How to Create a Social Media Posting Schedule That Increases Your ROI 

Not everyone likes schedules; they require discipline and can often feel uncreative, but having a social media posting schedule can actually inspire creativity while saving you time and guesswork.

When you only post one link to your latest piece on each social media channel, you’re severely limiting the number of people who will see and get value from your post.

Not everyone is glued to their social media channels every minute of every day, so there’s a very high chance that the vast majority of your audience will miss it and your lovingly crafted post will disappear along with all the others.

Creating a social media posting schedule means you can automate links to your posts to go out at certain times of the day on a regular basis, which helps you:

• Save time
• Make team collaboration easier
• Increase the quality of your content
• Boost follower engagement
• Gain control over your content
• Facilitate social media experiments for further jumps in ROI

More people will see your content which, in the long term, leads to more followers, more traffic, more conversions, and, ultimately, more customers.

 

What You’ll Find in This Post

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Why Creating a Social Media Posting Schedule Matters

Staying on top of social media is difficult.

Feeds are fast-paced, and it’s tricky trying to stand out in a sea of other businesses every single day. For it to work, you’d need to be on social media 24/7, which isn’t possible.

But, with a social media posting schedule, you can set aside an hour or two every week to fill your queue up with awesome content and then sit back and relax (kind of) the rest of the time.

Plus, the more consistent you are with your schedule, the easier you’ll be able to see what’s working and what’s not to increase your overall ROI.

 

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Social Media Posting Schedule

Now you know why you should create a social media posting schedule, let’s look at how you can do that with the help of Sked.

1. Set Goals for Your Schedule

The basic goal for your social media channels should be to grow relationships and build a following for your brand, but on top of that, it helps to have specific goals that can be measured.

For example, you might decide that you want to convert at least ten new customers via Instagram each month.

This counts as a SMART goal because it’s:

• Specific: you have a solid number you’re aiming for
• Measurable: you can measure whether you have 10 new customers
• Achievable: it’s doable (not like, say, aiming for 2K new customers a month)
• Relevant: it’s relevant to your business
• Time-based: you have a set timeframe (the end of each month) in which to reach that goal

2. Consider the Purpose of Each Social Media Network

Not all social media channels are built equally.

Instagram is great for high-quality visuals and sharing in-the-moment Stories with your followers, while Twitter is better for text-based shares and linking to industry news and blog posts.

Before you plan your social media posting schedule, it’s important that you consider the purpose of each social media platform and determine how you’d like to leverage each one for your business.

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For example, you might decide to use Facebook to share your latest blog posts and research, Twitter for curating industry news, and Instagram to share behind-the-scenes insights into your brand.

With Sked, you can customize your posts for Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Tumblr, Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest.

So, if you want to share your latest blog post, you can create different captions for different networks all in one place.

3. Choose the Right Time of Day to Post

Audiences are active on different social networks at different times.

People are more likely to use LinkedIn during the working day compared to Pinterest, which they might scroll through while watching TV in the evening.

It’s important to know when people are most active on the channels you plan to use, but also when the specific audience you want to attract is active.

For example, if your audience is professionals with 9-5 jobs, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to reach them on Facebook during their working hours.

According to research, here are the best times overall to post on the different social media networks:

• The best times to post on Facebook are Wednesdays at 12 pm and 2 pm, and Thursdays at 1 pm and 2 pm
• The best time to post on Twitter is between 9 am and 10 am on a Friday
• The best times to post on Instagram are Wednesdays at 3 pm, Thursdays at 5 am and 11 am and between 3-4 pm, and Fridays at 5 am
• The best time to post on LinkedIn is between 3-5 pm on a Wednesday

With Sked’s Queue feature, you can set up recurring post times on different days of the week so that your content gets published when your audience is most active.

It’s worth playing around with this at the beginning to see when you get the most engagement and then working those times into your schedule.

Remember that time zones might be an issue, too, especially if you’re targeting a global audience. Sked lets you create custom timezone assignments for each account so you can be sure to share the right content in the right place at the right time.

4. Mix Up Your Content

Though not all content is appropriate for every network, social media is inherently a place for conversations to develop and for consumers to interact with the brands they love. That means keeping promotional posts to a minimum (as a general rule, 80% of the content you share should be from other people, with only 20% of your own content thrown in).

Curating and sharing content from other industry experts not only gives you access to swathes of fresh content, but it also builds trust between you and your audience.

Why?

Because they can see that you want to provide value and not just sell, sell, sell.

For inspiration, it always helps to take note of holidays and special events throughout the year that lend themselves to new content.

Built-in social media calendars let you mark any important social media events and holidays down, plus it helpfully reminds you of any upcoming occasions so you can schedule content well in advance.

5. Focus on One or Two Networks

It can be tempting to go into planning a social media posting schedule with all guns blazing, but trying to post on every single channel is exhausting and not conducive to a successful strategy.

Spreading yourself too thin means you won’t be able to measure your results accurately and it might dilute your schedule overall.

Instead, start by focusing on one or two social networks.

This way you can really learn what your audience likes and engage with before moving on to the next network and doing the same.

Here, you want to choose the most relevant social media networks for your audience.

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For example, if you’re targeting fashion-savvy millennials, you’re definitely going to want to be on Instagram, whereas if you want to reach lawyers, LinkedIn might be a better bet.

6. Measure and Tweak

You’ll only learn what your audience likes by testing, testing, and testing some more.

To do this, you want to:

• Identify key engagement metrics (including comments, likes, clicks, and shares)
• Track your goals (for example, if you’ve set a goal to convert 10 new customers a month, but you’re only managing to convert 5, do you need to change your goal or is there a way you can tweak your social media marketing to make that number higher?)
• Make a note of the posts that have the highest engagement metrics
• Post more content like your most popular posts

On Instagram, get detailed analytics & insights about your engagement metrics.

Not only can you get designated post reports, but you can also download detailed engagement breakdowns to see which segments and demographics of your audience like certain posts.

 

Simplify Your Social Media Posting Schedule with Sked

Planning, creating, implementing, and measuring a social media posting schedule is not an easy task, particularly if you want to see some eye-opening results.

Surprisingly enough, 43% of marketers in this survey said they don’t use any software to automate posting, which can drain resources and be time-consuming.

Instead of manually uploading content to each social media network every time you want to post content, choose a tool to help you automate and streamline the process from start to finish.

With Sked’s built-in analytics, you can measure what’s performing well and what’s not, see who is interacting with your posts the most, and figure out when the best time to post is, all of which come together to help you create a solid, consistent social media posting schedule that boosts ROI and gets you more customers.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this collaborative post with Sked Social.