Scheduling your Social…

There’s always going to be a debate over whether scheduling social posts with third party scheduling tools makes them fall victim to the ‘algorithm’ leading to the reach and engagement of posts being affected. I’m not here to address or judge that! I’m here to share my experiences of different scheduling tools and a few of the benefits and limitations!

Being a small business is tough and you can be pulled in so many directions. Ultimately, there may be a million reasons why you may need to schedule social posts. Maybe you don’t have the time to post on a regular basis, but can set aside the time once a week/month to schedule in some general posts, you could be serving customers or clients in an area of your business and so can’t post when your customers are actively online, you’re planning a holiday and want to ensure that there is still consistent content on your profiles or you simply wish to use a combination of scheduled and ‘in the moment’ posts.

There’s so much advice out there, at times it can be hard not to become overwhelmed by all the “do’s and don’ts” when it comes to posting on social media. Firstly, I’d just like to say, by all means listen to the advice, but do what suits your business and lifestyle; otherwise the risk can develop of it becoming a ‘chore’, you won’t enjoy it and your content can then become affected as well as your mental wellbeing.

There’s a whole range of social media management software out there that offer varying ranges of tools from scheduling content to managing all your accounts in one place, looking at engagement, insights, audience etc. This post was triggered by a conversation that I recently had regarding the options of using scheduling tools within software and platforms that people are already using rather than paying for software with the sole use of using it to schedule posts!

Due to the nature of my business and working for clients in a variety of sectors, I’ve used a range of software and scheduling tools including Hootsuite, which I have to admit I loved! It appealed to my organised side! It was so easy to use and with the options of being able to set up streams and have everything arranged in an easy to use planner! I remember being horrified in a previous role, when asked to try out alternative more cost effective options as it really helped with my time management, when I was only contracted for a small number of hours and a significant number of posts were required! However, the digital world is constantly changing and more options are constantly becoming available … and with more challenging economic times, businesses are increasingly looking at ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs!

So, back to my conversation which was triggered by an individual highlighting the ‘Content Planner’ feature in Canva and someone asking if they should switch from using Meta Business Suite to schedule social posts! I thought, I’d share my experiences of using both here!

Canva is now the go to to software for many small businesses to design their social posts, so many are already subscribing to Canva Pro, which offers a wider range of tools than the basic free version. If you are already designing your social posts within Canva and are subscribed to the Pro version then you will have the option within this to schedule your posts using their ‘Content Planner’! If you are using Canva already this offers a convenient option for scheduling as you no longer need to download designs and then upload them to another platform. The planner allows you to schedule your posts to a range of social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn (personal profile and business page), Pinterest, Tumblr and more, unlike Meta Business Suite that only publishes to their platforms Facebook and Instagram. However, that’s not to say that Canva doesn’t have it’s limitations just like some other general social media scheduling tools.

If you want to add a simple post including a photo/video, website link and some hashtags to a social post, the Canva content planner is great. However, if you wish to add more detail to your posts such as tagging in other accounts or products and adding a location with your photo/video particularly on accounts like Instagram, this is where there are some drawbacks as this feature doesn’t have the option. You could schedule the posts, but you’d need to login directly to your accounts once the scheduled post was published and edit it! (The same goes for tagging other accounts within your post text on Facebook and Linked In). Even though this could be seen as ‘time lost’, to keep on top of your social media and monitor engagement, best practise would mean regularly logging into your accounts anyway.

Although, my ‘organised side’ loves having everything in one place, I have ultimately settled on using a combination of the two when needing to schedule posts. I will tailor to meet clients individual requirements, but in the majority of cases for now, I’ve stayed with Meta Business Suite to schedule Facebook and Instagram posts, but used Canva particularly for LinkedIn. However, this post will probably become ‘out-of-date’ as soon as it’s published, as the area is constantly evolving!