Do scheduling tools hurt engagement?
Can you really engage with your audience if you’re using scheduling tools?
How do you use scheduling tools successfully in a small business? I answer these questions and more in this video – including my 5 best tips to master scheduling without hurting your engagement!
Let us know in the comments how you schedule!
Video transcript:
“Hi everyone, I’m Kelley Sanabria, the founder and CEO of Femworking! Today we’re going to talk about social media scheduling tools. We have another blog post where we talk about all the scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Edgar, Buffer, … and we compare them. But today we’re going to talk about the concept of scheduling and whether or not it’s good for your business.
The age old question regarding scheduling on social media is: can I have true engagement from my community if my social media posts are scheduled? My answer is: yes! When this topic came up in our Members Only Mastermind Group, it got a lot of attention and a lot of people got excited, and one member in particular was really outspoken against scheduling.
She made the point that you can’t anticipate where your audience is going to go or respond to different pieces of content, so scheduling makes you not able to be agile and responsive with your audience, and therefor not engaging!
She kind of has a point, but I would argue that you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so the key is to create really engaging, really compelling content about the things that your audience typically asks you about. So if your audience is coming to you with the same questions over and over again, those are really great things to be creating content for, because you already know you are responding to a need your audience has.
For me, I have to schedule. My life doesn’t enable me to be real time all the time, so I like to schedule updates and kind of front load my social medias. And then, and this is the key people! You have to go in daily and leave evidence of engaging with your community! So you want to have engagement with individuals who are a part of your community. You want to talk one-on-one, and have real two way conversations with them. That’s huge!
50/50
So scheduling can be 50%, but engaging live with them has to be at least the other 50%. It’s really important.
Scheduling allows me to have an online presence and gives me a jumping off point for engaging with my audience.
A quick note here about batching: batching is one of my favorite entrepreneurial hacks of all time. It’s for example when I schedule all my social media content in a batch, all at one time. I might plan all my blog posts for one year in one sitting. Maybe I’ll film all of my vlogs in one day. Or I might write and schedule my social media content in one sitting. This is all batching, and it’s insanely helpful for efficiency and productivity.
And while we’re at it, another quick hack: one of our Femworkers, Dorie, actually uses scheduling for her personal life, so she’ll schedule things like PTA updates on her Facebook too, which I thought was so cool when she told me that!
Behind-the-Scenes!
So, now I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we handle scheduling here at Femworking, and I’m going to give you 5 quick tips:
- Decide which platforms you want to show up on. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, … where do you want to be?
- Decide how you’ll schedule for each platform. For instance at Femworking, when we schedule for Facebook we use Facebook, not any other scheduling tools, we schedule directly on Facebook. For Twitter we’ll use Buffer or Sprout Social.
- Implement a system so that the scheduling actually gets done. For us at Femworking we’ll draft the post, record the vlog, write the post, and we’ll also do all our planning for the social media. We plan what the status update will say on each platform. We plan everything in advance, and then on a daily basis I go and check every one of our accounts, and engage with people who are following our work!
- That’s number four: engage, engage, engage! You need to be engaging at least once a day. But again this relates to batching, because if everything is planned in advance, you can just go in once a day to engage. It makes it so much more efficient, and you’re still getting that authentic connection with your audience.
- Stay agile! You want to make sure you’re able to shift and adjust to your audience’s needs as they arise, that’s what agile means.
So that’s it, those are our tips for scheduling at Femworking! I would love it if you could tell us in the comments what your scheduling secrets are and how you schedule!
I think it’s really important for entrepreneurs to have a community and learn from each other, so let us know how you do it, if you have tips you want to share, or more questions! We all help each other here at Femworking, so we’d be happy to help you too!”