Maintaining social profiles is essential to the success of any social strategy or brand awareness campaign. This can be really difficult in the world of business, though, as your calendar changes from day to day and you won’t always be available to post on all of your different channels. This is where social scheduling comes in; by preparing blocks of posts across your channels, your brand appears more coherent and your message can be holistically crafted, rather than relying on your daily doses of inspiration.
What does social scheduling mean?
Some social platforms, such as Facebook, have software built into them which allows you to write posts and then specify a time that that message should be sent from your account, whether you are online at the time or not.
Some platforms, like Twitter and Instagram, don’t have social scheduling abilities incorporated into them, but third-party management apps like SproutSocial or HootSuite allow you to schedule posts on these platforms.
What are its benefits?
The biggest benefit for your business is that by scheduling blocks of tweets at a time, you’re more likely to convey exactly the branding message you’re looking for. It gives you a chance to redraft and edit posts before they become public, and maybe even have another member of your team glance at them too. Writing your week’s tweets (for example) all in one sitting means that the messages are far more likely to be coherent with one another, rather than posting in individual moments every day, and you’re also more likely to be mentally focussed in one 25 minute session than you are in 5 5-minute breaks spread across your week.
Additionally, when you take a day off from your business, you should really take that day off. Without social scheduling, your customers might notice your absence, and your brand might be hurt; either that, or you’d have to be working to post on your day off, which defeats the point of the break.
Of course, there is a value to live-posting; you should always have one eye on trending topics that could be related to your business and you should be available to react to customer interaction (positive or negative). Any successful social media strategy should incorporate both scheduled and live postings and will benefit from the advantages of both styles deployed together.
If your social media profiles could benefit from social scheduling, or you want to rethink your whole strategy, talk to AsOne today. You can contact us on 0161 368 9100 or on our website.
