One great tip on getting into the marketing habit is scheduling your content. Your content should go out on a regular basis, even if on a particular day you’re busy with something else.
You’ve probably heard us say that you don’t have enough time for social media if you don’t have a plan! Posting haphazardly to Facebook at midnight because that’s when you get around to it isn’t a great idea for most businesses. But once you have created content, use a scheduling tool to schedule your posts ahead of time. Your posts and key messages will go out automatically on the right days and times.
Get into the marketing habit by planning and scheduling your content.
Native Scheduling on Meta
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, tends to favor scheduling from within their platform. You can use Facebook’s Creator Studio to schedule your Facebook and Instagram content. Native scheduling has been available for a while in Creator Studio, but Instagram has recently announced that you can now schedule Instagram posts from within the app itself, including Reels. Having the ability to schedule directly from the app, will make it much easier for you to stay on top of the posts you create, rather than having to create in one app, then schedule in another, or use non-native scheduling tools which could be limiting your reach on Meta.
More platforms are announcing native scheduling including LinkedIn, and scheduling Reels on the Instagram app.
Third Party Social Scheduling
Third party scheduling tools are the best for some platforms. For example, LinkedIn doesn’t currently allow you to schedule within the app, but that may be changing too. They have announced that they are working on a native scheduling option where you can create your posts and schedule those directly in LinkedIn.
Scheduling within the platform can sometimes perform better than using a third-party tool, but your mileage may vary. Third-party scheduling tools let you schedule multiple platforms at once.
But for the convenience of all platforms in one place, you can’t beat a third-party tool like Buffer. Buffer is the tool we use to schedule LinkedIn and Twitter posts today. It is one of the many scheduling tools out there.
Social Media Link Sharing
We recently saw that Buffer has some new research, which is pretty interesting. They found that on most of the social media platforms, if you have a link included in your post, it gets less reach. And platforms like Instagram and TikTok don’t even allow you to put in links in your post. The social media platforms depend on you staying within their app so they can serve you more ads. They want to keep you in their walled garden.
Links in social posts (where they are allowed) don’t get as much reach, but Buffer has a social tool called Start Pages you can use a link in your bio that accepts scheduled updates.
One way around this is to use the “link in bio” strategy. Buffer, for example, lets you create a Start page, where you can list all of your social media platforms and all the important links on how to reach you. Then you direct people to the link in your bio for the relevant info. Linktree and other companies also offer this service.
A new feature that Buffer just added to their Start Pages is scheduling of different posts or link sections to appear in your start page. You can schedule this at the same time you’re scheduling your social media. So if you change promotions frequently, your Start Page can automatically have the latest promotion at the same time you’re scheduling your social media posts on that same promotion.
The bottom line is: creating a social media scheduling plan doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. Get into the marketing habit with repeatable processes and templates for creating your content, and remember, consistency gets traction. Once you create your content, having a plan to schedule your posts helps that consistency happen.
Links in this episode: LinkedIn is Working on a Native Post Scheduling Option
Instagram Moves to Next Stage of Development with its Native Scheduling Tools
