If you are a brand starting your social media journey there’s one thing that you should keep in mind: plan your content! This is the most effective technique for brands in 2021 especially when it comes to organizing your social media sites and making sure that everything follows your company plan.
Working in the social media world can be overwhelming, and most of the time it is because you have to keep up with everything that is going on around you, trends, new conversation topics, news about your business, and more. That is why planning your content is a good idea in order to have everything organized and make your life as a content creator easier.
Whenever you decide to take this step, make sure you have a calendar where you are able to see what is going to be posted on each site, that will allow you to organize yourself correctly and make sure that your audience is going to be reading the content that is interesting for them in the right time.
Now, there are two tools that we love when it comes to organizing and planning our content, and here you are going to read everything about these two incredible sites. Are you ready?
Tools that we love to plan out content
1. We love Sendible! Sendible allows you to schedule your content across different social media platforms meaning that your brand will have a presence in every single one of them.
You can schedule tweets, FB and IG posts, and even LinkedIn blogs. Social media in 2021 is all about presence, find the platforms that are good for you, and start posting. The perk of Sendible is the variety of social media platforms that you can schedule in just one place, which is something that not every scheduling tool has.
2. The second one that we recommend is Creator Studio, a tool from Facebook that will never fail. Since it is a tool created directly from the owners of Facebook and Instagram, you can schedule the posts of these two platforms, and we can assure you that every post will upload without a problem. Creator Studio was born as a necessity since they realized how much the creators needed a place where they can organize and plan their content.
This tool is completely free, you just need an Instagram business account that is linked to a Facebook fan page, and you will be ready to schedule your content in order for you to focus on other things that are related to your business.
Have you tried any of these two tools? We will love to read about your experience using these platforms in the comments below!
Advice from the experts
This week we discussed social media planning with two marketing experts. The first one, Turbo from Turbo Talks (@turbotalks) whose advice focused on being authentic and living the moment:
“I’ve been a digital scientist for years— and I found out that I was taught social media strategy wrong. You can’t plan the future (as much as we all want to) Impromptu engagement is authentic. Not planned”
Another valuable piece of advice came from Christina Hager (@ChristinaMHager), a writer, content creator, and digital strategy expert! Her main advice was related to saving time, and making sure to find a tool that works for you and your business:
“I recommend that any business leader, marketing team, brand, or organization use a scheduling tool to save them valuable time on social media for a few reasons: one it saves them time in the week when they’re not hopping in and out of their channels posting, and two, it usually forces the issue that they must have a plan for their social media when it comes to their content.” (Ideally, they have an overarching and channel specifically social media strategy, but that’s for a different article!)
The value a scheduling tool gives you is time and clarity because you can batch content out quickly for different days and times on various channels, optimizing it for whichever channel you want as you go along. It also allows you one place where everyone can see the content you’re planning to share on social.
My cautions against using a social media tool:
1. You can’t schedule an engagement. That is something you have to do in real-time, and what is social media if you are not being SOCIAL on it?! Your followers don’t want you to just drop knowledge and leave. They want to have a back-and-forth conversation (good news though— A lot of social media scheduling tools also have great social listening and can keep track of all of your notifications for you!)
2. The other caution with using a social media tool is if you schedule content and then something happens that day like a mass shooting or an earthquake you need to remember what content is going out when and make sure that it’s sensitive to world events.”
What we learned
Even when you have a scheduling tool of your preference, or enjoy planning content months in time, there’s a thing that these nuggets of advice have in common: you also have to live in the present! Make sure to go into your social media profiles every day, engage with the audience, comment on the accounts that you love, and make sure to build a community.
After all, that is what social media is all about, building a community that enjoys the same things that you do, remember that behind the screen there’s a person and all of us enjoy or crave interaction on a daily basis, especially nowadays where we spent so much time at home.
What other advice do you have for us? We would love to interact with you in the comments!
