Don't get overwhelmed at the idea of posting content on social channels regularly, write it in bulk (or get someone else to do it) and then schedule it! (Here's some inspiration for finding good content to schedule too.)
How do I schedule my social content?
There are lots of different tools that can do this. I'm going to talk about scheduling straight to Facebook and two tools that will let you schedule to multiple other channels.
Scheduling directly to Facebook
I can't help but be a bit of a pessimist when it comes to Facebook not penalizing third party apps when posting to your Facebook page. That means that I recommend that when you schedule content to Facebook, you do it right in Facebook.
The good news is that it's really simple. When you go to your Facebook page, write the post as you would if you were posting it right away. Instead of clicking post, click to the right of post and select Schedule.
Editing or making changes is just as easy by going to the very top of your Facebook page and selecting Publishing Tools and then going in to your scheduled posts tab on the left.
Using Hootsuite for scheduling
Hootsuite is a tool that I use more for engaging and organizing my content (mostly Twitter in fact) but it has a lot of capabilities for scheduling. A free account lets you connect 3 accounts and a paid account will let you add more accounts and more users.
Hootsuite connects to:
- Facebook (personal account, pages and groups)
- Google+
- Wordpress
Scheduling is easy and you can schedule the same content to multiple channels (as long as that makes sense - remember that most of the time you want to use different language and tone depending on the channel). Select the channel you want to schedule to from the dropdown on the left and select the calendar to open up the scheduling options.
There are two easy ways to find the content afterwards if you want to change anything. Either select the publisher icon on the left hand toolbar (it looks like a paper airplane)
or create a stream for scheduled content, which is my preferred way of doing it.
Using Buffer to schedule content
The tool that I use the most for scheduling is Buffer. Like Hootsuite it has limited capability unless you have a paid account (which I have).
Buffer connects to:
- Facebook (personal, page or group)
- LinkedIn (personal or page)
- Google+
You can schedule to multiple channels at once and easily access your scheduled content by selecting your channel on the left hand side and viewing the queue tab.
Buffer also has a plugin you can install to Chrome that makes it easy for you to schedule content as you're browsing the web. It even has an advanced schedule that lets you schedule the content to post more than once, which is handy for scheduling your own new content.
Which tool should you pick?
A lot of what you pick comes down to preference. Scheduling will take a lot of the daily pressure off of your online marketing work, so even though learning a new tool can feel like a big time commitment it will save you time in the long run - for real :)
I find Buffer a bit easier to use because everything is bigger and there is more white space. Hootsuite has the ability to see more at once which can make it a more useful dashboard for some. I recommend you give both a try with the free version and see if you have a preference.
