IS SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULING A THING OF THE PAST?

Social media schedulers and planning tools have been a life saver when it comes to planning posts, automatic reposting and most importantly saving the time it takes to log in and doing it every day.

To stand out from all the white noise on social media, content must now be more engaging and interesting than ever before. With the recent Twitter changes banning bulk tweets and same posts across duplicate accounts, is scheduling now becoming a thing of the past?

From our experience, scheduling posts are integral to any social media strategy as long as it’s done properly. As a business that serves various clients, we pride ourselves on delivering regular relevant content, managing active and sector-specific accounts for our clients.

We’ve never used an “evergreen” feature by setting the same post to repost automatically on future dates. As part of our client offering, we have always been conscious about the way we write social media posts for ourselves and our clients and have tried as far as possible to vary posts even though they may well be being sent to the same blog or webpage.

So, what should you do?

Here are our top tips for scheduling social media:

- Schedule core posts

To keep your accounts active and engaging, make sure you schedule set posts to be automatically posted daily, try and have a few per day. Whether this to a blog, video or webpage, send your followers to educational, interesting and beneficial content.

- Don’t repeat content

Mix it up and make it different, use questions, statements, add different images, a video perhaps or even a GIF.

- Make sure you go into your accounts every day

Ensure your accounts are seen to be managed by a human and are personal. Even if you spend just five minutes per day, it’s beneficial to go into your accounts. Retweet other content, comment on other posts, review and respond to your notifications, be active with your following. This all helps to keep your accounts natural and organic.

- Start conversations

It’s also worthwhile spending a few minutes going in and doing some posts that you wouldn’t normally schedule, for example, a poll to create conversation or create a post that includes trending hashtags for that day.

When also having to focus on the “day job”, using scheduling tools to save time is tempting. However, it is still important to get into the habit of finding a small amount time in your daily routine to make the account personal, engaging and stand out from the noise. This will have far more impact than just relying on “bot-like” scheduled and repeated posts.