Promoting your content over your social media platforms is by now a no-brainer. Everyone that makes content that has a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. will add their content whenever they publish it. However, it is no longer enough to just share it on your social media channels. The newest and most fruitful strategy is to make a schedule for continuously post your social content over a given period of time.

Start with a template

The smartest social posting template that we have found is from a Kissmetrics blog post titled “How to easily double your traffic from social media”. In which they talk about different strategies and methods to increase your social traffic. The biggest take away from me was this graphic –

Now this is just an example that they have used, which makes it a great starting point for us.  Once we set this up, we saw that many brands’ audiences engaged differently than expected. So, it is necessary adapt the schedule to best fit the needs of your brand. But for this blog, we will use this as your starting template to begin building out your best social post publishing schedule. Here is how to get started –

Look at your Competition

One of the easiest ways to see what types of posts people are engaging with, is to look to your closest competitors. Look to see if they are posting their content multiple times to increase their reach. Once you have a good idea of the most popular posts from your competitors, look to the leaders of the industry you are in. Do the same research you did with your close competitors and note the difference in how they post. Now using that insight, you can make a plan on how you can improve your posting schedule, headlines and posts based on their user engagement.

Use your Insights

Facebook insights can help you know what day and what time of day are the better times to post your content. Look to see when your engagement is highest and make your schedule around that. The first time you publish a piece of content it should get those spots first and foremost. Now, for the other good times to post, be sure to use these when you are reposting your content to continue to get the most reach to your audience to see your content.

Twitter insights are a great way to test the types of headlines that your audience will engage with. When you are posting different tweets about the same content try testing different snippets from your content to see what resonates with your audience. The first day you tweet out your content, try the same headline but then test one tweet with an image. Make sure that you are tracking your posts and engagement. This will help you to build a better schedule to promote your content.

Track Everything

There are a slew of tracking tools that you can use as a marketer. Here, we use Sprout Social to keep tabs on the accounts that we run. It helps with scheduling, content discovery but more importantly it tracks your posts and measures engagement, shares, likes and reach. Well-rounded tools can be expensive though. Using a spreadsheet can be a cost-effective way of doing exactly what these tools do for you. Be sure to track all the variations of your posts that you use so you can measure their effectiveness against each other.

What to Avoid

Reposting content several times can do wonders for your engagement and reach but there are pitfalls that you can fall into if you are not careful.

Stay away from –

• Reposting the same posts (without changing any copy or image)
• Posting too many times in a day (see: social media fatigue)
• Not being consistent with your scheduling
• Not customizing posts for the platform. 140 character tweets with proper image size and hashtags vs. Facebook post with proper image size and no hashtags.

Making a posting schedule for your brand starting with the Kissmetrics template can be a great jumping off point to greatly grow your social media presence along with your reach and content engagement. Remember that there is no special formula for when and how to post. It is up to you to do the extra research and find the best platforms, times and days to post. Learn the different styles of headlines and images that resonate with your audience and stick to your plan once you have it in place. If you need some more advice on social posting or your digital presence, give us a call and we can help you figure it out.

Happy Marketing!