Social Media Posting Schedule

You know that sticking to a schedule is important for your business. It helps you get things done,
and keeps everything running smoothly. The same is true when it comes to your social media
marketing.

Understand which networks are right for your business before creating a posting
schedule.

Most businesses use Facebook first. But you may also want to get setup on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Pinterest, or Instagram — depending on the audience you’re trying to reach. If you’re not sure
where your audience is hanging out, this cheat sheet should help:

Now you need to decide how you want to divide your time.

Don’t think you need to post new updates on each network every day. You don’t! Social media is
about quality, not quantity. This is true when it comes to the size of your audience, and is also true
when it comes to the amount of content you share. Here are a few rules of thumb to consider when
it comes to posting frequency for each network:

Remember that these are suggested frequencies; not requirements for success. Depending on the
role each network plays in your social media plans, you may want to adjust these numbers. In
addition to these suggested frequencies, you’ll also want to monitor your networks for feedback,
and look for opportunities to engage directly with your members.

Name Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest Google+

Men,
Women,
Primary Young Students,
All Business Foodies,
Audience Adults Software
Crafters
Developers

Sharing Text
Share Text, Share News, Printing
Share News, updates,
Good for Photos, Text Photos,
product Info, Links,
What Videos, Updates, Video &
Testimonials photos,
Links Links to Info Graphics
video

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 Name Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest Google+

Sharing
Increasing
engaging Sharing Sharing
your
Best for content, Thought original and products,
seachability
What? reaching a leadership curated how to tips,
and
large content e-books
expertise
audience

Minimum 3 x per week 5 x per week 2 x per week 5 x per week 2 x per week

10 x per 10 x per 10 x per

Maximum None 5 x per week
week week week

This brings us to the type of content you’ll want to share.

Don’t jam-pack your schedule with promotional posts. Remember that your goal on social
media should be to grow relationships and build an audience for your business. It’s not to
turn every new fan, follower, and connection into a paying customer.

Try to limit your promotional content to just 20 percent of your weekly posts, with the other 80
percent focused on keeping your audience engaged and informed.

Here are a few suggestions for the type of content that works well on the top social networks:

Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest Google+

Behind the scenes Blog posts; Behind the scenes

Product updates Product photos
photos interesting articles photos

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 Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Pinterest Google+
Guides, eBooks,
Quotes Quotes Blog Posts Videos
white papers

Fill in the blank Industry news Industry news Videos Event information

True or false Newsletters or Recruitment

Infographics Blog Posts
questions announcements Videos

Vine or Youtube
Blog Posts Newsletters Quotes or Tips Industry News
videos

Newsletters or Newsletters or Guides, ebooks,

Event Updates Blog posts
announcements announcements white papers

Remember, the best way to figure out what type of content your audience is most interested in is to
test. Keep an eye on your key engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, retweets, clicks, etc).
These provide insight into which type of content is working, what’s not, and what you could be
doing differently to improve your strategy.

In addition to testing different posting frequencies, you can also test different days of the week, and
different times of the day. For some businesses, the majority of social media activity will take place
during the Monday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. work week. Other businesses may see more
engagement on weekends, early morning, or later at night.

It all depends on your audience, and when you think people are most likely to see your posts.

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Now it’s time to pull your schedule together.

At first, you may want to focus on your most important network. Once you see how it works with
one network, you can start to incorporate all of your activity into your social media schedule.

Let’s see how the schedule might look on Facebook:

Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

Morning Noon Morning Afternoon Morning

Link to latest blog Behind the scenes Updates on weekend

Motivation Quote Fill in the blank
post photos specials

To recap:

 Find the networks that are right for your business.

 Learn the type of content that works well on each network.
 Start with your most important social networks, and add others over time.
 Find the tools you need to improve social media productivity.
 Track your results and make adjustments when needed.

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PLANNING YOUR POSTS

No matter if it’s Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or Google+, you have to have a plan.
Before you start getting tap-happy on your keyboard, think about…

What are our business/marketing goals for this platform? Are we trying to sell directly? Boost
clickthroughs to our website? Get our name out there? Or do we want to encourage customer
engagement by posting useful articles or fun pictures? It might be one, or all of these. But it’s
important to know what you’re trying to achieve before you jump in all tweets blazing.

Who are we trying to reach? Think about the people you’re trying to engage with, and where
they’re likely to live socially. Why might they want to interact or follow you? What added value
can you and your company bring?

When should we post – and how often? Our posts point to just some of the vast data out there
about when you should and shouldn’t post. But realistically the best way is to try and see what
works best for your brand, that particular platform and (most importantly!) your users.
Experimenting like this may give you some quick wins and help you prioritise platforms.

How will we know it’s working? Think about your ideal outcomes. For example: greater sales,
more recommendations, more awareness of your business. Then turn that into achievable and
available measurements, eg customer recommendations = retweets and likes. Or greater awareness
= shares and clickthroughs.

What’s our tone of voice? If you don’t have tonal guidelines, find a piece of previous content you
all liked and use that as a shorthand reference.

