3 Tips About Post Scheduling

Scheduling your social media posts in advance can save you a lot of time and hassle. Sit down on a set day and schedule all of your posts for the following week, or even the coming month!

There are nuances to scheduling posts though, and different platforms interact differently with post schedulers.

THE MAIN IDEA

The most well-known scheduler is Hootsuite. I use both Hootsuite and Social Pilot, (<- affiliate link) a lesser-known scheduler that works basically the same.

Most post schedulers you'll run across have free and premium versions, allowing you to connect only a certain number of accounts and/or allowing only a certain number of posts in the scheduling queue on the free option. If you can dedicate time to scheduling posts often (so as not to fill up your queue all at once) and can remember to manually post on accounts that are unconnected to your scheduler, you can definitely get by with a free version. If it becomes too much, you can always upgrade.

TIPS

• Preview what your final post will look like and customize it for different platforms. When I schedule a post, I go into the Facebook-scheduled version and edit it to remove link text and change/add preview images. In the Twitter version, I add hashtags. I also sometimes change the wording a bit, since Twitter is all about brevity.
• Check your queue of posts every once in a while, especially if you're scheduling far out in advance. You might find that something you scheduled a long time ago is no longer relevant or needs to be updated.
• ​Instagram does not allow 3rd party apps to post to their platform on your behalf! This means that a scheduler cannot automatically post to Instagram for you. Most scheduler apps send you a notification when it's time for your Instagram post to go up and will pre-populate your post with your pre-written caption. I don't even try to use Instagram with schedulers. I just set a reminder in my phone and save a caption (complete with hashtags) in my notes app.

As always, be mindful about what kind of audience is on each platform. Customize your posts and put the right content on the appropriate channels.

​❤ Bayley