Last week, we talked about self-promotion and how you need people around you who will be willing to promote you and that you need to be willing to promote others.
Why? Because of the bigger bloggers I work for, all of them post around the clock on social media. Day. Night. Weekends. When you’re probably asleep (but the other half of the world is wide awake).
So how do they do this? Well no one is staying up 24 hours a day to post on social media. Instead, they utilize a variety of scheduling tools.
Yes, we’ve mentioned that they have staff – virtual assistants like me – or family and friends that help them out. But even with people to help out, no one can do it all and do it 24 hours a day.
The lesson here? You need to utilize scheduling programs as much as possible. There are tons out there.
Facebook has it’s own scheduler. As a rule of thumb, you should use their scheduler instead of a third party client. It’s probably no surprise, but Facebook doesn’t play nice with things like Buffer or HootSuite or CoSchedule. The nice part about their scheduler is that it’s pretty simple to use and you can knock out a lot of posts in a short amount of time. Take an hour a week and just schedule out some shares from your share group, your own blog posts (this is great for repromoting old content!), or videos you find on Facebook that you think your followers might like. I use this one a lot for clients.
I use CoSchedule for Twitter and Google +. It’s a great WordPress plug in because it acts as an editorial calendar, and walks you through the best process for scheduling immediate and future posts.
Pinterest has several options for scheduling. Services like ViralTag, Ahalogy and TailWind help you schedule your pins. I’ll be honest here and tell you that I don’t currently use a scheduling service for Pinterest and both ViralTag and Ahalogy are on wait list. Personally, I prefer to keep my pinning more organic and not scheduled, but I know many bloggers who swear by them. I’m always open to trying it though. What do I have to lose?
There are other options of course. You can use something like Buffer or HootSuite to schedule your tweets, shares to Google +, etc. Both of those services are free (or free to a point) and keep all of your social media in one place.
It’s really up to you! Scheduling helps you maintain a presence on social media as much or as little as you want – even when you can’t actually be present.
What do you think? Do you currently use scheduling to grow your social media presence? If so, what are your favorite apps or programs for scheduling. Leave me a comment!
7 Comments
I use the FB scheduler, but have not been happy with the free Pinterest scheduling options and really, really don’t like HootSuite. That means that I do most of my sharing the “old fashioned” way.
Nothing wrong with old fashioned if it works for you! Remember, you only have to blog the way YOU blog. 🙂
I use the Facebook scheduler and Hootsuite for Twitter. I’m with you on the organic pinning though. Plus, I don’t want to pay for scheduling anything yet.
Totally understandable. All those apps get expensive! And I kinda like just pinning for myself and not lining up hundreds to be pinned at random times. I need something for me. 🙂
I just can’t seem to figure out the Pinning programs. I have multiple versions, and they confuse me. I don’t know what I am doing wrong?!
Since I only tried Tailwind (and even then, I don’t use it) I can’t speak to their difficulty, but I would say that my best suggestion would be to pick one and try to figure it out. More than that would be too much!
Yaaaa I use Hoot Suite! ha ha. WHOOPS – maybe I should change my ways!