Social media scheduling is a powerful way to streamline your marketing efforts. Instead of logging into each individual social media channel and publishing posts one at a time, you can spend a few hours scheduling all of your content for a specific time period.
But how far out should you schedule social media posts? The answer depends on what content you’re scheduling. Let’s dig into a few key types of posts you may add to your social media queue.
Blog-related Posts
When promoting blog posts on social media, it’s easiest to schedule a batch of content all at once. As long as your blog’s topic will be relevant for the next few months, consider scheduling a 12-month drip campaign. Leverage all of your social media platforms and be sure to vary the messaging and imagery.
It’s also a good idea to include more posts toward the beginning of the campaign, and spread them out toward the end. Aim for around 10 posts per platform spread across the year.
You can use Missinglettr to automatically develop a 12-month campaign based on each new blog post you publish. Once created you just need to click through the posts to approve them.
After the initial 12 months are up, revisit your blog. Is it still relevant? Can you refresh any links? Are there any opportunities to expand the content? Give your post a bit of a facelift and you can queue up another year of posts.
Promotional Posts
Promotional posts should be few and far between. If you have a fairly active social media presence, limit promotional posts to once every two weeks. Otherwise, try to only post about yourself once each month.
With that in mind, it can help to schedule your promotional posts out on a rolling basis so you don’t have to worry about remembering to post on the right cadence. If you’re a relatively new business, try to only schedule posts out for about three months at a time. Once you’re more established and know your messaging won’t change, you can start scheduling a full six months in advance.
Holiday & Time-sensitive Posts
Posting about holidays is a great way to fill up your social media schedule. It’s often easiest to take care of the entire year at once, or you can take a quarter-by-quarter approach. For an easy cheat-sheet, check out our Q1 and Q4 event calendars.
Additional Best Practices to Keep in Mind
Scheduling takes a lot of the pain out of social media management, but there are a few best practices you should keep in mind:
- Leave space for spur-of-the-moment content. Make sure you can still add a post or two to your calendar if something comes up. Ideally, most of your posts should be flexible enough to shuffle around if need-be.
- Keep holidays in mind. If you decide not to do holiday-specific posts, be sure to keep holidays in mind when scheduling your content. You’ll likely see lower engagement on professional posts during holidays so it may be best to save for the next business day.
- **Spice things up. **Don’t post the same thing over and over again. Get creative with the copy and graphics you use.
- **Don’t forget social media best practices. **Sometimes when you’re queueing dozens of posts at a time, it’s easy to forget about all the essentials you normally remember. When you’re queueing content, remember to include hashtags, high-quality images, and profile tags as relevant.
Fill Your Content Queue with Missinglettr
Missinglettr makes it easy to schedule drip campaigns, one-off social media posts, and manage your content calendar. No matter what types of content you’re sharing, use Missinglettr to queue them for publication and then you’ll be able to monitor the analytics of each post.
Learn more and try it yourself with a 14-day free trial.
