Using Scheduling Tools for Your Social Media Content

When devising a Social Media content calendar, it can often be more efficient to you’re your content in ‘blocks’ of weeks or months at a time. Whilst this may involve a more labour-intensive approach initially, it will prove time-saving in the long-term. 

Once you have established a rich and engaging content calendar, there are a wealth of free, digital ‘scheduling tools’ available to help automate the process of posting that content and most importantly save time. Completing this in advance will free up your resources to concentrate on other marketing and business functions. 

Whilst each scheduling tool promotes slightly different benefits, they all offer the ability to;  

• Link to multiple Social Media profiles and platforms 
• Use a calendar to ‘plot’ future scheduled content that automatically posts on a date and time of your choosing 
• Integrate images, videos and links into your posts 
• Provide basic analytics and insights into the performance of each post

The scheduling tools seamlessly integrate with your Social Media channels via an ‘API’. Whilst this may sound complex, it essentially involves an initial configuration of settings within your profile or dashboard, after which you can post as much content as you prefer, in one sitting. 

Four of the most popular scheduling tools include;  

• Buffer (Watch overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHWHAeWQ1u8)  

• Hootsuite (Watch overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVwBPh-CHJs)  
• Canva (Watch overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztcSCcRIfWc)  
• Sendible (Watch overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqg61sPBdH4)