fbpx

25% OFF ALL PLANS FROM NOW UNTIL JANUARY 15 – USE CODE NYEDGAR25 IN CHECKOUT

Schedule Social Media Posts Like a Pro, with Categories

Welcome to Edgar Learn, where we share the strategies that helped us find success! This is Part Two of our series on Social Media Scheduling, where we’ll look at how to schedule social media posts using categories. Click here to read Part One!

Today we’re going to take a close look at using categories to help you schedule social media posts.

Categorizing your posts is one of the core philosophies behind MeetEdgar. We’ll explain why it makes a huge difference in how your posts are created and scheduled, and we’ll show you how to pick categories that make sense for your content.

But first – let’s be clear about what we mean by “categories.” Take a look at the last ten things you put out on social media. Can you start grouping them together in some way? For instance, are some links to other people’s content, some questions to your audience, and some links to your own content? Congratulations – those are all categories!

Creating content in batches.

One of the biggest advantages to categorizing your content is that it lets you easily create content in batches. This saves you time and makes your monthly social media strategy more efficient.

How? It’s simple. Say you’re going to do six updates a day, five days a week. And for the record, that’s a ton — you probably don’t need to update that frequently. But if you did, that would add up to 30 updates a week. With four weeks in a month, that adds up to 120 total updates per month. Do you really want to sit down and write 120 updates all at once?

But if you have six categories, you only need 20 updates per category, per month.

Categories let you divvy up the content.
Categories let you divvy up the content and more easily create it in batches.

That doesn’t sound so tough, right? And just think — if you updated three times a day instead, you’d only need 10 updates per category, per month! You can easily sit down for an hour or two once a month and write those out in advance.

Simply put, breaking up your social media posting schedule by category divides the work you have to do.

Categories affect how you schedule social media posts.

Not only do categories make creating social media posts into a less daunting task, they can revolutionize your posting schedule.

Let’s say you only want to publish three posts each weekday. That means 15 posts each week to worry about. How do you make sure there’s enough variety? How do you make sure you’re promoting your site enough?

The answer is categories! Instead of worrying about which post to publish at a given time, you first plan what category to post from. If you set up a repeating schedule based off of categories, you take out a huge amount of the guesswork involved in posting.

Here’s a simple sample posting schedule broken down by category:

Social media category based scheduling calendar

As you can see, we’re using just six categories, posting three times per day, and varying the categories to make sure that the same category isn’t used twice in a row. You could easily apply this formula to post twice as often without adding any additional content categories.

With all of this batching and scheduling, it’s important to remember that the heart of social media is still live interactions! The time you save working with categories can translate into having more time to foster conversation with your audience. And there’s no better way to build that “Know, Like, Trust” relationship with your fans!

Choosing the right categories for you.

In the example above, we used the following categories: Link to My Blog, Link to Other Person’s Content, Inspirational Quote, Funny Quote, Question to Audience, and General. While this is a pretty even balance for your content, it’s by no means the only way to organize things.

No matter how you organize your posts, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on how they’re performing, and to tweak your schedule as you go. If, for example, you notice that you’re getting a lot of retweets when you post a Funny Quote – you should post more Funny Quotes! Even though you’re not directly driving traffic to your site with that kind of post, you’re building awareness and getting your name out there.

While five or six categories are a good starting point, you might also want to experiment with having more or fewer categories. There are no hard and fast rules, so feel free to find what works best for you! Here’s an example of how you could create multiple categories based around the types of posts in your tech blog, for example:

Updates For Promotion

No matter how many categories you use or how you choose to schedule them, you’re sure to find that they make it a whole lot easier to plan, write, and schedule your social media posts. Categorizing also opens up the door for automation. With a good scheduling tool, you’ll be able to save hours of time each week by automating the posting process!

Social Share
Categories

Get Actionable Social Media Advice (And Not Too Much of It!)
Get EdgarNews, your monthly social media to-do list, delivered straight to your inbox.

Never Run Out
of Stuff to
Post on Social

MeetEdgar scheduling software automatically pulls posts from your content library to keep your social fresh everyday, on repeat.

2 Comments
  • Barry Napier

    Outstanding post…I signed up for my trial with Edgar, I’ve been using Buffer but have had challenges staying on top of it. LOVE the idea of automation. Question, do you find the 6 categories you mention here a recommended starting point?

    • Tom VanBuren

      Hey Barry! Thanks!
      As for categories, the six that are listed in this post (in that graphic above) are just one specific example, and not necessarily the right fit for everyone – especially because those categories would all just be for updates linking to your own blog! You definitely want to make sure you’re posting a strong variety of stuff, including links to your own blog, links to other stuff on the web your audience will be interested in, tips, questions, and so on. If you’re looking for a good place to start, the default categories that come built into Edgar should be right up your alley!

Leave a Reply