7 Social Media Scheduling Tips and Tricks

You can spend weeks crafting the perfect social media post, only to have it flop and fail to engage because it goes live at the wrong time.

This is where scheduling is your greatest asset, giving you the opportunity to help your content gain serious traction.

Of course, to master scheduling, you need to know what strategies and solutions work best, so here are just a few tips to assist you.

Software tools make life easier

Posting content to social media at the right time can become a complex responsibility, even if you know what you are doing.

This is where tools for social media scheduling come into play, letting you orchestrate entire campaigns across different platforms and keep them completely in sync with one another. All thanks to the use of the APIs available.

Aside from these advantages, the top tools are also great for collaboration, allowing different team members to contribute to projects without needing to go through the rigmarole of endless emails and meetings.

Use data to your advantage

If you have had some posts succeed while others fall short of expectations in the past, it is not enough to chalk this up to blind luck. Instead, by delving into the data relating to each and every post, you can see whether your current scheduling tactics are proving effective or lacking panache.

Even a broad overview of the average levels of engagement seen at different times of the day on different platforms can indicate when your target audience is most active and alert. This can give you a top-level template for future post-scheduling.

Harness hashtags

Appropriate use of hashtags can go a long way to making your scheduled social posts as visible as possible, without having to go down the paid ad route.

That is not to say that you can simply stick any old hashtag on a post and hope for the best, or load as many as possible in and cross your fingers. Instead, you need to research hashtags carefully and aim for your posts to piggyback on terms that are both relevant and timely.

You can try to follow trends and ride the wave of popular hashtags, but better still is getting your own hashtag going. This is only really possible if the quality of your content is high.

Create content you are proud to post

Speaking of content quality, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you publish posts at the perfect point in the day; if the content is bland or irrelevant, it will still sink without a trace.

Once again it pays to make rigorous use of the analytics tools that all social platforms offer, in combination with the third-party software that can help with scheduling. This will let you judge whether your content is hitting the mark with your audience, or not connecting.

Not every post needs to be a minutely tuned nugget of pure brilliance, of course. But equally, it is better to be more sparing in your posting and invest more time and money in the quality.

Be consistent

One of the reasons that scheduling social media posts is so sensible is that aside from being convenient, it helps to make your brand appear consistent and reliable on the platforms you occupy.

In turn, this means that your audience will be expecting to see your posts pop up in their timelines. This regularity will foster familiarity alongside it, and people will actively look forward to your output.

On the other hand, if you post sporadically you will not gel with your followers and might end up being more of a nuisance than a benefit in their social spheres.

Follow up on interactions

It is nice to have your social posts fired off automatically at the time that will improve their chances of hitting hard, but that does not mean you can put your feet up and get on with something else when your content is published.

Specifically, if people are compelled to engage with your posts by publishing a comment or reply of their own, then you need to follow up to meet expectations.

Responding to these interactions will help to build a bond with your audience, and improve customer relations in a major way. Leaving customers hanging for hours or even days, on the other hand, could harm your reputation.

Check up on the competition

The final thing to do if you want to become a social media scheduling master is to see what works for your competitors and determine whether or not you could learn lessons from their efforts.

Directly copying content strategies is obviously a bad idea, but if you can see that rivals are engaging audiences at particular times or with particular approaches to posting, then there is no harm in gleaning your own insights from this.