To succeed on social media, you need good content. That much is a given. But you know what else you need?
Consistency.
Your audience wants to know what kind of content they can expect from your brand, and they want to know when they can expect brand new content.
Humans are creatures of habit. We like consistency far better than uncertainty. It's much easier to connect to your audience when they know what to expect.
Part of being consistent is keeping your content on-brand. You want a “vibe” that reflects you who are as a company, and this means maintaining a particular brand voice that stays the same across multiple media channels and multiple types of content.
The other half of consistency is scheduling. You need to put out content at regular times, whether it's new blog posts or curated content on your Facebook page.
Over at Sprout Social, a recent post on social media scheduling offers tons of great advice about how to keep your timing consistent.
Social Media Scheduling Tips
It’s probably cool at this point to say you’re on board and understand the benefits to scheduling social media posts. Well, it’s just as important to know how to actually schedule content in the first place.
Native social media platforms weren’t really built for businesses in mind, which means you need a powerful social media scheduling tool.
1. Adopt a Social Media Scheduling Tool for Your Most Valuable Networks
Listen–we’re going to be a little bias on what tool we think performs best for your social media scheduling needs. However, we have the software to backup our reasoning. Sprout Social’s publishing tools lets you see your scheduled content on a weekly calendar. Not only that, but our tools make it absolutely simple to publish to your favorite social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Instagram.
Understand what social networks perform the best for your brand and hone in on them with the insights you can gain from an all-in-one social analytics tool. As you’ll hear from us often, don’t try to tackle all your social networks at once.
Instead, focus on the few networks that actually produce results. As you build out your social content strategy, you’ll be able to tweak and alter your publishing habits to gain more brand loyalists and engaged followers.
Every business on social will have different needs, but this shouldn’t prevent you from effectively tackling the networks you need. With a powerful tool like Sprout, your scheduling needs are answered.
2. Start Filling Your Content Calendar
Once you have your tools set, it’s time to start planning. Building out your social media calendar is the best way to keep consistency, continually publish and remain agile in your industry. There are some important questions to ask when building out your calendar.
First, how many posts per day do you plan to publish and on which social networks? While each network obviously has different posting habits, the amount of followers can also make your situation unique.
For example, posting twice a day to Facebook has always been the go-to for brands. But a HubSpot study found brands that post twice a day with under 10,000 followers see fewer clicks the more they post.
And with Instagram’s latest social media algorithm, brands want the most engagement per post. This drives up the demand for quality content. If you’re wondering if your Instagram content is up to par, check out our Instagram best practices infographic!
Through collective research, CoSchedule dissected the best posting frequency from different studies. They recommended posting between these ranges depending on your audience size, content type and schedule:
Facebook: 1-2 times per day
Instagram: 1-2 times per day
LinkedIn: 0-1 times per day
Twitter: 1-51 times per day (recommended 15 per day)
Pinterest: 3-30 times per day (recommended 11 per day)
For more great advice about how to organize your social media content calendar, check out the full article over at Sprout Social.
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