What do we have to share or say that’s interesting? At first it may feel as if you don’t have a lot,
but all businesses have useful insight. And whatever you say, keep it positive. Positivity
encourages engagement and sharing. It also helps to inspire or excite your users.

Does it fit in with our overall content strategy? Social media shouldn’t be seen as separate to
content strategy but as an integrated part of it. Content is posted on social media, you see which
works best and then adapt your future content to suit this.

STARTING TO WRITE

Check:
☑ Is this the right platform for this post? And this audience?
☑ Does my post have a clear purpose?
☑ Do I know what I want people to think, feel or do after reading my post?
☑ Is this the right time and day to post?
☑ Have I decided what success will look like for this post?
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BEFORE YOU PUBLISH

Check:
☑ Does my post contain a link or call to action?
☑ Can I include an image or video to boost engagement?
☑ Is my post concise and specific? Does it include keywords so people know what it’s about?
☑ Can I add an appropriate hashtag(s)? (NB use up to 2 for Twitter and Facebook, up to 5 for
Instagram)
☑ Have I stayed positive? And will it reflect positively on my business?
☑ Will our customers get something useful, interesting or fun out of the post?
☑ Have I done a spelling and grammar check?

AFTER YOU’VE POSTED

Check:
☑ Have I checked how my post is doing? Am I recording engagement so I can track performance?
☑ Is there anything I would do differently next time?
☑ Can I follow any new people?
☑ Have I responded to any questions?
☑ Have I thought about my next post? What will I say and when will I do it by?
☑ Where can I repurpose or repost this content? Will my Facebook post also work on Twitter?
Can this blog I’m linking to also work as an Instagram caption? Or can I even post it again with a
different image or headline and get better results?

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Daily

 Reply to everyone
 Check your mentions
 Monitor social media for keywords and phrases
 Schedule your updates for the next day
 Check out other social media profiles
 Curate content to share
 Advocacy: Make it easy for your team to share
 Follow back those who follow you
 Connect with one new person

Weekly

 Check your stats

 Engage with influencers
 Engage with partners
 Weekly goals check-in
 Hold a strategy session
 Attend events—chats, hangouts, etc.
 Update your social media ads

Monthly

 Perform a social media audit

 Goal-setting
 Come up with new experiments
 Plan ahead for the next month or more

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Top Task to be performed by Social Media Manager

1. Curating

Depending on the type of content you share on social, curating can have a huge role in the way
you create your updates. Discovering and vetting content from others involves having a deep
well of sources to read—as well as the time to read it all.

2. Crafting

Once you’ve found what you want to share, it’s time to figure out how to say it. Crafting a
social media update is likely a task that goes faster over time as you gain experience writing
headlines, using the most impactful words, and arranging things just the perfect way.

3. Posting

Here’s where a social media management tool really makes a difference. Instead of logging in
to a handful of different channels one after another, you can log in to your management tool
once and post faster and easier.

4. Scheduling

The next step beyond posting is scheduling: writing your updates ahead of time and queueing
them to post throughout the day, overnight, through the weekend, or any other time when you
can’t be actively updating your accounts.

5. Measuring

Once your updates go live, you then dig into the metrics surrounding each post. How many
clicks did the post receive? What was engagement like? Which stats matter most to you?

6. Analyzing

With the measurement numbers in hand, you can analyze and make your strategy moving
forward. For instance, in analyzing the metrics, you might notice that it would be beneficial to
change the times that you publish or to focus on a certain type of update. Constant
measurement and analysis can reveal these opportunities.

7. Responding

Chances are that people will be responding to your social media updates or reaching out to you
directly. At least some portion of a social media manager’s day should be spent responding,

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 however you feel is appropriate—with a reply, a thumbs up, an outreach email, or something
else.

8. Listening

In addition to responding to direct contact, you can also keep your ear to the ground via a
listening tool or an advanced search that helps bubble up those conversations about you and
your brand. It’s amazing how many opportunities are out there that might be missed without
proper listening tools in place. For instance, following Twitter mentions for “@buffer” might
not turn up all results when folks talk about “Buffer.”

9. Engaging

In addition to replying and responding, there’s also an element of outbound happiness in

engaging with your community and other accounts. This can happen via chats or comments,
delight campaigns to reach out to others, and by following, friending, liking, and retweeting
content from others.

10. Helping

Occasionally, folks might come to you with problems—bugs, breaks, troubleshooting, big
questions. These can fall into the realm of the social media manager to handle as best as can be.
(Neil Patel’s advice as mentioned above is to send this task along to a customer support team.)

11. Planning

What is the roadmap for future social media marketing? Every so often, the manager needs to
zoom out from heads-down work and take a big picture view of things.

12. Experimenting

We’re a bit partial to this one at Buffer. We love experimentation, and this ties into many different
tasks already on the social media manager schedule: curating new ideas to try, measuring results,
analyzing the numbers, scheduling, crafting, and posting.

