Scheduling Social Media Ahead of Time: Best Practices

Sep 25, 2014

The especially tricky thing about social media is that is ALWAYS happening. There is never one moment without social media. At any time, someone, somewhere could be talking about your company, and you need to be ready for it AT ALL TIMES. Scary, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we’re not addressing this issue today. Social media monitoring is its own beast, one that we’re going to save for riding on a different day.

Photo Credit: * Cati Kaoe * via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: * Cati Kaoe * via Compfight cc

Today, we’re talking instead about scheduling your social media posts. Because, yes, social media is happening at all times and if there’s one over-arching key to social media success, it’s consistency. At the same time, you have a life. And we’re guessing that even though your company should be posting on Saturday mornings, you don’t want to be the one to do it. That’s where social scheduling comes in.

There’s plenty of social scheduling resources out there. HootSuite, for one. HubSpot has a nice system, for another. And I’ve heard good things about Sprout Social, too. To top it all off, you can even schedule your posts ahead of time right on Facebook! Here’s how.

But before you go scheduling like crazy, remember that not all of your posts should be scheduled in advance.

Here’s our best practices for scheduling social media ahead of time:

Treat each platform differently.

Twitter’s 140 characters means that your message there is going to be different from the message on Facebook. Your audience on LinkedIn is also different from your audience on Twitter and Facebook, so perhaps you’d want to change your phrasing. Use the same content, but re-purpose it to fit the audience and the platform.

Don’t forget about your scheduled messages.

It can be easy to schedule out your social media and then to forget all about it. Make sure to keep checking back in – does the post still make sense now? I have to do quite a few weather-related posts, and there’s been times where I’ve changed it day-of since the weather wasn’t as warm, rainy, cloudy (you name it) as the original forecast stated.

Stay on top of monitoring, too. If your audience is having great dialogue about one of your photos, participate! Don’t post and then go AWOL. The same goes for controversial posts – make sure you’re there to help monitor the discussion.

Leave room for spur of the moment. Scheduling Social Media Ahead of Time

Some of the best social media moments have come from companies who were able to take current events and turns them into brilliant social wins. Anyone remember when the lights went out during the Superbowl last year? Oreo nailed it.

Sure, a good percentage of your posts can be planned and scheduled ahead of time. But if you leave room for posts like these, your social will fly through the roof.

Relax.

Go one, live your life. Go out to dinner, walk your dog, visit a friend. And leave your phone in your pocket. You already scheduled your social media for the day.

Before scheduling social media ahead of time comes creating the content. For help keeping your content organized, checkout our free content calendar below.




RedMoxy Communications is a Communications Agency located in Waukesha County, more specifically, Delafield, Wisconsin. RedMoxy schedules social media posts for our clients and follows the advice suggested here in this blog. You can learn more about RedMoxy at www.redmoxy.com.