Keeping up with all your social media channels can be a difficult, time consuming and never-ending task. Each channel needs a good amount of attention, daily or weekly, in order for them to grow as well as keep your audience entertained. For this reason, investing in some social media scheduling software can be essential for ensuring your time is being spent effectively.
Social media scheduling tools were invented to make your life easier and once you get used to navigating the separate platforms, you will wonder what you ever did without them. Like most inventions, there are many different versions available, which is why we are writing this blog in order to take you through the ones that we use/recommend.
On Platform Scheduling – Free
Not all social media platforms have useful scheduling tools built into them (*ahem* Instagram *ahem*) but the ones that do you should be utilizing. Facebook have a great scheduling tool that allows you to plan your social posts ahead of time for both Facebook & Instagram. Simply create the content you want to share, add a caption (+ hashtags for Instagram) and schedule it to go out on the day + time you want. You can set the same post to go out on both platforms at the same time/day and with the same caption but we recommend trying to schedule the same content on different days for each platform. This may take a little longer but there are benefits to it.
To find out more about why posting the same content at different times on each of your platforms is beneficial, check out our blog How to get more engagement on Social Media.
You can find the Facebook scheduling by navigating to your business page and then finding publishing tools in the left-hand toolbar. If you want to schedule posts for your Instagram you will need to connect your account to Facebook. This can be done in your page settings. See the images below for a visual guide.
Twitter also offers a similar tool but it can only be used to schedule tweets. You can add images, GIF’s, URL’s + hashtags to your posts as well as what time/day you want them to go live. Twitter is a hard platform to keep up with as there is a consistent stream of content, which is why posting more often can often help grow your audience as it’s more likely to be seen.
Although it is hard work switching between platforms and getting used to more software to help you run your social media channels, scheduling your content can help save you time in the long run. The benefit to using on platform scheduling tools is that they are often set out similarly to the social media platforms themselves, which you are probably already used to navigating. They are also completely free and good free software is often hard to find.
Canva – £10.99 p/m
We talk about Canva pretty often in our social media blogs because we personally use it when we need to create a quick social media post and we feel like it’s easy to use for even complete beginners. Canva is primarily used to design content for social media channels but when you dig a little bit deeper they have many different useful tools available under one subscription. They have a resize feature that allows you to design once and then resize it to fit each social media platform. They also have an animated social post feature that brings your designs to life, making them more eye-catching.
Most importantly, keeping to the point, they have a scheduling tool that you can use for all of your social media platforms. Unlike on platform scheduling tools, you are not limited to that specific platform or a select few. You can schedule content for the following channels; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Groups, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Slack, Tumblr and a few more.
Considering how much you are getting under one subscription, the £10.99 a month cost seems worth it to us. You can improve your social channels easily, quickly and fashionably with the tools you will have access to here and there is a 30-day trial, so you can try everything out before you have to pay a penny. We couldn’t recommend Canva enough! (seriously, they should be paying us).
Buffer – Free Verison Available or $5 per channel, per month
Buffer provides an awesome platform for a relatively low price, so this is one for you if you’re on a budget. You can choose to only manage one platform or connect all of your social channels. There is a free version available which is, of course, limited but it’s worth signing up to just to get a feel for it.
Their publishing feature allows you to schedule content for each of your social channels, even including your Instagram stories. Buffer’s analytics tool enables you to bring all of your social media analytical data together to compare as well as create ‘gorgeous’ reports to share with your team or clients. Finally, their Engagement tool allows you to keep up with your audience’s interactions by managing your comment section via their website. This is a useful tool that stops you from having to switch in between social media channels as you can manage all engagement in one place.
They seem to cover all bases when it comes to social media scheduling, so we recommend at least giving them a try. If you don’t get on with their platform, try using the other software mentioned in this blog.
Hootsuite – $39 p/m
Hootsuite is the most obvious option when looking for a social media scheduling tool as they are easily the most used scheduling tool currently. They are popular for a reason as it’s a great platform if you are willing to pay the price. $39 p/m is a bit steep (just under £30) considering that you don’t get as many features when compared to Canva. Saying that though, they do have tools that you won’t find on Canva such as their Reporting tool. As far as we know Canva does not have such a tool, which may be something you can benefit from.
Each social media platform has its own separate analytics section which will tell you how well your posts are performing. Hootsuite collects that data and put’s it together, so you don’t have to switch between platforms. It also allows you to compare each social media channel and how your content performs on each separate platform.
This is a handy tool that will enable you to make changes to improve your social media channels but you can survive without it. At Manuka, we collect all of our social media analytical data manually from each social channel at the end of the month and enter it into a spreadsheet. This allows us to see our overall social media performance and compare each channel. If you don’t have time to do this, then Hootesuite may be a good option for you.
Conclusion
Social media scheduling tools are extremely useful when managing all of your channels and they can save you a lot of time. If you can afford to invest in one of the software platforms we mention in this blog, you will for sure benefit from their services. If you cannot afford to invest, it doesn’t mean that your social media will take a hit. You will just have to invest time rather than money.
Overall, there are a few different options available to you and we will always suggest trying them all out to see which one works best for you. What works best for us may not suit you. The above software options are the ones we have either tried previously or currently use today and have found helpful, so thought it would be worth sharing with you. Let us know how you get on!