How to Schedule Social Media Posts In 2023?

If you are running a business on social media, then you know that social media is an essential tool for promoting your brand and getting your message out to a large audience. But just like any other form of marketing, social media marketing requires careful planning and execution to be successful.

You could have the best social media strategy in the world, but are you posting it where it will be seen? Or, to put it another way, are you posting when your target audience is likely to see it?

That's why social media scheduling can be crucial in your content visibility.

This guide will discuss how to schedule social media posts through the basics of social media scheduling, right from developing a plan to creating effective posts. By following these simple steps, you can create engaging content that leads to business growth and success on social media.

What is a Social Media Schedule?

A social media schedule is simply a plan that outlines when and how often you will be posting on social media. It allows you to plan ahead of time what and when you'll post.

A social media calendar can help you streamline and optimize your social media strategy. It should include information such as:

• The audience you are targeting based on time, location, etc.
• When specific types of content will be released (blog posts, infographics, videos)
• How frequently and where to post screenshots or images of your latest posts.
  

What are the Benefits of Social Media Scheduling?

The following are the benefits to social media scheduling:

Increased Engagement With Your Fans and Followers

When you schedule your posts in a way that aligns with the interests of your target audience, you will achieve greater engagement rates. This means that more people will see your content and be likely to interact with it (share it, like it, etc.).

This further leads to increased loyalty among your followers and increased brand awareness.

Improved ROI on Social Media Marketing Budgets

If you're using social media to market your business, then increasing engagement and overall visibility is key in achieving a better Return on Investment (ROI).

Scheduling social media posts in a way that encourages interaction will help to generate more leads and sales from your followers, ultimately resulting in a bigger financial return on investment for your business.

Greater Reach and Visibility for Your Content

When your content is posted in a way that targets your audience and aligns with their interests, it will be more likely to be seen by them.

By posting on relevant topics, you can ensure that your content is seen by as many people as possible – leading to greater visibility and an increased likelihood of conversions.

Reduced Stress and Increased Productivity

Scheduling your social media posts in a way that works for you can reduce the stress of having to post regularly and promote your business.

This leaves you with more time to focus on other important aspects of running your business, such as growing revenues and expanding into new markets.

Maintains the Consistency of Your Brand Image and Message

When you post regularly and engage with your followers, it creates a sense of belonging and builds trust between you and your audience.

This helps ensure that the messages that you're sending are consistent with who you are as a business – which is key in keeping customers loyal over time.

How to Create Your Perfect Social Media Posting Schedule?

Social media scheduling can be challenging and time-consuming. Social media scheduling is a process of picking the right time to post, how often to post, and how to reach your audience.

Various social media marketers in the digital marketing industry use strategies and social media scheduling tools to schedule posts and messages across multiple platforms.

Using the below strategy and the list of social media scheduling tools, you can schedule your posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and more.

Know your audience

The first step in social media scheduling is understanding your audience. You need to know their interests, the time of day they are most active, and what type of posts will engage them the most.

Before creating or curating your content on any social media platform, you must filter and refine your target audience based on demographics, interests, location and other important metrics.

Understand the Social Media Algorithms

Whether news stories or blog posts, curated social media content often performs better on certain social platforms than others.

You need to understand the social media algorithms in order to post effectively across all of your channels. Facebook and Twitter have a strong algorithm that favors links from friends and followers over links from strangers.

LinkedIn has an algorithm that prioritizes contacts connected with you in some way (for example, as colleagues or friends in your network).

In contrast, Instagram has an algorithm that prioritizes photos that are liked and commented on more. The closer your content is to the top of the feed, the more likely it is to be seen by your followers.

How often you post and the quality of content matter the most in your popularity of social channels.

For optimal results, TikTok recommends uploading at least once a day and up to four times a day. Once a day may not seem like much, but consider that you're literally planning, scripting, shooting, and editing the videos.

Plan Your Social Media Campaigns

Plan your large product launches, announcements, and seasonal campaigns ahead of time, in addition to your usual content.

Create a high-level social media content calendar to keep things in order.

Social media is a place where you plan and write your blog posts. It's part of your social content plan to ensure you've got everything you need to get out there.

In general, it's important to think about the following when planning your social media content:

• What are you trying to communicate?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are some of the hot topics or issues affecting them right now?
  

Analyze the Performance of Your Campaigns

Monitor your social media performance monthly to make sure you're hitting your objectives.

Track likes, shares, and comments across all of your posts and determine where improvements can be made.

It is really important to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Before spending money on a campaign, it's important to measure its effectiveness. This will help you decide whether or not a campaign is worth running in the first place.

Keep Ideal Posting Frequency on Social Media

To increase engagement, it’s important to keep your ideal posting frequency on social media consistent.

After you've established a rough framework for the piece of content you'll create, the following step is to determine the best posting frequency.

Based on your target demographic, your timetable is likely to be one-of-a-kind. 

Make Sure to Curate Some Content as Well

Make sure that you post regularly and curate some of the best content for your audience.

Content curation might be another aspect of the calendar. Besides posting your own content, if you prefer to share other people's work, you'll want to set aside some time in your calendar to queue up other people's work.

In general, curation takes place in the present. You share freshly published information from other blogs and websites. In these circumstances, you can leave certain schedule slots available on the day of the event to fill in with curated content.

You may share some evergreen content from the past or pick content that might be trendy.

Use Social Media Templates and Social Media Scheduler Tools

Trying to time all of your posts perfectly can be difficult. But using social media templates or scheduler tools can make the process a little easier.

If you don't currently have a content creation process in place, start by producing content a week ahead of time. Large campaigns, of course, will necessitate greater planning.

