Social Media Scheduling Tips To Make Your Life Easier and Your Content Better

If you have been around these parts long enough, you know that we love to talk all about social media scheduling. Edgar is a social media scheduling tool, after all.

We love social media scheduling because it makes it much easier and less time consuming to manage your social media content. But let's face it, even though you're scheduling your content, you still need to take the time to come up with it, create it, design it, publish it, promote it and measure it. Exhausted yet?

There is no denying the fact that social media content can be a solopreneur's biggest headache.

If you ever get yourself stuck in content management overwhelm, we have some tips to make all that content easier to manage. These five super simple social media scheduling tips will make your life easier and your content better.

1. Optimize for the best posting time

If you want your content to go farther and actually drive results, you need to pay attention to the timing. Back in the dark ages when Facebook first began, you could add a post to your page and still be seeing engagement two days later. Those were such nice times, weren't they?

Sadly, things have changed and today, timing really matters on social media. Social media is a fast-paced and if you post even just a few minutes later than planned, you could miss your audience!

Consider this, a tweet has an average lifespan of 18 minutes and Facebook posts receive the majority of their impressions in the first hour and 50 minutes. With such small windows to reach your audience, timing your posts correctly is crucial!

So when should you post? Well, that all depends on your audience and when they are most active online. You can check each platform’s analytics to determine when your audience is online. In the photo below, you can see that our audience is most active on Facebook around 4 pm so we make sure we schedule recurring content to post around that time.

If your audience is still small or you are just getting started with social media and don't know when your audience will be active, we've got you covered.

There have been numerous studies done on the best time to post on each social media platform.

The best time to post on Facebook is Tuesday between 12pm and 1pm.

The best time to post on Twitter is between 9 am and 10 am.

The best day to post on Instagram is Wednesday. Overall, due to the platform’s oversaturated audience, things change from day to day.

The best time to post on LinkedIn is Monday between 3 pm and 4 pm.

You can use this as the basis for your social media scheduling but we recommend measuring your analytics as you go so you can make any adjustments when necessary.

2. Find your posting frequency

So you know timing is important because social media moves at a fast pace but now you need to figure out how often you need to post. Logic says that if social media content has short lifespans then it makes the most sense to post as often as possible, right?

Well not exactly. Posting too much can actually annoy your followers and cause them to unfollow you. Your post frequency should encourage more people to follow you, not the opposite so you need to master the post frequency on each social channel.

Most people expect brands to post 1-2 times per day on social media platforms with the exception of Twitter. Since Twitter is the fastest moving medium, it’s recommended to post around 15 times a day with seven of those tweets being curated content.

Like most things with social media, it’s essential you test your posting frequency and find the sweet spot for your audience.

The recurring schedule in Edgar will help you manage your posting frequency so that your content is going out at the right times and at the right rhythm.

3. Find a content balance

The fastest way to run out of social media post ideas is to post the same type of content over and over. We hate to break it to you, but people will get sick of your steady stream of sales pitches just as they will get sick of your non-stop memes.

You need a balance of content or a content ratio. If you’ve already guessed that your content ratio depends on your audience, then you get a digital high five because you’ve been following along!

But your content ratio also depends on your goals, your industry and your overall messaging. What’s most important is that you are mixing up your content so your audience doesn’t get bored and your feed isn’t repetitive.Here are a couple of popular content ratios that you can test out in your social media scheduling.

‍1.The 5-3-1 Ratio

• Five curated content posts
• Three educational/informative content from your company
• Two personal or just for fun messages

2. The 80/20 Ratio

• 80% of your content is educational/informative content, including both curated and your content
• 20% of your content is promotional content

3. The 30/60/10 Ratio

• 30% of your content is owned content including blog posts, videos and images
• 60% of your content is curated content
• 10% of your content is promotional content

This is just a starting basis! You can get more complex and split up your content however you choose. Edgar offers categories so you can organize and balance your content for the right ratio.

4. Identify your evergreen content

We know that you are a busy person and you might not be a professional writer or content creator. And if you are a writer or content creator, well then you’re probably not only creating content for just your brand. Most people just don’t have the time to constantly be creating new content.

Luckily, you don’t have to! This is where evergreen content comes to the rescue. Evergreen content is content that is not time-sensitive and provides value over a long period of time.Evergreen can be blog posts, webinars, videos, infographics, or live streams. All that matters is that your evergreen content is still relevant to your audience.

For example, our post about Facebook’s algorithm change was incredibly valuable in January 2018 but by now, most people are already aware of the change and Facebook has made different changes so it’s not an evergreen piece of content. But our post about how to write insanely smart content every time you sit down to write a blog post is more likely to stay relevant and valuable to our audience.

Some entrepreneurs worry that evergreen content doesn’t stay valuable once it’s already been posted but there are two important things to remember about social media content.

The first is that there is no guarantee that your whole audience sees every single one of your posts. In fact, it’s more likely that most of your audience doesn’t see every single one of your posts. Resharing evergreen increases the opportunity for your audience to see your content.

The second important thing to note is that your audience is growing every day and you’re attracting new followers who have not yet seen your content. Your evergreen content will be brand new to these followers!You can find your evergreen content by doing a quick audit of your content.

Adding evergreen content to your social media scheduling efforts makes it easier to provide consistent valuable content.

5. Keep your content ideas handy

Have you ever needed to find a piece of curated content to schedule but it was a slow news day and you end up spending way too long trying to find something interesting to share? Been there!

Content curation is an important part of any successful social media strategy but sometimes just simply finding someone else’s content can take up a lot of valuable time.

And scrolling through articles for hours searching for the perfect piece of content isn’t thrilling or productive.

We recommend making a list of your favorite industry publications or websites. You can follow your favorite publications in an aggregator like Feedly so you can simply scroll through these on a regular basis to find content ideas.

If you are an Edgar user, you can upload your favorite websites into the RSS feed. Edgar will automatically add these to your pending content queue and all you need to do is go in and approve them.

Bonus Tip for Edgar Users!

6. Create variations and use auto-variations

In Edgar, variations allow you to add more variety to your library quickly. By creating variations of each post, you can keep your social feeds fresh and increase your social media engagement. Variations keep your content work for you and decreases the amount of time spent on social media scheduling.

But we know that you are human and your brain can get fried some days and you might not be able to come up with any variations for your content. That’s when you can rely on auto-variations. When you click the auto-variation button, Edgar pulls quotes from the link you are posting to create different variations for you.

You can use the auto-variation for your post or it may spark some inspiration and you can edit it to be the exact message you want to share.

Social media scheduling is the smartest way to manage your content and grow your audience. While you are already saving a ton of time by scheduling, these tips will hopefully make it that much easier and faster to share great social media content.

Want to see how easy it is to use Edgar to schedule your social media content? Give us a try!