“The key to success is not in spending time, but in investing it.” These famous words by Stephen R Covey are especially true when it comes to social media.
Knowing how to schedule social media posts on different platforms can really help you gain more traction, even when you are not online and when your audience is most active. However, while scheduling, you will soon realize that content scheduling is not the same for different platforms. Each one has its own peak time and preferences.
To achieve this, you need a good scheduling tool to help you stay on point with a consistent content calendar and regular posting, which is the backbone of social media success.
This blog will help you learn about scheduling social media posts, the best tool, top tips, and creating a perfect content calendar. Before that, let’s look at the reasons why it is vital to schedule posts.
Why Should You Schedule Social Media Posts?
Firstly, when you schedule social media posts, you free yourself from all the burdens that are keeping you from creating a remarkable social media campaign.
It eliminates manual work that demands manpower and time. With the help of a social media scheduler, everything can be easily automated.
Below are more reasons to schedule your social media posts in advance.
To Schedule for Different Social Channels
Every social media channel has its own rules and guidelines, along with the audience type and their preference. When you schedule posts in advance, you are able to separate every channel with different strategies and content. This way, you stay relevant and attractive to your audience.
To Organize Your Content Calendar
After working so hard on an engaging content calendar that follows all the latest trends, it’s heartbreaking to see your strategy scatter because of last-minute hassle. Scheduling social media posts beforehand protects your calendar from last-minute panic. With such content calendar tools, you can schedule posts for odd hours for a global audience.
To Post at the Best Time (for every channel)
Still, there are brands, SMBs, and marketers who do not know the importance of posting their content on the right channel at the right time. Maybe it’s because they don’t have scope for that in between their manual posting schedule. But, those who use apps to schedule social media posts are always ready with their content for the best time to post.
Now that you know how to schedule posts, you must be curious about how to schedule social media posts. Let’s learn the procedure for scheduling posts with SocialPilot next.
How to Schedule Social Media Posts with SocialPilot?
SocialPilot is a social media scheduling tool that lets you automate content for all social channels with just a few clicks on desktop and mobile. This makes scheduling easy for thousands of marketing agencies and SMBs and, unlike other schedulers, gives them satisfaction with their spending.
Here’s how to create a social media schedule with SocialPilot:
1. Log In to SocialPilot Account
The first step is to open your SocialPilot dashboard and click on “Posts.”
2. Go to “Posts” then “Calendar”
In the drop-down options, click on “Calendar.” This will take you to your personalized content calendar, which showcases all your scheduled content for all platforms and accounts in one place.
3. Click on a Selected Date on the Calendar
On the content calendar, to schedule content, hover over any future date and click on it to create a post. This will open your post-creation window with all the scheduling options.
4. Create a Post and Upload Media
Now, you can create your post and upload the media either with SocialPilot Canva Integration or a device.
SocialPilot also has built-in AI assistants to help you generate content, copy, and relevant hashtags for your posts or develop content ideas.
Unlike many other social media scheduling tools, SocialPilot provides a post preview so you can visualize how your post will appear on your audience’s feed.
5. Select Account and Scheduling Options
Next, select the account for which you want to schedule the post and click on “Schedule Post.” Here, you will encounter several advanced scheduling options, such as Share Now, Share Next, Queue Post, Repeat Post, and Schedule Post.
6. Schedule the Post
When you click on Schedule Post, a pop-up will ask you to select a future date and time for scheduling. Once the date and time are set, click on “Schedule.”
Voila! You Are Done!
Know More About Scheduling on Different Platforms With SocialPilot:
4 Things That Can “Go Wrong” While Scheduling Social Media Posts
Scheduling social media posts is a powerful strategy for maintaining consistent posting, but it has its own pitfalls. Moving forward, we will explore the common mishaps that occur while scheduling and how using the right tool is essential to avoid these issues.
Let’s dive in and learn how SocialPilot provides effective solutions to the common challenges that arise when managing and scheduling posts across multiple platforms:
1. Account Disconnection
Often, the connection between your social media account and the scheduling tools is lost due to password changes or security issues, causing the scheduling and publishing failure.
Solution: With robust account management features, SocialPilot alerts you immediately when your account gets disconnected. This makes it easy to reconnect and avoid any possible interruption in scheduling.
