The Bonus Benefits of Scheduling Social Media Posts
Is continuing education in your field crucial to your continued growth? Do you want to be recognized as an authority in your field? Is it worth it to you to invest a couple of hours a week doing both simultaneously?
Then set aside a couple of hours a week to schedule
social media posts for the coming week.
I schedule my weekly social media posts on Fridays.
In addition to scheduling links to my weekly blog
twice a week, my promotional book graphics, and
my Word of the Week on Sundays, I fill my social
media feed with interesting posts from others.
Today, we will explore the latter, the benefits from
sharing posts from others.
Because I am in the communications field, I post
almost exclusively on communication techniques
and tactics. If you sell real estate, you will want to
post on housing trends, decorating, home
remodeling, lawn care, and anything else home-related. If you’re a dentist, you would want to post on oral hygiene, foods to keep your teeth healthy, how smoking leads to tooth loss, and other health-related topics.
Do not post exclusively on homes you have to sell or services you have to offer. Use the 80-20 rule: 80% of your posts should be educational and 20% should be offering your services. If you follow that rule, you will receive the educational benefits, be recognized as an authority in your field, and the couple of hours you spend each week will benefit you personally as well as businesswise.
How, Why, & What
Here is how I do it, why I do it, and what I get out of it.
I use two of the most popular social media scheduling tools,
Buffer and Hootsuite, to schedule my posts on LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Google+. Facebook has its own scheduling tools
for business pages and your posts rank higher if you don’t
use a third party to schedule posts. Hootsuite is primarily
used to schedule my promotional book graphics on Twitter,
while I use Buffer to schedule everything else. I just find it
easier to track the effectiveness of my promotional tweets if I
separate them on the Hootsuite platform.
In addition to the four platforms already mentioned. Hootsuite also allows you to schedule posts for Instagram, WordPress, and YouTube. Buffer doesn’t post WordPress or YouTube, but it does for Pinterest.
Although I do from time to time find good material to share haphazardly, most posts are found systematically. I subscribe to speaking, writing, and marketing email newsletters from Hubspot, SpeakerHub, American Society of Association Executives, Freelance Writing Jobs, Simply Measured, and others. I peruse them looking for good material to post. Usually every newsletter has at least one good item worth reposting. Most times several posts are easily shareable.
Here are three recent examples:
The Marketer's Toolbox: The 60 Marketing Tools We Use at Buffer
How to Gain Instant Credibility with Public Speaking
The AP Stylebook now includes "they" as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun
An Investment in Credibility & Education
I started out reposting others’ good material to meet the 80-20 rule without having to crank out a lot of original material. I have found in the process that it has, in fact, increased my credibility as an authority in my field by collecting and sharing some of the best material out there.
I also found that I am, in fact, more of an authority in my field because I scan at least every piece I post to ensure it meets my standards of quality (educational, well-written, no spelling or egregious grammatical errors) and read many of them word-for-word.
Those I don’t fully read are now cataloged in my social media feeds. I can go back to my feeds and retrieve a post when I need it. It’s not a perfect catalog system, of course, but for the time invested each week, it works.
Try it for yourself. You, too, may find spending a couple of hours in a free social media classroom furthers your education and gains you credibility in your field. It’s a tremendous investment in you that also benefits others. Questions? Send me an email.
Tom Pfeifer is the managing partner and chief strategist for Consistent Voice Communications and author of Write It, Speak It: Writing a Speech They'll APPLAUD! Reach him at Tom@YourConsistentVoice.com.