Schedule Social Media

How to Schedule Social Media

Today I want to show you a way to automate some of the basic things in social media that you might be doing manually and that take a lot of time I want to show you how to use analytics to find the best things to share frequently and how to set up a tool to have those things done for us over and over without spending more time that will leave us more time and more energy to focus on the things that matter most

the really social part of social media online networking and building relationships and making friends so here are a couple tips for using social media automation first here's a quick review of social media scheduling which is all about making sure that your content appears more than once in a social stream social streams move fast so you can't really count on anybody seeing it if you share just once here's an example from KISSmetrics of how often something might be shared how you can see some things get shared more than once especially on a social network like Twitter social media scheduling is about creating your post in advance in a tool like HootSuite like this so I have simply written the tweet or in this case it could also be a LinkedIn post and just click that little scheduling button which then gives me a whole calendar I can choose any coming the future that I want this to go out or I can turn the auto scheduling on which will then pick a time when my audience is active and it fills up this queue of all the things that I've scheduled or Auto scheduled in advance now these things are all lined up in they're going to be shared at the right times and so I can be very affected by doing all of my planning in the morning maybe and then it's scheduled so that things don't get bunched up they're going to get scheduled to have a different time today buffer is a similar tool it you can install the chrome plug and it's even easier just with one click anything that you see you can then share and add it to your social stream the downside is that those buffered posts or those auto schedule toot sweet posts will get used up and then there the queue is empty now here's a way to fix that with social media automation fair warning there's a paid tool involved here I'm going to do it using Edgar which is I think 50 bucks a month but it saves us a lot of time so the trick is to first find the best content get shared the best content is the kind of that gets shared the most that gets clicked the most and that gets visitors to take action we're also going to find the best times to share and find the rid of logos into the tool now I am NOT talking about automating the interpersonal part of social media I'm just talking about the sharing the content that blue slice but according to Twitter rule of thirds there's two other thirds of so hook up sharing stuff which is of interacting on social which is sharing other people's content which might be industry news or advice or content of people you're becoming friends with here that's the influencer marketing piece so that's highly valuable content and adds value to your audience and also the interpersonal connections those interactions those hellos and thank-yous we're not going to try to automate that of course we're just going to create a tool that will share the own content over and over freeing up more time for the other two thirds now you can see using buzzsumo what gets shared the most on any domain in any social network just put in the address and it gives you a list add these posts to your list these are the this is your content that gets shared the most you can also see what gets click the most you can send it for the paid version of HootSuite which gives you a 30-day view which will give you this data if you want it and it shows you which of your posts have been clicked the most often and you can add these to your lists finally I want to show you a tool for finding the things that get not just clicked and shared but that inspire action the most often and we're going to do that using the reverse goal path at Google Analytics this report shows us what people were doing right before they subscribe to the newsletter for example once you choose newsletter as the goal it appears in the on the Left column and in the column right before that it shows you what people were reading before they subscribe to the newsletter on the far right is how many people subscribed after reading that post this works well especially if you've got a newsletter signup box on every page you can see what they were doing right before they handed on that because the signup box is everywhere so this data is useful but it's not the full picture because this just shows us the total number of subscribers if I want to see the conversion rate the percentage of people who took action I need to go get some more data from another report in the site content all pages report it shows me the total number of pageviews from each of those this is killer data because when you combine these on a spreadsheet and divide the number of pageviews by the number of subscribers it will show you the actual conversion rate from visitor into newsletter subscriber for every one of your pieces of content definitely add these to your list and you'll quickly notice that some things convert much higher percentages of visitors into subscribers there's a link down below if you'd like to see a post that describes exactly how to do this step by step when to share the most it's conventional wisdom that 11 o'clock in the Midwest is lunch on the East Coast and breakfast on the west coast that's generally considered to be a good time you can also just go back into a tool like followerwonk to see when your show when your network is active and then share it at those times or consider counter competitive timing share when you're with your audience's may be less active but so are your other people putting content into those social streams as a general rule also you might not want to share directly on the hour or half-hour tons of people schedule things to go out then look for what Jay Baer calls those micro opportunities sharing just before or just after the half hour that way people who get to meetings early or late might check social media so now I'm going to load these into Edgar and I'm going to work on these tweets and make each them a work of art I'm being very deliberate about using headlines that have clarity and using maybe secondary headlines and including numbers output in special characters on these you see that little arrow there the hashtags and using hashtags and line breaks right to take more space there images never share something without an image in it of course and finally the link Edgar uses bitly for its URL shortening which will give me more data later if I want to optimize this automation here's that list of every trick in the book I called it so you want to make sure that each of those posts include all those and when to share them at all those different times of day so here's the look at the calendar which shows that I'm scheduling certain things to go out on certain networks they're all loaded into this tool and at each of these times Edgar will grab something from that big bucket of shared posts those posts that gets shared clicked and convert the most it keeps them in constant rotation so that's basic social media automation I hope this was useful to you guys you'd like 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