Our go-to tools & techniques for scheduling content
Being a solopreneur comes with its challenges. From sales and accounting to management and marketing, you juggle so many different aspects of your business. But when it comes to building a successful online presence, some handy tools can take the constant burden off your shoulders.
I couldn't imagine our marketing team without scheduling and planning tools. We prepare our content ahead of time, schedule it all to be automatically posted, and spend the rest of the month working on other important stuff. This not only saves us tons of time but also helps us remain consistent in posting.
Here's the breakdown of what tools we use to schedule our Social Media and Marketing:
A scheduling software (we'll cover our favs below)
A project management software (to organise everything in advance)
Built-in scheduling for email marketing, youtube, blog and other content
So, let’s take a look at some effective scheduling tools and techniques that have helped us and will hopefully help you too!
Our fav Social Media Scheduling tools
There are a ton of different platforms that can help you schedule your social media posts and we highly recommend using one! Basically, you can add in your posts, captions, hashtags, etc and add in a date and time and the app will post it for you - it can be a little more complicated than that depending on what you're posting, but generally, it's so much easier than going in there every day and manually posting.
We love to schedule a month's worth of content at once so that we can set it and forget it for the rest of the month.
We've tried quite a few of the scheduling platforms, and truthfully, they have all been pretty good! So, you can't really go wrong.
Some of our favs are:
Facebook Business Manager: Free scheduling!
Facebook Business Manager has to be one of the best things that’s happened in the social media scheduling world!
It’s completely free and lets you flawlessly schedule posts on both Facebook and Instagram. If those are the only platforms you’re most active at, you might not have to look at any other scheduling tool.
It gives you a single dashboard where you can choose to plan and schedule both posts and stories for your Facebook and Instagram channels.
As a solopreneur or small business, it's likely that you have a limited budget. So, a free tool that actually works really well is probably the best option!
Scheduling a post is really easy. All you need to do is to open the Business Suite on your Facebook page, go to Planner, create a post under the date of your choice, add the date and time, and boom, you’re done.
Pricing:
It is a free tool, and you won’t have to pay a single penny to use it 🎉
Buffer Scheduling
Buffer is a great scheduling tool for all of your social channels. We are currently using Buffer to schedule our Instagram and Facebook.
Buffer actually comes as three different tools: Publishing, Analytics, and Engagement.
Publishing helps with planning and scheduling content. Analytics focuses on performance reports and Engagement helps with social conversations. So not only is Buffer great for scheduling, but you'll also get a host of other features that are helpful to optimize your social media if you want them.
Buffer Publishing allows you to draft and schedule multiple posts on all the popular social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest. It can do all of the scheduling basics that most social media schedulers offer, plus it has the added bonus of the Analytics and Engagement features.
It's pretty easy to get set up with and use, and there's also a handy phone app so you can schedule straight from your phone if you want to. Other features such as team management, approval workflows, access permissions, WordPress, and Chrome integrations are also available on paid plans.
Pricing:
On a free plan, you will have access to 3 social accounts and 10 scheduled posts per social channel which is a great option if you're just starting out!
Paid plans begin from $5/month for 8 social accounts and 100 scheduled posts.
Later Scheduling
Later is another excellent tool that caters best to the needs of an online business. You can use it for all social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Linkedin.
From our experience, it's GREAT for Instagram scheduling, so if Instagram is all you're working on, then we recommend Later. It’s power-packed with features that make the process of scheduling and managing posts on Instagram simple. With hashtags and keyword search features, you can prepare the posts quickly and increase your discoverability. You can also visually plan content, store media, and add notes to each media for later use too.
Later also added a great Instagram analytics tool to its system that works really well (especially compared to built-in IG analytics) and is something you might need as you grow your account.
Pricing:
With a free plan, you can schedule up to 30 posts in a month. Paid plans begin at $15/month and let you enjoy more enhanced features and services.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a scheduling tool that is primarily used for Pinterest. You can also use it for Facebook and Instagram, but if you use Pinterest as a marketing tool, I highly recommend Tailwind.
Tailwind allows you to create, schedule, and optimize your own pins, pins from Instagram or directly from Pinterest. This is a huge benefit because Pinterest, even more than other Social Media Platforms, wants you to be pinning often and consistently (like many times a day!).
You can monitor your follower growth, clicks, and pins. The ability to have relevant hashtags and save them for later use is also a great help.
You can download the Tailwind browser extension that lets you schedule interesting pins you come across on the internet with just one click. It also has something called "Tribes" which is a feature only found in Tailwind, and you can add pins to the Tribe you belong to, and other Tribe members will share it with their respective audiences (basically, just another great way to get more traction on your Pins!)
Pricing:
It has a free trial period that lets you post up to 100 pins. The paid plan starts from 9.99/month, including unlimited pins and one social account for Pinterest and Instagram.
Organizing, creating, and planning your content:
Managing multiple social media accounts and putting out multiple pieces of content can be overwhelming. You might find yourself a little lost when scheduling and planning posts. There are too many things going out on too many platforms, there's no way you can keep that all in your head!
To keep things streamlined, you can use project management software like Asana or Clickup.
Create a list of things you plan to post every month and when you plan to post them. Then break that down into things you need to do to get all of that created (eg "write 4 blog posts", "design Instagram graphics" etc). Create a new task for every single thing you need to do, and put due dates on those things.
You will soon realize how much actually goes into creating your marketing and social media content. Having everything written down and itemized into a to-do list will make your life so much easier. Plus, once you've scheduled out a time period of content, you can just duplicate that list and start again for the next period!
Utilizing great project management software will make this whole process more manageable.
For a long time, we used Asana, which is a great, free online project management software. Now, as our team is growing and our marketing is a lot more involved, we're using ClickUp. Both are great options!
Using built-in scheduling features (eg blog, YouTube, email marketing software)
You'll notice that in our schedule round-up above, we only mentioned scheduling for Social Media channels. But you'll probably have other content that would be great to schedule too for example your Blog Posts, Youtube videos, weekly email blasts, etc.
A simple solution to this is that most of these platforms have a built-in scheduling system so that you can create and publish posts according to your desired time without any need for a scheduling app.
If you’re Blogging with Squarespace, you can schedule posts by choosing "schedule" on your blog post status and choosing a time + date.
For scheduling posts on YouTube, go for the visibility option next to the publish button and click "post later" and choose a time + date!
Scheduling options are generally available in email marketing software like Mailchimp, ConvertKit or Flodesk so you can create emails and auto-send them later (I've never seen an email marketing software without scheduling!).
So, it's worth checking your program to see if there's a built-in scheduling option, as just like with social media scheduling, this will make your life much easier!
So that's it! A breakdown of all of the best tools we use to plan, create and schedule our content and marketing.
Want more? Check out some more posts all about Social Strategy below!
How to Grow your Business and get Clients with Instagram in 2022
How to Make your Instagram Reels go Viral
Which Social Media Platforms Should You Use For Your Business
8 Tips for Social Media Marketing
Social Media Metrics you Should be Tracking and Why
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