“I don’t have time to post on social media.”
“I never know what to post.”
“I try to be consistent but the other aspects of running a business gets in the way.”
“I just don’t like it.”
“My followers don’t see it anyways.”
If you’re not posting on social media, there’s a REALLY good chance that you’ve convinced yourself of one or more of the above statements. I’ve seen it time and time again and I always say the same thing, “You’ll have to get over that.”
If you’re building a brand, you have to build a social presence to go with it. Period.
That means you have two options:
1 – Learn to love it.
2 – Hire someone to do it for you.
If you’re going to hire someone to do your social media for you, stop reading. You don’t need this article.
If, however, you’re like me and you’re busy as hell, you don’t spend hours of time on social media in your personal life, and you want to be know as the best at what you do, you’ll learn to love social media.
My biggest tip? GET A SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULER.
Why You Need a Social Media Scheduler in 2020
If you don’t know what scheduler to go with, check out this dope video from Courtney. She went over the most popular social media scheduling platforms to help you find the one that will work best for your business.
This article is a love letter from one ultra-planned, highly focused, content strategist to the platforms that allow us to put our content out there at the right time.
1 – You can make a plan and stick to it
No more setting your alarms for when you want things to go out. That doesn’t work and everyone always falls behind.
When you commit to a social media planner, you can make your content plan and not have to execute it on the rigid time line.
The scheduler separates your plan from your content. This lets you make content when you’re inspired – not when your calendar calls.
2 – Get ahead on your marketing calendar
This is probably my favorite thing about using a scheduling platform for social media. I get anxious if I feel like my posts need to happen immediately because I start to feel like I’m late. That stress f*cks up my creativity and then I don’t know what to write.
Humans literally use different parts of our brain to plan, to stress, and to create. Being able to get ahead on our marketing calendar lets me relax and get the work done without stress.
3 – A social media scheduler lets you batch the work
Running a business is like the ultimate test for multi-taskers. The reality is that the human brain can only focus on one thing at a time. You lose time when you’re constantly switching from one task to the next or trying to do 40,000 things at once.
Using a social media scheduler lets you focus on one thing, content. We suggest building your plan for a month at a time and then and batching the month into weeks. This way you’re always focused on getting 7-10 days worth of content done in each week.
Once you have your weeks batched properly, spend 1-2 hours each week focused solely on creating and scheduling your social media content.
4 – Kiss your scramble aguhbye
That feeling of, “I have to post it right now” is gone.
You’re not rushing or feeling like you’ve forgotten something or worse… THE GUILT.
There’s nothing worse as a business owner than feeling like you’re not doing enough to share your brand. It starts a downward spiral that can keep you off balance and unfocused for days.
Getting a social media scheduler and making it a priority to spend a little bit of time filling it up is going to change that for you immediately.
Does a Social Media Scheduler Limit Reach?
This has been a myth since the beginning of scheduler time. Or at least since 2013, which is when I started researching and using social media scheduling platforms for brands I work with.
Since then, I have paid close attention to the difference between the reach of native posts and that of a scheduler. In seven years, I’ve never noticed any significant difference.
That generalization isn’t good enough though. So in 2019 Courtney and I spent some time scheduling half of our video posts (because they get the most engagement) with native Facebook and the other half with Later- that’s our scheduler app.
You know what happened? Nothing.
We learned that it’s easier to post using our scheduler—for all the reasons above—and that it was a pain in the ass to post directly with Facebook.
But we have a small following. I needed more. So I looked deeper into it and it found this incredible study from Buffer about the use of 3rd party social media tools. It’s extensive and hats off to them for doing it!
They found the same exact thing that we did. It makes little to no difference, and on some platforms the reach is BETTER! I like to say that probably has to do with the fact that most social media schedulers will tell you when the best time to post is, and when you do it natively you have to just like… remember? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
So get yourself a social media scheduler – tell me which one you like best and why in the comments!
