You know what they say: Fail to plan, plan to fail. The importance of social media in the world today cannot be overstated, with users spending over 42 minutes on social media every day. In fact, there are now more than 2 billion active social media users worldwide, and it’s clear that this number is only going to keep growing. If you want your brand to stand out from the crowd, you need to implement a social media strategy that helps you reach your audience and effectively communicate with them on these channels. However, given how much time you need to commit to creating new content for each platform and monitoring followers for engagement and insights, the last thing you probably have time for is planning out a detailed schedule of when and where you should post things.
What is social media scheduling?
Social media scheduling is the practice of pre-planning and scheduling your social media posts in advance. It’s an essential part of any effective social media marketing strategy, as posting on all your social media accounts at once can easily take up to 10 hours a week, depending on how many accounts you manage and how frequently you post. Social media scheduling allows you to create a single post and schedule it to publish at multiple times and dates, reaching all your followers without the need to manually log into each network every time you want to post something. Social media scheduling tools, or social media management tools as they’re sometimes called, are online services designed to simplify the process of managing and scheduling your social media posts. They allow you to plan and publish posts in advance, and many of them also provide analytics and insights to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
Why you should use scheduling tools
Creating new content for your social media profiles is important for branding, engagement, and driving traffic to your website. However, you’ve probably noticed that there just never seems to be enough time in the day for everything you need to do. With all the different social media platforms out there, you’ll quickly discover that the only way to stay on top of your social media strategy is by streamlining your social media activities as much as possible. This includes scheduling your posts in advance, so that you can focus on other important tasks. Social media scheduling tools make it easy to organize your social media posts in advance and can save you up to 10 hours a week by removing the need to log in and out of each social media account every time you want to publish a post.
The best social media scheduling tools
Hootsuite: An all-in-one social media management tool, Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard and includes a scheduling tool for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Buffer: One of the most user-friendly social media scheduling tools, Buffer allows you to easily create and share posts across multiple social media accounts from one place. It also has a free account for two social media profiles. Later: A visual social media scheduling tool, Later lets you create beautiful social media posts that look great on all devices and screen sizes. SprOUT Social: SprOUT Social lets you easily manage and schedule your social media content across multiple social networks. We hope that after reading this article you will select the best social media scheduling tool for your business needs.
Create great content with a visual editor
One of the challenges of scheduling posts in advance is that you can’t be sure what kind of content will perform best at a given moment. You might make a great post on a specific topic, only to find that it gets very few views when you schedule it for a different time. When you use a visual social media scheduling tool, you can create visually engaging posts that are sure to get attention. SprOUT Social’s visual social media scheduling tool lets you create stunning visual content for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Save time by automating your social ads
If you run ads on Facebook or Instagram, you know how much time you can waste just trying to keep track of your ad stats. However, with social media scheduling tools, you can automate the tracking of your ad stats and get real-time reporting. You can also use scheduling tools to create ad campaigns by importing images and creating a template that you can then apply to every image. This allows you to easily pre-create all your ads in advance and have them scheduled and ready to go once you hit the go button.
Summing up
Social media scheduling tools make it easy to manage multiple social media accounts and post content at the best times. You can schedule posts in advance, and many of these tools also include real-time analytics to help you determine the best times to post. What’s more, many social media scheduling tools also offer a visual editor that lets you create stunning content for your posts, and let you automate your social ad campaigns to save even more time. Hopefully, after reading this article you will select the best social media scheduling tool for your business needs.
