Here’s a confession: I don’t schedule my social media posts. I know numerous freelance writers and creatives who do plan out their posts each week and swear by social media scheduling. Naturally plenty of businesses do this because it’s vital they have a consistent presence and many have the benefit of social media managers whose job it is to maintain their postings.
There are a few different reasons I don’t schedule my posts. I don’t always have a regular batch of alerts or messages that I want to publish each week. I share links to my published stories when they go live and when I happen upon things during the week I post them. I’m tending to post more on LinkedIn because, as a newly minted full-time writer working for myself, that’s where a lot of the work is with the content and marketing managers.
Why soloists need a schedule
There’s no doubt that as a freelancer or independent creative you need a consistent presence on social media that covers the major platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. You might not see the results from a single posts or a particular platform, but you never know who will see your post and how you can build a profile through social media.
Social media scheduling can let you project yourself and your work into the social domain in an organised but restrained fashion. The goal is to have a reliable stream of posts that will attract followers but limit you from spending too much time on it. We can too easily trick ourselves into feeling like social media is real work, but it’s just busy work that takes up precious time and mental bandwidth, both of which are limited. Like most things, used in moderation and with intention, it can work for you, and not the other way around. After writing this, I’m going to sign up for one of the platforms and try out scheduling for a month to see how it goes.
Here I’ll give you five good reasons to schedule social media posts if you’re a freelance or independent creative.
1. Develop a unique profile
It’s an efficient way to show your personality and expertise by joining in conversations, liking and sharing posts on topics related to your interests or professional niche. Develop a group of loyal followers, build your presence and gain the attention of commissioning editors and content managers with a consistent social media presence.
2. Connect with thought leaders
Find and connect with the experts, industry leaders, change makers, thought leaders and others and widen your professional network fast by finding, following and connecting with others. They may give you ideas for stories, points of view for thought leadership articles and links to useful research. For this one, your scheduling platform can collect and list your retweets and @s for easy reference.
3. Research and analysis
If you have a write about a particular topic, it’s going to help if you conduct a social media audit to understand what the conversation is on social and things like hashtags and even potential keywords. If you’re scheduling your posts, your more likely to have a wider network to draw on quickly.
4. Promote your work
This is a big one. Prospective commissioning editors and content managers will want to see your clips. Keep a file on hand to quickly share them across social media and if you schedule them each week or so you’ll be sure to maintain your presence and show off your work.
5. Time management
If you work for yourself, time is money, your money. Social media is an amazing place to connect and share but it’s also something of a black hole for time and attention. Schedule your posts once each week to avoid jumping into social media for one thing and then finding yourself lost there for ages. Get it all organised and sorted for the week and then you can get on with the real work.
Social scheduling platforms
There are a bunch of different platforms that let you schedule social media posts. Here’s a basic rundown of a few to try, most with free version to get you going. And there’s also ‘micro-scheduling’ or automation so that when you post to Instagram, for example, you can also post to Facebook and Twitter if you link your accounts. You may also want to develop your own content calendar to make it easier to have posts at the ready when it’s time to schedule. I’ll cover that in the next blog post.
HootSuite
HootSuite is a popular social media dashboard. It even has a free course, social media marketing, which I took a few years ago that’s an excellent introduction to using the major platforms for marketing and includes how to use each platform’s analytics tool.
Social Oomph
Social Oomph is a social media dashboard much like HootSuite with the added benefit of features such as auto-follow and auto-message. It has a long list of plug-ins including Reddit and Discord and connects to major blog platforms like WordPress.
Need more ideas?
If you’re still looking for more options, there are quite a few more in this list on the Blogging Wizard website and this post has a good run down of social media tools including where to source images, design posts and more.
Main image credit: Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
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