Various social media calendars or templates are available for free on the internet. These templates suggest different types of content to share, such as your most recent blog post, a video, or something curated.

Change the content categories to reflect the topics you'll be writing about.

Now that you have created the templates, posting manually will take a lot of time and effort. That's why businesses turn to social media scheduling tools that help schedule the social media posts by connecting with your social media accounts.

Best Social Media Scheduling Tools

Here is the list of best tools for scheduling and social media management:

Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling tool using which you can automate social media campaigns.

Buffer is simple to use and works with all major social media platforms. It's similar to Hootsuite, but it has a more casual feel. With Buffer, you can schedule your posts, set a posting schedule and make sure they're published at the right time.

You can schedule posts to be published at different times. Buffer can also help you manage your social media accounts.

Pros:

• It's simple to use
• Can schedule posts for different times
• Helps manage your social media accounts
• Customer support is quick to respond.
  

Cons:

• Buffer lacks a critical function, such as a Content Curation capability for discovering new and trending content.
  

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media scheduling tools. It runs on all the major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hootsuite has over 16 million members worldwide and has been in the social media business for a long time. It allows you to schedule posts on prominent social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Hootsuite lets you schedule your posts, measure how well they're doing and even track engagement levels. It also has a “team” feature that allows multiple people to share a single account. This makes it easy for teams to manage their social media together.

Pros:

• All-in one interface for social media accounts
• Can measure how well your posts are performing
• Has a team feature that makes it easy to share an account with other team members.

Cons:

• Hootsuite is overpriced and may not be fit for small businesses.
  

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media scheduling tool specifically designed for small businesses. It allows you to schedule posts, measure how well they're doing and even track engagement levels.

Sprout Social also has a content curation feature to help you discover new and trending content.

It's more of a business tool with features like a smart inbox, detailed social media analytics, and customized reporting. When it comes to evaluating your entire social media performance, analytics can be really useful. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest are all supported by Sprout Social.

By directing your efforts in the appropriate direction, Sprout Social can help increase the quality of your work.

Pros:

• The bot builder from Sprout Social makes it easy to create, administer, and manage chatbots in Facebook Messenger.
• This social media scheduling software may group your team members for improved collaboration.
• The tool also provides detailed social media analytics.
• Sprout Social also integrates with third-party tools like Zendesk, Hubspot, and UserVoice for support teams to manage user issues without leaving the dashboard.

Cons:

• For social media publishing with teams, Sprout Social can be somewhat costly, as it charges for each team member/user you invite.
  

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a social media management tool that provides metrics, scheduling and content curation tools.

Zoho also has a chatbot builder that makes it easy to create and administer chatbots in Facebook Messenger. This can be particularly useful for integrating with customer service channels.

It allows you to collaborate with others, track brand mentions, and manage social media campaigns.

You may use Zoho Social to manage your social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.

Social listening and SmartQ predictions are just a few of the great features included in this social media posting tool. Zoho Social recommends the optimum time to share your posts for maximum engagement based on your profile metrics.

Pros:

• Zoho Social offers CRM functionality using its Zoho software, where you can engage and manage your prospects effectively.
• You can generate automated reports that your clients will get in the format and frequency that you specify. You may also include a personalized note and include team members in the delivery list.
• This platform is easy to use and highly integrated.

Cons:

• The analytics feature of Zoho is not so intuitive.
  

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a social media management tool that enables you to easily schedule and publish posts, track engagement, measure results, and create semi-automated follow-up sequences.

It also integrates with other marketing tools such as Hootsuite so that you can monitor all your social media activities in one place.

It offers easy content curation features, including capturing customer feedback from surveys or interviews.

This information can be used to improve your customer service and social media marketing efforts.

You can administer your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr social profiles using CoSchedule.

This scheduling tool is compatible with blogging tools such as WordPress and Hubspot, which allows you to organize and publish your blogs from your CoSchedule account. With a re-queue feature, you can also reshare your best-performing posts.

Pros:

• This social media management tool enables you to easily schedule and publish posts, track engagement, measure results, create semi-automated follow-up sequences and integrate with other marketing tools such as Hootsuite.
• It also has content curation features, including capturing customer feedback from surveys or interviews, which can be used to improve your customer service and social media marketing efforts.
• If you fall out on the social media posting schedule, it automatically substitutes it with your top-performing posts.
  

StatusBrew

StatusBrew is another social media management tool that integrates with other marketing applications, such as Hootsuite, and provides valuable insights into your online presence.

It offers a suite of tools to help you measure and manage your social media performance, including:

• A dashboard that displays all your active posts across all platforms in one place.
• Targeted demographic reporting, so you can see the impact of your content on different target audiences.
• Integrated analytics to measure engagement, shares and likes across all your posts.
• A newsfeed that showcases the most popular content on your site, as well as trending topics and influencers.

StatusBrew also offers advanced scheduling options so you can publish more posts per day, weeks or months depending on your goals.

Pros:

• It has decent analytics and reporting features.
• You can also target the audiences based on social listening capabilities.
• You would also get the security features in enterprise plans.

Cons:

• UI needs a bit of improvement.
  

Conclusion

Social media scheduling tools are essential for brands of all shapes and sizes. They help brands plan, schedule and execute posts on a daily basis so they can save time and focus on their core business.

It's important to remember that social media scheduling tools are only as good as the content you produce. So make sure you're taking advantage of the right tool for your needs.

There are a number of great social media management tools available on the market. These tools provide valuable insights into your online presence while also offering easy scheduling options and advanced analytics.

If you're looking to improve your customer service efforts or increase the effectiveness of your social media marketing, any of the aforementioned tools should be suitable for you.