How to Create a Winning Social Media Schedule

As a business, it’s important to stay in touch.

And by staying in touch, we don’t mean bombarding your subscribers with unsolicited emails or anything of such. Rather, staying in sight simply means you should create and distribute content where your users are already it.

This gives you an easy shortcut to grab their attention without doing anything extraordinary.

And where are your ideal customers, paying users, and prospects all at?

If you guessed social media, you’d be right.

Since Mark Zuckerberg took Facebook online at Harvard, social media use globally has exploded with over 3.6 billion users connected on the major social networks.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

So, if there’s any channel you should be doubling down on, it’s your social strategy.

You need a Social Content Publishing Schedule

Now, it’s great when you finally decide you’re going to get down to being more intentional about your social media strategy. Given that Instagram has a monthly user base of over 2.3 billion active users, it's a great idea to post on Instagram more often. Additionally, consider diversifying your social media strategy, schedule  posts on Facebook say, once monthly, and tweet as often as possible.

But then you make a shocking realization.

You don’t know where to start. You don’t have any idea what you should post next after the handful of witty businessyquotes and cute workplace pictures you posted.

So? Give up, or…

There’s a better way. To be precise, you need a social media schedule to help you plan how often you’ll be posting.

This helps you build a more intentional approach towards your social media, plan ahead, and get better outcomes.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• Why exactly you should even bother creating a social media schedule,
• How to get started curating your content ideas and assets,
• When’s best to post to each social media outlet, and
• How often you should be posting.

You’ll learn how to take your social media marketing to the next level with the help of marketing templates, so you can attract, engage, and convert customers via social media.

Here’s Why you need a Social Content Publishing Schedule

Before we dive into the how-tos and what-ifs of scheduling content for social media, we’d have to understand why we’re doing it in the first place.

To start, scheduling social media content helps you be more intentional with your social media management.

But how exactly?

What specifically does a social media schedule help you achieve that demands you create one before diving in and sharing office pet pics on Instagram?

Here are the benefits of scheduling content for social media.

1. Post at the perfect time

When do you check your social media apps?

Let’s take a guess here. If you’re like many people, it’s early in the morning after you get out of bed, just past noon when you’re on a break, or late at night before you snooze off.

Now, whether that accurately describes you or not, it describes a huge portion of the population. This might not mean much yet until you realize that those time windows are the best for reaching your social media network with your content. 

The average social media user has a network with hundreds, if not a few thousand connections in their network. To keep the experience fresh, social media algorithms must find a way to give everyone’s content a fair chance to get seen.

What that means is that you need to publish your content at just the right time window to get a good chance of by seen by more people in your network. A social media schedule empowers you to have a folder of content ideas ready-to-go for just when the right time comes.

2. Post consistently

Distraction is one of the biggest problems businesses and brands of all sizes face with social media. You maintain a healthy posting rhythm for 3 weeks, and after that, you get back to focusing on other stuff.

When you recover momentum, you’d have lost a lot of heat and enthusiasm —and that’s if your audience hasn’t gone cold already.

A social schedule helps you build up content assets ahead of time so that you can maintain a rhythm without overthinking or stressing over churning out content at the moment.

3. Save time and energy

Homework, office work, laundry, Christmas shopping.

Everything you do at the last minute takes an awful lot of time and energy to come out just passable.

On the other hand, when you dedicate the focus needed early enough, you can get the best outcomes.

This applies to building a social media schedule. Planning and publishing content on the fly can be draining, but when you dedicate time to focus on planning software and scheduling content ahead, you get to spend less time and energy getting it done.

4. Manage your content library easily

Without a well-planned schedule, social media posting becomes a fire-and-forget affair and you have no way of tracking assets after you’ve published them. This makes it hard to track results on a large scale or learn from past marketing campaigns.

A social media schedule gives you one place where you can look at and see your library of published content, track your outcomes, and learn what to change for better outcomes.

Scheduling social media content helps you take a planned, intentional approach to creating social media content. As a result, you’ll be able to post better, more often, and more efficiently.

Best practices for curating social media content and assets

It takes great content to make any content strategy work. And like we’ve already established, you can’t always come up with ideas on the fly.

You need to take an intentional approach to your content creation to win at it.

And that’s where content curation comes in.

Content curation is all about collecting content ideas and organizing them so they’re easy to access and utilize when you need to.

Content creation gives you a sustainable way to manage your content creation so you always have a steady supply of assets to publish anytime. If you’re wondering how exactly you should go about gathering and organizing content assets, here are five actionable tips for curating social media content.

1. Go with the tide as much as possible

Leverage trends, holidays, seasons, etc., and publish intersecting content so you can ride the wave.

What’s the best way to grab people’s attention? By talking about what they’re already thinking about.

As much as possible, endeavor to create ideas that focus on specific times, seasons, holidays, etc., that your prospects are already thinking about.

Big brands have perfected this art of intersectional content. Once the holidays are around the corner, they focus more on holiday-themed content.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holidays themed sales are perfect examples of brands tying their marketing in with trends as much as possible.

2. Schedule posts in advance.

Curation isn’t all about collecting content assets and heaping them into one folder that you only open to take a peek once a month. Curation, to a significant degree, should include scheduling your social media posts ahead of time. This puts your posting on autopilot and helps you to leverage ideal posting windows.

3. Brainstorm with your team—often

Even if you have a dedicated social media person (or, maybe you are that person) you can always use outside help with curating content for social media.

Frankly, it’s impossible for just one person to be able to tell your business’s or organization’s story as vast as it is. That’s why you need to brainstorm often with other members of the team, collect their ideas, and see where their unique viewpoints can serve as seeds for your social media content.

4. Crowdsource

Many times, your followers and your brand evangelists may have more knowledge of the ins and outs of what makes other customers like them tick. You need a way to harvest their experience and use that to reach more potential customers.

Keep an open suggestion window to collect content ideas, tips, and tricks from brand evangelists as an avenue to keep creating content that delights your network.

5. Organize assets for ease of use

Don’t just toss pictures into a giant folder with the hope to review them sometime later. Organizing your ideas into sub-groups makes it easy to keep track of them and eventually get anything done with them.

Curating ideas without organizing them just creates one big folder where good ideas go to die.

6. Keep an eye on your competitors

When curating content, keep an eye open for the type of content your direct and indirect competitors share, track their progress, and strategize how you can use theirs as an inspiration for future campaigns.

Curating content determines how effective your social media content marketing will be. An intentional approach will empower you to collect, vet, and publish social media content that’ll make the most impact.

When’s the best time to post on each social media platform?

If good content is the bait, timing is the line that gets it to your network at just the right time.

No matter how good your content is, it won’t make much of an impact if you always publish when your followers are hard at sleep or working. Thanks to social media algorithms, your social media content has a limited lifespan outside of which it’ll get less and less engagement.

So, your target should be to shoot off your content at those time windows your targets are active. This increases the chances of them viewing, interacting with, and converting on your content. Here are the best time windows for posting to each social media platform.

The world has gone social. And your success in a social media world won’t be accidental. You need to be intentional about your social media content strategy, including:

• managing your social media content calendar,
• curating the best content for use whenever you need it, and
• creating and adhering to a social media content schedule.

Leveraging the tips we’ve put together in this article will help you manage your social media content better, record more success, and crush your social media goals for 2022 and beyond. Marketing project management software will help you keep track of the social media calendar on a project board. Kissflow Project will help you do that.