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 Social Media Goals Checklist
In addition to your primary business objective, you’ll have specific
social media goals. You should have multiple goals, and use a
variety of content types to achieve those goals. Goals may
change as your business grows, when you’re releasing a product,
or working on a specific project or promotion. Use this checklist
to clarify your goals, and also as a resource for testing new goals
in your social strategy:

 Increase Website or Blog Traffic

 Make Sales / Get Clients

 Build Email List

 Increase Social Media Reach

 Relationship & Trust Building

 Improve Engagement & Interaction

 Find New Affiliates or JV Partners

 Find Guest Bloggers & Guest Blogging Opportunities

 Connect With Brands and Merchants

 Provide Customer Service

 Market Research

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 Social Media Content Brainstorming
Vary your updates with a good mix of different types of content. It keeps things fresh
and fun for your audience, and allows you to test what your market responds to best.

 Trends, Breaking News or Hot Topics

This draws BIG spikes in traffic, especially when you use relevant hashtags.

 Actionable Tips
Share bite-sized tips and how-to information. Include a link to further instruction.

 Social Shares
Share cool stuff you find in your content stream, but also share why it's cool. Include your
thoughts and/or a question to encourage discussion.

 Public Conversations
People love to “eavesdrop” on conversations between market leaders, or Q&A and other types
of discussions. Don’t just post content to your own stream, reach out too. Ask BIG questions,
reply with your opinion, share your results, etc.

 Humor!
Funny updates get a great response! It should be relevant to your niche, of course, or include a
creative angle to make it relevant. Ideas include images/photos, YouTube videos, sharing
funny updates from others, or even fun lists & “geek humor”.

 Strong Opinions
Love it, hate it, agree, disagree? Whatever your stance, share it with your audience. And ask
their opinion as well! A good debate can be enlightening, and draw strong responses for a
highly engaged discussion with your market.

 Ask Questions
Questions encourage replies. People love to be heard!

 Thought-Provoking Quotes
Find quotes relevant to your niche, or current topic of discussion, by searching “keyword
quote” on Google (replacing “keyword” with your topic). Try the Image Results as well.

 Announcements
Announce things relevant to your market. Including your own content, or from your merchants
or other market leaders: events, sales, contests, coupons codes, etc.

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 Social Media Profiles Checklist

Use this checklist to set up new social media accounts correctly, or to review
established profiles and consider updates or improvements.

 Separate Personal & Business/Niche Profiles

 Create accounts and Claim Your Username at:
 Gmail / Google+
 Facebook Page
 Twitter
 YouTube
 Pinterest
 LinkedIn (for service-based business or professional industry)

 Use the same Profile Picture across all social media accounts
 Create a Facebook Page “Timeline Cover Graphic”
 Include the most relevant link in your Profile bio
 Create a fun, compelling Profile Descriptions
 Add relevant updates to your content stream
 Follow/Connect with relevant people in your market
 Connect with Brands & Market Leaders
 Find and make note of popular hashtags in your niche
 Find and join relevant Google+ Facebook Groups
 Integrate Your Social Media and Email Marketing
 Add Social Media Icons to Your Blog/Website, as well as Social Share
buttons on all content pages
 Create your Inner Circle / Professional Associations

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Go Viral Faster
Some of the tools listed below can be extremely useful in helping
your content go viral, and creating relatively inexpensive viral
campaigns.

Social Media Tools Short Description

[Link] A task management tool with a social twist.

[Link] Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any

topic.

[Link] Listen to Social Media Channels about your Brand

and engage with your customers.

[Link] Identify the Social Media Influencers and grow your

audience.

[Link] Create your own Social Q&A Community

[Link] Social Influencer exchange, who are the Social

movers & shakers

[Link] A Social Media Marketing platform for Marketers

[Link] Onsite analysis, discover where your clicks are

[Link] Share via your smartphone and stream to your blog

[Link] A Social Media monitoring platform

[Link] Social trends friends tool

[Link] Share, track and analyze your links

[Link] A very cool vertical search engine based on slashtags

[Link] Bloggers choose the kinds of opportunities that

you're open to being contacted about.

[Link] Find out where the buzz is at

[Link] Content sharing on steroids

[Link] Chat with your friends on twitter

[Link] Online social newsrooms

[Link] Social Media monitoring platform

[Link] Schedule social content with Buffer

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Social Media Tools Short Description
[Link] A pro-democracy Web site featuring daily headlines

[Link] A Google + education tool and some

[Link] An easy way to record & share audio online

[Link] Community management for building relationships

and discover leads on twitter

[Link] Track your followers and friends on twitter and

other social networks

[Link] Never miss another comment

[Link] Helps teams manage one or more Twitter

accounts by providing tweet assignments, notes, and

on duty status

[Link] A social tool that aims to improve conversations

online

[Link] Never read a tweet twice

[Link] A creative social media tool

[Link] Facebook search

[Link] Who unfollowed me on Twitter? Who's not following

me back? Who am I not following back? Who are
my friends?

[Link] Stay connected with this social tool

[Link] Save articles and video for later

[Link] Google Alerts

[Link] Google Blog Search

[Link] Promote your company, clients, or products

[Link] Social news reader

[Link] Social management platform

[Link] Brand viability metrics

[Link] Share your photos, videos, words and more

[Link] Discover your Klout score

[Link] Discover the most engaging and relevant content lost

in your social stream

[Link] Real-time search engine for Facebook & