5 Goals for Scheduling Social Media Content

People are always talking about the several roles involved in running a business – boss, administrative assistant, social media strategist, marketing director, accountant, copywriter… the list goes on. Most days we find ourselves doing strange, frantic dances, running around trying to keep every plate spinning.

We started doing something simple a few months ago that helped cut back on the circus that’s entrepreneurship: scheduling social media. (and it’s a little different than what the popular kids are doing)

Now, for some of you this might not seem ground-breaking and for others this might be old news, but we encourage you to follow along this week as we talk about our major goals regarding scheduling social media; there might be some benefits or strategies mentioned that you may not have considered before.

And while this post may not solve all of your juggling, plate-spinning problems, it will certainly help with sanity and productivity.

Here are 5 helpful benefits of scheduling social media (and an inside look at our Hello Social scheduling strategy).

1 | TIME BLOCKING

We are a big fan of time-blocking. At the beginning of each work week we sit down with our to-do list and set aside time for each task on our schedule.

We’ve discovered that we focus best when we’re tackling one task at a time, and having a set amount of time to complete each task motivates us to get things done quickly and stay on schedule.

Before we started including that social media time-block in our schedule, We would throw up a random post on our account at a random time of day or week. The randomness of our social media posts interfered with all of the other tasks on our list.

But now that we set aside time to tackle social media once a week, we get it all done in the beginning of our week and we don’t have to worry about it again. It takes less time out of our schedule in the long run, helps us get in a daily routine of sharing helpful content, and it’s increased our productivity.

2 | LESS DISTRACTIONS THROUGHOUT THE DAY

A little less distractions, a lot more satisfaction!

Social media is one of the largest time wasters, especially when you use sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for your business. It can be far too easy to hop on an account for a quick minute to post something… and get off 30 minutes later after getting sucked into scrolling through everyone else’s posts, photos, and pins.

We know the struggle all too well, which is another reason scheduling posts has been extremely helpful. Because we schedule everything out at the beginning of the week, we only check back in once or twice a day per post – often on our lunch break or afternoon break – because our posts have already been taken care of.

Scheduling posts has cut back on the distraction of social media and keeps us on task throughout my workday.

3 | MORE INTENTIONAL POSTS

Our business has begun to grow now that we’ve started implementing strategy with our social media accounts. The more strategic we’ve become with the content we share on Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, the more we’ve seen our accounts grow and drive more traffic back to our website.

Once we started scheduling time in our work week to take care of social media, we were almost forced to become more strategic about the type of content we were sharing. Planning out each post has helped us come up with a concrete game plan for how we use Interwoven Designs social media accounts.

This has been especially helpful for new business ideas and announcements; scheduling posts has helped us map out promotional posts and create campaigns.

4 | CONSISTENCY

Scheduling posts has also helped us become more consistent across all of our social media accounts. We will get more in to the structure of scheduling later. By planning each post at the beginning of the week, we’re able to share similar content across all platforms and reach our different social media audiences with the same cohesive content.

It also helps create consistency for our audience and sets expectations for when they’ll see posts from us and what kind of posts we’ll share.

5 | DELEGATING is KEY!

This has been one of the largest benefits of scheduling posts.

Remember all of those hats and plates we talked about earlier? One of the keys to cutting back on the number of tasks on your to-do list and growing a successful business is delegating. By handing off tasks that don’t require your creativity or expertise, you’re able to spend time and energy performing tasks that directly bring in an income.

By having a system in place for scheduling your social media posts, you’re making it easier to hand off this task in the long run.

While we prefer to put our own spin on the wording and tone of each social media posts for Interwoven Designs to maintain a consistent voice and streamline our brand, Les & I collaborate by creating helpful topics each week. And it saves us so much time.

Down the road, if our business continues to grow and we’re able to bring on more people, we might be able to hand off social media to someone else. Having this system in place ahead of time will make that transition easier.

We hope that we have convinced you that scheduling your social media is the way to go.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this or answer any questions you might have. Drop us a comment below and meet us back here next week when we talk about content pillars and a road map of intentional categories.