Most of us are using social media to some level in our businesses. Some of us love it (hands up, me!) and others find it a chore. The thought of finding the time to post, not to mention actually finding things to post in the first place, can send some people into a spin. There’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram…. All of the planning and posting leaves many people feeling quite anxious!
The good news is, you can make it easier on yourself. As for what to post, you can use a mix of your own content, as well as using sites such as Feedly or Scoop.it to find relevant things to share. Then when it comes to actually posting, some people set up a simple excel spreadsheet and plan out a whole month’s worth of posts, spend 1-2 hours scheduling, and then it’s done! This way might be better for you than stressing each week over what to post and then finding the time to do it.
Another option is to hire a social media manager. I work as a Virtual Assistant and one of my tasks for a few of my clients is to schedule their social media posts, via Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Either I have created the content myself for them, or they provide the content and I just schedule it on their behalf.
I am going to focus on just using Facebook here in this blog, but for LinkedIn and Instagram, or cross posting, I also use Hootsuite. It is quite easy to teach yourself how to use Hootsuite if you have some basic understanding of social media, and there are some great tutorials online or you can get someone to help you.
So, back to Facebook. If you want to do it yourself, here is a guide to scheduling your posts:
If you have a business page, you go to Write a Post and then create your post as you would normally. Then you go to the News Feed option at the bottom and click on Share: Now. This drops down a list where you can click Schedule. You can then select a date and time for the post to be published. Then click Schedule Post. It’s that easy!
Some Pages have Groups within them. For example, a Page would be Public, but within that page there is a separate Members only group which is private. If you are an admin of the group, you can schedule posts here too, the button is just in a slightly different place. You still create your post as usual, then look down the bottom for a little clock icon. Click on that to select the date and time you want the post scheduled and then click Schedule post. All done!
As I said above, there are options for posts in LinkedIn and Instagram, and ways to cross post but I think I’ll write a new blog all about that! Now get posting!
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