Become a More Efficient Social Networker
Posted by Marketing Man in Facebook,Marketing for Accountants,Online Marketing,Social Networks | November 2, 2012
Making the time to post regular, interesting, content on social networks can be a difficult task at times. When we start to get busy with client work our social networking can fall by the wayside. In order to keep your contacts and followers engaged with your social network pages it is recommended to post regular content, so how do you manage it when you get busy?
The way you manage it is by becoming much more organised in the way you run your presence(s) on social networking sites, instead of logging on and thinking of something to say or something to share have it all mapped out ahead of time.
Schedule Your Posts on Facebook
Not a lot of people know that you can schedule posts in advance on your Facebook page, in all honesty I only became aware of it a couple of months ago, but this is a great way to make sure your Facebook page is getting updated even when you are struggling for time.
The way I manage things is to sit down for an hour on a Sunday night and map out the week ahead, scheduling at least 2 posts per day for the coming week. Some of these might be quick questions, jokes, funny pictures or interesting news, others are usually links to blog posts that I think my Facebook page fans will enjoy. Once that is done I can relax knowing that my page will be updated daily without me needing to get involved, obviously if something newsworthy comes up or I see a great blog post that I want to share or I get some extra time to put into Facebook then I can add to the content that is posted but I will at least have a base of content getting posted on a daily basis.
How to Schedule a Post on Facebook
You will need to be an Admin of the Facebook page to enable you to post and schedule content onto the page. Getting posts into your schedule is really quite simple. Input the post as you normally would but instead of hitting “Post” you want to click the little “clock” icon at the bottom of the post box.
Then it is just a case of choosing the Year, Month, Day and Time for the post to be published and then hit the “Schedule” button, all done. Posts can be scheduled up to six months in advance at 15-minute intervals.
If, at any time, you want to see what posts you have got scheduled to appear you can do so by following these steps:
- Open the Admin panel at the top of the page.
- Click the “Edit Page” tab.
- Select “Use Activity Log”
This will pull up a list of the posts you have got scheduled to publish and you can cancel them, change the publish time or choose to publish the post immediately.
I Already Use a 3rd Party App for This!
There are a number of 3rd party apps that have allowed auto-posting to your Facebook page like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, so you may be asking why is this information even relevant to me. Well there is a strong theory in social media circles that posting via a 3rd party can impact your Edgerank and reduce the level of user-engagement you get on posts so it may be worth switching to manually scheduling your posts in Facebook itself.
What Are The Advantages of Scheduling Facebook Posts
Aside from the obvious advantage of making you more organised and relieving the pressure of having to find something new to post everyday there are some other advantages.
- You can schedule the posts to publish in the optimum time for user-engagement. This is going to take some research and testing on your part but eventually you should be able to gauge which days and what times during those days are better for user-interaction (likes, comments, shares) and schedule your posts to take full advantage.
- You can spread your posts out over the day or week rather than logging in and dumping 5 or 6 posts on people which does nothing for user-interaction and ends up annoying people.
- Your page can be working for you even when you’re not. If you’ve got a holiday coming up you can take full advantage of the scheduling feature to make sure your Facebook Page never goes quiet.
How To Know When The Best Time To Publish a Post Is
There is no hard and fast rule here that I can give you that will magically improve your interactions, obviously don’t schedule your posts to publish in the dead of the night as nobody will see them! You are going to need to do a little bit of testing here to see what works for your audience. You can make notes or, being accountants, i’m sure you know your way around a spreadsheet, fire up a new spreadsheet and document a few details of the posts you make, like:
- The day of the week it was published
- The time of the day it was published
- The type of content i.e. link to a blog post, photo, text, question, survey etc.
- Level of engagement. How many Likes, Shares and Comments
- The interaction on your posts. Hover over the “xxx people saw this post” and it will give you a breakdown of how many directly saw your post and how many virally saw your post. Someone virally seeing your post has been alerted to it by a contact Liking, Sharing or Commenting on it.
This may seem like a lot of hard work but once your spreadsheet is set up you are just inputting data which you can then use to get a better idea of what days are best for posting and at what time during those days.
By taking a little time to get organised you can make your presence on Facebook operate much more efficiently and reduce the amount of time you waste thinking of things to publish.
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About the Author – Marketing Man
Marketing Man is a superhero marketer hell bent on a personal crusade to improve the websites and marketing of UK accountancy firms. Check him out on Google+
