Question: Our company is looking to start scheduling more posts to help our content (original and curated) reach more potential customers more often. Any suggestions for scheduling in terms of times, tools and methods?
The desire to spread your content out to reach more readers each and every day is great. I believe this comes down to tackling a couple of important issues.
Timing: With almost all social media platforms you have a certain number of people actively on the platform at a given time. When you post they may not be on the site and after a certain amount of time they will likely not see your post even if they visit. With sites like Twitter the half-life is exponentially shorter than the half-life of a post on FB or LinkedIn, but even on those platforms there is very little guarantee that the viewer will scroll much beyond what is on their homepage when they login.
Audience: The way you curate the content can reach a wide and diverse audience and if you just throw out the content the same way over and over you are missing out on a lot of potential eyeballs. Of course most people understand that each platform is different (so don’t share the same message on all social media platforms) and the way a message is curated should be different on each platform. (See this post for more on this topic)
In short your audience (even when small) is diverse in the way they seek and consume content. This can vary from where they find it to when they view it. If you only post at one time or another you are missing out and this is why it makes so much sense to schedule.
While there are many ways to successfully schedule content I have a couple of tools that I’m a big fan of and you should check out.
HootSuite: Great all around social media management tool that you can use to manage multiple networks and scheduling of content.
Buffer: Solid for queuing content (especially Tweets) and sharing at select times.
BundlePost: Powerful tool for managing feeds that deliver the content you seek to share and then customizing with hashtags and easily integrating into HootSuite (As well as several other platforms)
Scheduling content is a great way to reach more people within your targeted audience. How is your company using scheduling and automation to improve its Social Media presence?
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.