Social media is a powerful tool for promoting the growth of your business and finding the best strategy for your local business. Whatever niche you are in, there is a high chance that you will be able to find people talking about that niche on social media, and with some creative posting you can attract the interest of those people and grow your business online.
The challenge with social media is that it takes a lot of time to build up your engagement and to post quality content. It is easy to get so caught up with posting that you start to neglect the other parts of running your business. This can put you in a tricky situation in the long term – you need to promote your business for it to grow, but you also need to focus on the other bits of running your business as well.
Save Time and Grow Your Following
Social media content scheduling is an invaluable tool that can help you to grow your business, by saving you time when it comes to posting. Instead of having to log on to your account and post every day or even a few times a day, you can set aside some time once a week or even a little less often to queue up posts to go out at times when you know your followers and interested parties will be active.
You will still need to put aside some time to read user responses and reply to messages, but scheduling the content that you want to share will help to cut down on the amount of time that you waste getting distracted with things like social media.
Facebook has built-in basic scheduling tools, and you can schedule posting on Twitter using third party services such as Buffer. There are tools that will help you to automate a large part of posting to Instagram as well, although the Instagram tools are more limited compared to the tools for other services, because of limitations that Instagram has set in terms of how people can access the platform.
Avoiding a PR Disaster
The one thing that you should consider if you are going to use social media content scheduling is that the world of news moves quickly, and if you schedule a joking post for a few days time, then something negative happens that makes the post one that appears to be in bad taste, then this could leave you with egg on your face to a large portion of your audience. Most people won’t assume that your post was scheduled in advance and simply ‘unfortunate’. The automatic assumption will be that you were simply going for the shock value. It’s hard to come back from that kind of negative PR.
When you’re scheduling content, try to choose neutral topics. Avoid politics unless you want to take a specific stance as a part of your brand. Avoid anything that could be considered sensitive in any way. Stick to content that is on-message, and that is clearly geared towards the subject that your target audience is looking for. If you see that something is trending, and want to jump in on the conversation with an ad-hoc post, take a moment to learn exactly what is going on. The advice to think before you speak applies just as well to social media as it does to face to face communications. You never know who is watching/reading, and you never know who will share what you say. So, think carefully about what you want to share, and make sure that you present a positive and professional image for your brand at all times.
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