Are you a competition business that is looking to create, plan and schedule social media content? Here is our guide to scheduling content for social media in advance. It will save you time and energy, but also allows you to stick to a successful strategy. Planning ahead is a key part of any successful business plan and scheduling your social media posts in advance is well worth it. Let’s go through the benefits of scheduling your social media for your competition business!

 

Benefits of social media scheduling

1. Time-saver: Scheduling your content allows you to have so much freedom with your time. When you plan and schedule your content, you are not tied to your desk or having to worry about getting things posted at peak times. This gives you the most efficient use of your time and allows you to get on with other aspects of your business. We recommend allocating at least one day per week to sit down and organise your content schedule in bulk.

2. Freedom to change things about: One of the biggest benefits of scheduling is that it doesn’t have to be set in stone.  What we mean by this is, say you decided to change the graphic or the caption information, you can do this with ease. That element of flexibility allows you to tweak your content with ease and post exactly what you want, when you want. Decide to move your competition draw date a day forward? Don’t worry – this can be done with ease when you schedule. 

3. Focus on important areas: Scheduling content allows you to visualise what a week, month or even years worth will look like! Being able to identify which areas of content you would like to try or like to improve on. Seasonal content such as Fathers Day and Christmas can all be planned for well in advance. Not only this, but these times will probably be extremely busy for your business. That’s why we recommend planning ahead so that you have a clear head to create and execute campaigns!

4. Consistency is key: Posting regular and good quality content is essential for keeping existing customers interested in your brand as well as bringing in new clients! It’s so much easier to stick to a content strategy by planning and scheduling your strategy. In addition, scheduling tools allow you to track your analytics meaning you can identify information such as best times to post your content. 

Click here to learn the signs that people are engaging  with your competitions on social media 

 

Examples of social media planning tools.

Let’s look at some scheduling tools. There is plenty to choose from on the market but here is just some examples:

1. Hootsuite: Popular with many businesses, hootsuite is a scheduling tool that is compatible with popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and youtube. Hootsuite allows you to track account-specific social media analytics to track results and performance and make customised reports! Comparatively, to other scheduling platforms, hootsuite is not the most affordable site to use. Therefore, we recommend trying other platforms which don’t have the same hefty price tag for new businesses.

2. Smarterque: One of the nice features about smarterque is that it uses a category based system. Posts are assigned to a category and these categories are assigned to a post at certain times. Say you wanted to post promotional content on a Monday, informational content on a Tuesday and winners on a Wednesday. Categories are assigned automatically when added to the queue according to your social media schedule. This helps with your consistency and helps with planning what images you may need. Another bonus feature that smarterque has is to recycle content. This works by when the queue is empty, previous content will be uploaded automatically. Meaning, all you have to do is upload inject new content but can keep using previous content. For example, countdowns and live draw dates.

3. Facebook Business Suite: Facebook business suite is one of the most easy to use scheduling tools and you are probably already familiar with the set up. This platform incorporates all of your facebook and instagram pages into one space. It’s very user-friendly and is available on a desktop or on a mobile app. This scheduling platform is totally free which is a huge advantage. The limitations of Facebook business suite would be that it cannot publish blogs or publish to youtube or pinterest, it can only post videos and images to Facebook and Instagram. In addition, this platform allows notification management and the ability to respond to comments and see likes and shares all in one place.

A daily social media content plan for your competition business. 

Work one day ahead.

• What events and launches do you have planned for tomorrow?
• How much content do you need to plan and schedule?
• What times are best to post for my audience?
• What images do I need to make/use?

A weekly social media content plan for your competition business.

Work one week ahead.

• What events and launches do you have planned for this week?
• Which blog posts do you need to prepare and schedule?
• How much new content do you need to find ahead of time?
• Which images or graphics could you create in advance?

Choose a day of the week to schedule content for the next seven days. This allows you to identify areas to improve your content or plan efficiently around an event. An added bonus, it is satisfying to see what content you have scheduled for the week!

Final thoughts

Scheduling great content is an essential part of your business and has great benefits. Not only does scheduling save you time in the long run, it helps prepare you for events, and keeps your content strategy consistent. Scheduling your content also frees you from your laptop or phone. If you can allocate time to schedule your posts and videos for the week, you will see the benefits of social media scheduling for your competition business.