, you’ll feel less pressured! Nobody wants to be scrambling around at 5pm on a Friday for something to post on social media. So, if your content is all scheduled you can leave the office feeling calm and in control.

So, now you know why you should schedule your content, how do you go about doing it?

I like to plan in detail at least one month in advance and have a skeleton plan of the next two months in place for my clients. This allows me to see an overview of the types of content that is going out and also allows for any last-minute changes that may need to be made. I create my social media plans in Excel, but that’s only because that’s what I’ve always done in my previous roles before I became a freelancer. I may look into a software that you can create your plans on, but for now a spreadsheet works ok!

Make sure that when you plan your content that you aren’t including too much of one type of content, for example don’t post sales-y posts more than once a week and also ensure that the media of your content is changing too. Include Instagram REELS, videos and carousels in your planning in order to reach new people and create engagement.

Once you’ve planned your content, you’ll need to create it. I like to use Canva for the majority of my posts, especially for my own socials for T A Wells Marketing, as these are often graphics, however for my product-based clients I keep a stock of their products and take photos of them at home – for the time-being until COVID is over anyway!

Here are a number of other sites much like Canva that you can try:

· Stencil

· Snappa

· Crello

· PicMonkey

A lot of these sites are free to an extent and then require a paid subscription. I do highly recommend using a software like this to achieve a consistent and high-quality look to your social media feeds. Plus, they can also save you a lot of time!

Now it’s time to schedule! As my client base is still only small, I am currently using Facebook Business Suite to schedule Facebook and Instagram posts and Twitter’s own Tweet Composer. I have recently discovered Storrito which is a website that you can schedule Instagram Stories on (game changer!) but I haven’t used it just yet. I will definitely make a post about this when I do!

I am looking into a scheduling platform moving forward and would love to hear your recommendations!

Here are a handful of sites that you can use to schedule your content and I will definitely be giving a go:

· Later

· Hootsuite

· Loomly

· ContentCal

· Sprout Social

· Buffer

· Planoly

· Sendible

Let me know if you found this blog post helpful and if you have any other tips for scheduling and creating your social media content!