7 reasons why you need a social media scheduler - an app to manage multiple social media accounts

Why do you need a social media scheduler to grow your business?

If you want to grow your business through social media, you need to build an engaged relationship with your target audience. And that relationship is like any other relationship. You can't stop talking to your girlfriend for a week and expect your relationship to blossom. Same with social media marketing: you can't stop posting on your social media for a week and expect your followers to buy from you when you ask them to. So: to build that relationship with your audience, you need to post high-quality content every day, and be where your audience is.And then it just gets too much. Life happens, and you have to stop. I hear you. But being successful at social media marketing doesn't mean you need to relentlessly post everywhere, every day, and basically that you can't have a life. A social media scheduler - an app to manage multiple social media accounts - can help you win without the sacrifices.

Let's see how a social media scheduler can help you:

1. save time & stay focused
2. analyse your stats across all platforms & get better results
3. edit your photos and graphics & add watermarks
4. build audiences in different timezones
5. get post inspiration
6. outsource social media management to your team
7. schedule Facebook covers & use them as a free advertising space

#1 Save time & Stay Focused on growing your business

"I started using Postfity because I want to be able to schedule my social media posts in all of my accounts without spending time posting in each individual one every day and to be able to see their stats without checking each one individually as well."

- Roberta, gifts4you

Post on all platforms at the same time & save time

Roberta's testimonial says it all - the biggest upside of social media schedulers is that they save you a ton of time. Instead of switching between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter - you can post to all the platforms at the same time, as well as schedule your posts for later: it's that easy:

Schedule your posts and stay focused...

You may think that switching between the different accounts doesn't take that much time...until you realise that the startup costs of switching attention are killing your productivity. You may have heard about the book "The One Thing" by Gary Keller - how you should focus on that one thing at a time. If you're just starting your business and have a small team (or you're a one-man-show) you may feel like you're being pulled in all directions: you're torn between creating content, doing customer support (btw. you can also do customer support via social media or livechat- a great alternative to a call center software if you have a small team and don't have the bandwidth to pick up calls) and project management, and actually making your product/ delivering your service. But you don't need social media marketing to be yet another distraction.

Instead of posting every day, you can simply schedule all your posts for a week or month on one day - and then move on to other tasks, while your posts go out automatically.

#2 Get better results by analysing your stats & posting strategically

Ok, so now that you have scheduled your posts to go out on all your social media automatically, at the same time. Yay to that! But how do you know which posts are doing well and which not? Are all posts working for each social media platform? Maybe there's something you need to adjust in your LinkedIn strategy as opposed to your Facebook strategy?

If you don't analyse your posts, it's like shooting in the air - you will end up wasting a lot of time posting things that don't resonate with your audience.

But in order to analyse your posts' performance, you need to choose the right KPIs, and then compare how your posts perform against them.

It's hard to compare each post on one platform individually, let alone across several platforms.

Fortunately, social media schedulers like Postfity offer advanced analytics built into the tool!

Let's see what metrics you can compare using Postfity and what you can learn from them:

Posts published vs. post likes/ shares/ comments/ clicks

This metric allows you to see how different posts you published (by timestamps) resonated with your audience judging by the number of likes. This will help you create more posts that actually drive engagement.It also allows you to understand how the total number of posts affects engagement(number of likes). You can choose different social media from the panel on the left. It works for the social media that allow likes, of course ;)

Post likes vs. post shares/ comments/ clicks

This metric allows you to see whether the likes actually translate into post clicks. As you can see from the chart above, this is not always the case. Having the knowledge which types of posts get engagement actually also cause the audience to click on the links helps you create more posts that get actually read.

Comparing the same metric across two (or more) social media

[gallery columns="2" size="full" ids="https://blog.postfity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Posts-published-vs-post-likes-FB.png|,https://blog.postfity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Posts-published-vs.-posts-likes.png|"]Not all social media were created equal...and you may find out that your posts perform differently on different platforms.Comparing e.g. posts published vs. post likes between Facebook and LinkedIn will help you understand how your posts perform on different platforms. This will be especially useful if you're posting exactly the same content on different social media at the same time. It may show you that you need to adjust your strategy for a particular social media platform.

#3 Edit your photos and graphics & add watermarks

Do you know that social media schedulers also allow you to edit your photos and graphics for social media? You can resize the photo, crop it, add text etc...You can even automatically add a watermark (e.g. your company logo) to all your photos in the 'settings' tab:

P.S. you can get free stock photos (no credits required!) from Unsplash or Pixabay and free stock graphics like the one used in the video from Undraw.

#4 Build audiences in different timezones

Do you know that in order to get the best engagement, you should post at specific times? This sounds easy enough if you're based in the same timezone as your audience. But say you're based in the UK, but the majority of your customers are based in the US. Or it could be even worse - if you're based in Thailand and posting for people in the US, they will be up to 15 h behind you.

[caption id="attachment_13479" align="alignnone" width="800"]

source: https://buzzsumo.com/blog/facebook-engagement-guide/#time[/caption]

Does that mean you need to stay up until 3 a.m. to post when your audience is most active in their home country?

Not at all - if you're using a social media scheduler!

A social media scheduler allows you to plan your posts ahead - and post for you, literally in your sleep.

#5 Get post inspiration from your social media scheduler

One of the biggest reasons why people don't post regularly is because...they don't know what to post. While you should be creating high quality, original content yourself all the time, there will be a time when you need help and some 'extra inspiration'. That's when you can fall back on post ideas provided by your social media scheduler. Postfity provides curated articles organised by category (e.g. business, health, arts, science etc.) you can share with your audience when you don't have any new original content to share with them. Make sure you select industry news or useful tips that will be relevant and interesting for your audience.

#6 Outsource your social media to your team

As your business grows, there inevitably comes a time when you need to outsource social media management. Depending on your budget, this can be anyone from a remote VA (virtual assistant), to a social media agency. Regardless of what you choose - you don't want a person you've never met in your life to have access to all your social media directly:

You know what I mean - "trust, but verify". Sh*t happens to the best of us - so you'll be better off limiting access and verifying posts *before* they get published. Fortunately, a good social media scheduler allows you to create teams and see what your VA/ social media management agency wants to post *before* they post:

You can give your team membersdifferent account access levels and make sure that, well, sh*t doesn't happen.

#7 Schedule Facebook covers as free advertising space

If you're not using FB covers as free advertising space - you are leaving money on the table ;) Facebook covers are a massively underpriced banner ad as your followers see you've changed them in their feed.Facebook covers are an excellent way to promote:

• events
• product/ book launches
• time-sensitive sales / promotions:

And yet - if you're managing multiple Facebook pages for different companies, or you need the cover to 'go live' at a particular time - it might become really time-consuming to change them all manually. That's where a social media scheduler comes to rescue again: you can schedule Facebook covers in Postfity just the same way you schedule posts!

Wanna try our social media scheduler for free?

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