Social media has become a critical source of customers and sales for all types of businesses.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or if you’re trying to get people to download your app. Every business should have a regular social media content posting schedule if they want to compete in an online world.
The problem is that even if you’ve grown up as a social media addict in your personal life, you still might not understand how to apply what you know to business.
This article will explain how to optimize your social media posting schedule for all the big social account platforms. You’ll learn what to post and when. Plus, how you can manage that schedule using monday.com templates.
What is a social media posting schedule?
Social media scheduling allows you to plan specific social media account posts to go live at certain times and on specific days.
Pew Research shows that 63% of American users check Instagram at least once a day. And Instagram isn’t the only platform with daily visitors.
As you can see in the graph below, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube also have at least half their audience visiting once a day — often more than once a day.
So you’ll want to be posting frequently and consistently to reach potential customers.
However, it’s not just about the quantity of posts.
When you make a social media post can have a drastic impact on how well it performs. Various organizations have done research to figure out the best time to post on each platform.
For example, the best time to post on Twitter is weekdays between 6 and 9 am PST. Which means posting frequency is definitely something to factor in when you’re planning your schedule. Titktok’s best time to post is at 11 AM EST on Thursdays, 8 AM EST on Tuesdays, and 4 AM EST on Fridays. This means posting between this schedule will work for reaching a wider audience.
Why have a social media posting schedule?
Creating a social media posting schedule allows you to batch the work of creating social media content together and save a lot of time. Instead of wondering what social media content you’re going to post each day, you can create a backlog of posts that are ready to go.
You can spend an afternoon creating a batch of social media posts for an entire month. And with so many social media post ideas, there’s no shortage of something to share with your audience. Then, all you need to do is copy and paste in your social media content at a specific time.
It’s far more efficient than manually typing out posts one by one. Especially when there are social media tools designed for booting out manual tasks like these. You can queue up a month of social media account posts ready to go, then take some well-earned vacation time. And nobody will know the difference.
Plus, now you know that content will do better on certain platforms on specific days of the week and at specific times. So why not optimize for this in your social media posting schedule?
How do you create a social media posting schedule?
Creating a social media calendar or schedule can really be as basic or complex as you want it to be.
In the beginning, your content calendar may be as simple as a notebook.
When you come up with a great idea for a social media post, you can jot it down. Then when it’s time for your next social media post, you just have to refer to your notes.
But this method makes it hard to create a consistent routine or ensure you never forget a posting time.
Later on, you may have a larger team of designers, content creators, and social media calendar managers. Then you can use a content calendar tool, like monday.com’s social media planner template or social media calendar template to keep everything organized in one place.
It’s especially important to have a way to organize and manage all of your social media content once multiple people are working with your social media scheduling tool.
Read more in our related article: Solve these 3 big challenges with a social media planner
What to post to social media and when
The average lifespan of a tweet is only about 18 minutes. So if you make your social media posts at the wrong time, they might be dead on arrival.
Even if your social media content itself is great, it doesn’t matter if nobody’s around to see it.
The difference between scheduling your posts at the right time or wrong time is the difference between a successful business and one that could struggle to grow. That’s why having an optimized content calendar is so important.How often to post to social media
Here are some suggestions for how often to post to each social media platform, based on recent research.
- Facebook pages: 1-2 per day
- Instagram: 1-3 times per day
- Instagram Stories: 2-5 times per day
- LinkedIn: 1-2 times per week
- Pinterest: 3-20 times per day
- Twitter: 3-10 times per day
What to post to social media
If you just post memes and entertainment as your social media content, you might get a big following. But you won’t be selling as effectively as you could be.
Conversely, it’s not good if you’re constantly pushing your product and trying to convert people all the time instead of also offering useful social media content. People won’t stick along for long if you’re just shoving advertisements at them. If you’re struggling in that regard, you can refer to these influencer tips about creating engaging videos.
A happy medium lies somewhere in the middle.
When considering what to post to social media, there are a couple of standard content mixes that you can use to get started.
2 of the most popular ones are the 80/20 rule and the social media rule of thirds.
Content mix #1 – the 80/20 rule
When following this content mix, only a small amount of your social media posts will be directly promoting your brand.
- 80% of posts should be designed to educate, inform, or entertain.
- The other 20% of posts can be used to drive conversions or directly promote your business.
Content mix #2 – the social media rule of thirds
The social media rule of thirds is similar to the 80/20 rule. Except it breaks your content calendar down into 3 categories instead of just 2.
- A third of your social media posts should involve interacting directly with your fans and followers.
- A third of your social media posts should curate content from industry thought leaders.
- The remaining third can be used to drive conversions or promote your business.
Choosing the best content mix that aligns with your strategy is just one step to crushing your social media content. Content creation for social media can be difficult, but with proper guidance, you can improve your content.
How monday.com can help manage your social media posting schedule
Managing your social media posting schedule is a breeze if you’re using monday.com’s social media planner template.
With this social media scheduling tool, you can create, design, and schedule all of your social media content in one visual space.
It works great if you’re managing your social media accounts by yourself. But it’s even more useful for managing and coordinating a team. Everyone can see and work on your scheduled posts together.
What are the benefits of using a social media planner template?
This social media management tool serves 3 main purposes:
It manages your creative assets. You can centralize all of your documents and creative assets into a single visual workspace.
It organizes all of your content. You can organize your social media content calendar by status, publish date, and platform. Plus, all of your necessary digital assets for each piece of content can be kept together as well.
It centralizes your data. You can import all of your relevant data from external sources and connect external files to monday.com in just a few clicks.
monday.com integrates with many apps your business is probably already using, like Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, Zapier, and many others.
For larger teams, you can manage and coordinate the schedules of all of your content creators, designers, and social media managers, all within monday.com as well.
Take your social media game to the next level
A social media schedule allows you to plan your social media posts out well in advance.
Each social media platform has a distinct time of day that’s best for posting to maximize engagement. You’ll need to plan for this in your schedule to achieve the best results.
monday.com can help to streamline the process of designing, creating, and scheduling all of your social media posts. You can coordinate between several teammates and have all of your assets in one place.
Get started with our ready-made social media planner template today.
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