2. Incorrect Asset Sizes and Dimensions
Every platform has specific size and dimension requirements for assets and limitations. Not adhering to these can lead to poorly featured posts and impact how your content is engaged.
Solution: SocialPilot provides guidelines pop-ups and tools to adjust your assets with platform-specific requirements and lets you tailor content for each platform so your content always looks the best.
3. Overlapping Content and Posting Errors
Planning and scheduling multiple posts for multiple platforms can lead to scheduling errors and content overlapping.
Solution: SocialPilot provides a calendar interface to help visualize your content for all the platforms in one place. This avoids content overlapping and ensures diversity on different social channels.
4. Time Zone Confusion
When you bulk-schedule posts on various platforms, incorrect timing creates huge confusion due to time zone differences and thus reduces the effectiveness of your content.
Solution: With SocialPilot, you can easily visualize time zones for different posts and make sure that your content is published at the right time when your audience is most active, regardless of their geographic location.
This is how, by addressing common challenges, SocialPilot ensures time efficiency and maximizes your posts’ effectiveness. It protects you from minor issues that can cause big errors in your social media management.
5 Best Practices to Create Your Social Media Posting Schedule Like a Pro
Building a blueprint for social media success is as essential as scheduling posts for a better online presence. Creating a social media schedule sounds like a very overwhelming task, but with these tips it can be done easily.
1. Employ a Social Media Scheduling Tool
Don’t tell me it took you days to plan your social media schedule, and you are still unsatisfied! You need a feature-packed social media scheduling tool. A tool that can help you integrate all the elements and automate several portions of your work.
Tools like SocialPilot, Buffer, Hootsuite, SproutSocial, etc, are a few best social media scheduling tools you can choose from. But, regarding the most reliable tool, SocialPilot stands out from the rest with its premium features designed to simplify social media posting. It makes scheduling and publishing content on all major platforms an effortless process.
2. Know Your Audience and their Active Hours
Before you jot down content ideas and set up posting frequency, it’s essential to track down your audience. Who are they, what do they do, when are they most active, and where are they from? etc. You can gather these details with analytical insights and learn more about your audience. This data will make a path for your content calendar and a persona for your niche audience.
For this understanding, social media scheduling tools like SocialPilot offer analytics and the best time to post with the heat map based on their most active and engaging hours.
3. Choose Relevant Platform
Once you have established your audience persona and goals, you can select the most suitable platform for your activities and work on the type of content each platform will promote. If your brand is B2B or a marketing agency, your audience will likely be active on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. At the same time, if you are targeting B2C or young individuals, you will find suitable minds on Instagram and YouTube.
LinkedIn will be a more suitable channel if you want to promote professional content like articles and blogs. On the other hand, to share content like DIY or tutorials, Pinterest and YouTube will be right for you.
4. Set a Posting Frequency for Each Platform
After establishing all these factors about who, how, and where to engage with, you can move on to the technical part of setting a social media schedule. Start setting up and experimenting with the time zones to understand how your audience engages with your content.
Each platform has a different niche in terms of content and audience. So, having a tool like SocialPilot and its performance analytics can help you gain insights about where to post and how often to post. It can also let you create a customized time schedule for each platform and account.
5. Plan a Flexible and Relevant Content Calendar
The next step is to start brainstorming and find ideas to fill your months of content calendar. While preparing content for your social channels, make sure to include trends, holidays, important events, brand promotions, etc., to enhance the relevancy for the audience.
When you plan your social media content calendar, ensure to be flexible. Why?
Because social media algorithms can change without any head-up, leaving you in a dilemma to catch up.
Leave space for last-minute trends and algorithm changes if you don’t want to be the last one still trying the “ice bucket challenge” when any trend rolls in!
Summing Up
SocialPilot is the best social media management tool known for its accurate and reliable scheduling and planning abilities. The intuitive social media calendar that SocialPilot has is one of the biggest attractions that 13000+ users swear by.
If you are serious about maximizing your social media impact, you should know how to schedule social media posts with SocialPilot. It not only lets you schedule posts on every social channel but also has features like Bulk Scheduling, with which you can schedule up to 500 posts at once.
With an easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, SocialPilot makes every scheduling process fast. So why make your audience wait for the amazing content you have planned? Take a 14-day free trial and start scheduling today!
