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No matter the size of your business, your marketing plan will certainly include posting content to Facebook.
With over two billion monthly active users, Facebook is the world’s water cooler. People go to Facebook to share experiences, shop for products, and discover new ideas. Businesses must have a consistent presence on this social network if they want to be where their customers hang out.
But that can become challenging and time consuming. To do Facebook right and keep up with audience demands requires a lot of dedication. And that’s why most businesses use automation tools to schedule their Facebook posts in advance.
Scheduling your posts will give you immediate paybacks, such as:
Consider these three very persuasive reasons why you should consider scheduling Facebook posts in your small business marketing strategy.
Schedule Facebook posts in advance to stay on top of your social media content calendar. This will be a huge relief for social media managers, who typically deal with a wide range of marketing channels and content formats.
When you schedule your Facebook posts, you have time to focus on the creative aspects of your business, such as brand positioning and content creation.
Manual social media posting offers an extra degree of control, but it comes with restrictions too.
For example, you may miss reaching people in multiple time zones and countries due to inconveniences like meals and sleep. It’s hard to manage an account 24 hours a day without digital assistance.
With automated Facebook posting, your posts can go live around the clock to cater to audiences across time zones. This broadens your reach and helps meet social media marketing kpis like clicks and shares.
Planning your content in advance lets you build a brand that has consistency of tone across all content.
For example, you can carry out a social media audit to analyze the topics and content formats that typically perform best, then lay out a long-term strategy that capitalizes on these strengths. Beats winging it, right?
Whether you use social media for personal branding or corporate communications, consistency is equally important. Plus, you can set a regular schedule for your posts, so your audience gets to know when to expect updates from your company.
Your audience will keep coming back to your content if they know what they are likely to find on your page.
You can schedule posts within the Facebook interface or within a third party post scheduler.
The steps to schedule a Facebook post are similar in both instances. The benefit to scheduling posts on an external platform is that it can be part of a wider marketing plan. This will allow you to schedule posts across marketing channels and see reporting data within one interface.
Before working through the steps outlined below, you will need to set up a Facebook business page. Then you can get started with posting automatically.
Go to your Facebook page and select Publishing Tool’ in the left column. Next, click the Create Post button at the top of the screen, which opens up a window like the one below.
Within this interface, you can create content, post an event, or list a job. For our purposes, we want to create a traditional Facebook post for our brand’s audience.
Facebook now offers a range of content options, including posts that feature multiple videos.
Consider your marketing metrics and any social listening data you have. These sources should keep you on track, and allay your temptation to play around with all the new Facebook tools. Don’t lose sight of the real reason we are posting on Facebook.
Tips for creating a post
Keep these tips in mind when creating the content for your Facebook post.
Once you have populated the content, move on to scheduling the post.
As in the image below, select the Schedule option to open up the calendar interface.
Facebook can advise you on the best times to post, via the Page Insights section of your company’s page. These trends can be counterintuitive and show just how prevalent Facebook is in everyday life. Many people use social media in the workplace, on their journey to work, and at home in the evenings.
Next, all you need to do is select the time and day for the post to go live, and Facebook or your third-party post scheduler will take care of the rest.
Tips for setting your date and time
Selecting the right time to go live can make the difference between a great post and an underwhelming one.
It’s tempting to “set and forget” with your automated posts, but err on the side of caution here.
Should an unexpected event change the market considerably, adapt your communication strategy. Many brands have been caught out by this, scheduling posts in advance and forgetting to tweak the tone when the climate takes a turn.
For example, after news events with a negative impact on people’s everyday lives, it’s best not to go with a jovial tone that promotes conspicuous consumption. Whether you work in retail marketing, restaurant marketing, or dental marketing, be ready to adapt at all times.
Tips for revisiting your plan
Follow these tips to make sure your automated posts are the right fit for your audience.
Watch your marketing analytics dashboard closely to see how well your automated posts are performing against your core social media metrics.
Automating your posts lets you focus your efforts on the more challenging aspects of your marketing strategy. Make changes to your messaging and set up small A/B tests to compare post performance across different audience segments.
Tips for monitoring performance and optimizing
Bear these points in mind when assessing your social media marketing performance.
These social media management tools will take the stress out of your Facebook posting schedule.
Sprout Social schedules Facebook posts, plus a lot more and is an excellent choice.
It provides much additional data to fuel your social media strategy, and the automated post scheduler gets high marks from users.
Hootsuite made its name as a Twitter and Facebook post scheduler and it still excels in this arena.
Hootsuite has also added support for over 35 other social networks and developed proprietary tools to help improve the quality of your content.
Gain is the best tool out there for managing complex content approval processes. Users can share files within the platform and assign tasks, so you can get your posts scheduled as seamlessly as possible. It’s designed with teams in mind.
For companies that require numerous levels of approval before they can hit that Schedule button, Gain provides a lot of benefits.
Scheduling Facebook posts is a marketing 101 strategy today, given the need to post regularly to a varied online audience. It’s too time-consuming to manually post every piece of content.
But time efficiencies aren’t the only benefit of automation. Automated scheduling frees you up to set out a future strategy that caters to a variety of audience segments, across geographies, and in a consistent tone of voice.
Following the steps outlined above will create new opportunities for both efficiency and growth within your marketing strategy.
Our Small Business Expert
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