Social Media Content Schedule

Given the hectic pace of the world we live in, social media content scheduling has become an important part of remaining updated and up-to-date on the social media. Since it’s not feasible to be online constantly and to manually update the content on your social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram or more, the alternative is to schedule your content to post it at an allotted time.

Doing this facilitates the posting process, which can be done automatically with many of the scheduling tools, though you can also keep the actual control on posting in your hand and simply use the scheduler to remind you of when the content comes up for posting.

The scheduling system works for both text and images or videos with equal ease. And interestingly, some of the tools also provide for scheduling of multiple content at the same time, even enabling editing of the same. Scheduling templates make the task much easier, of course, and there are any number of free templates available online for you to choose from.

Excel spreadsheets

The advantage with such a spreadhseet is that you can use it offline or online. With different spreadsheets in a single Excel sheet you can allot specific sheets for specific social networks, enabling easy scheduling and tracking, without chances of messing up the posts in any way. So you can have one sheet for Linkedin, one for Facebook, one for Twitter and so on.

Of course this can be disadvantageous too in certain cases, say when you want to schedule the same post for all your social networks, which, unfortunately, the Excel doesn’t provision for.

Then there’s the monthly scheduling you can do with it, as well as other features like color coding that makes for easy use and adaptability to all kinds of contents, including ebooks, product launches, blogs, webinars etc. The ease of editing it also makes it a hassle-free scheduling tool for your social media content.

You can even put your content in the sheet, particularly, say, for Tweets, which have limited characters to play with. This means that you don’t have to browse around for your content at the time of actual posting, since the Excel sheet becomes your one-window source for all post-related information – from day and time to the actual content.

Build your own

Let’s assume, however, that you’re not really comfortable with Excel spreadsheets. Or perhaps this tool is not suitable for your needs. The alternative then is to make your own content scheduling calendar, for which you’ll find a whole lot of templates on the web.

To do so, you should ideally start by checking out what kind of content needs to go up in order to connect with your audience. The next step is to ascertain the required frequency, which will, of course, vary depending on your specific needs and TG.

There are some general guidelines that might be of use to you when deciding upon the ideal frequency. While FB is best managed 3-10 times a week, Twitter updation should be at least 5 times a day and Pinterest 5-10 times a day. LinkedIn is good 2-5 times a week and Google+ 3-10 times a week.

Apps you can use

For the actual scheduler, you can use one of the many apps that are freely downloadable.  The WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin, the Basecamp, Edit Flow and Google Calendar are some of the common scheduling tools that are popularly in use. Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time. It could be because you’re unfamiliar with the application and simply need more practice. Or alternatively, it could be because that particular app does not address you specific requirements, in which case you simply move to another app, unless of course you’re able to make certain customized changes to the same one.

Conclusion

A lot of it has to do with practice. Hence, the more your practice the better you’ll get at managing your content scheduling for the social media. With time, you’ll be able to handle multiple posts across multiple social media with total ease, and harness the social media to your advantage. Fore more on how you can exploit the social media content to your advantage, log on to Social Media Business Blueprint.