It is undeniable that marketing is essential to any business—including yours. Without marketing, you would have no way of finding new customers, and without customers your business has no purpose.
However, if you are a one man show or even a small team, marketing can feel overwhelming and hard to keep up with. You may try to post several things at once, only to then go days without a post at all. Inconsistency can be off putting to some people. Plus, the best way to market is to always be present on social media, so that potential customers see your business over and over until it finally peaks their interest enough to check it out. While this sounds like a good plan, the upkeep for this sort of tactic is exhausting. To have to drop everything you are doing to compose a tweet or make a Facebook post several times a day hinders your productivity to complete essential business functions.
Of course having a marketing or social media coordinator would solve the issue, but you might not be ready to hire someone full time. Maybe you are just starting out. The good news is that there is a solution for that. And it is much cheaper than hiring a marketing coordinator on full or even part time. That solution is social media scheduling platforms.
What is a Social Media Scheduling Platform
Just what it sounds like. These are programs that you can connect all of your social media accounts to and schedule posts in advance. This way you can block off time to write out all of your social media posts ahead of time instead of constantly having to take a break from what you are doing in order to draft a post.
So you might be thinking that this isn’t saving you a whole lot of time or hassle. After all, you still have to sit down and come up with the content. However, having to stop what you are doing several times a day to keep up with your social media is killing your productivity. In the back of your mind you will always be thinking of what post you are going to put up today and whether or not you are present enough on social media. One of the first rules of time management and productivity is to schedule time to do tasks and work without distractions.
What Platforms are Out There?
Currently there are a few popular social media scheduling platforms out there. These include Buffer, Hootsuite, and Likeable Hub (for a quick overview of the three, check out this post on How to Master Social Media Using a Startup Mentality).
Social Media Marketing Automation Platform Capabilities
Post Scheduling and Automation
The most important advantage to all of these types of platforms is the automation aspect of it. As mentioned above, it is far more productive to draft a dozen or so posts to be spread out across the next couple of days rather than constantly having to interrupt your day to create social media content.
Analytics
Another advantage to these platforms is that most of them give you the analytics on your posts, so you can see what type of content your audience reacts best to. This sort of feedback is incredibly valuable and will allow you to cater to the content your audience truly wants in order to be more successful with your marketing. Once you have enough posts out there, you will start to notice trends in what it is your customers react to, or just as valuable is what they do not react to.
Getting an aggregate picture across all social media websites saves a lot of time, otherwise you would have to go into each site individual to find this information and record it. Social media marketing platforms will help you see the big picture.
Post to Multiple Networks in One Step
Currently you might be switching back and forth between several platforms just to post the same content. With these social media marketing platforms, you can draft one post and then pick several websites to post it to. No more time spent typing the same content over and over on different websites. All you need is one draft and choose where to post it.
Apps
These websites also have mobile apps, so that you can spend more of your idle time being productive. You can queue posts straight from your phone! So now instead of just scrolling through social media while you are waiting in line somewhere you can queue a few of those posts to appear at a later time. What a productive thing to do when you have some extra time. Sometimes they even have shortcuts so that you can schedule the content as you first discover it, without having to exit out of the app you’re in and open the social media marketing app.
Add the browser extension
Another easy way to queue posts is through the Chrome extension of the social media automated marketing platform of your choosing. Many of these platforms have created extensions compatible with Google’s Chrome browser that you can download for free. This makes it super easy to schedule a post from your current webpage.
Whenever you are using Chrome, there will be an extension button you can use to set up a post with the content on your current web page. You can click that and it will take you to draft your post. All you have to do is click it, set up your post, and add it to the queue. The browser extension makes an already easy process easier.
Can Automated Marketing Systems Help Your Business?
If the thought of always having to stop what you are doing and post on social media gives you anxiety and makes you feel unproductive, I suggest you look into Buffer or one of the other social media scheduling platforms. The good news is that you can try it for free, and upgrade if you feel it is necessary.
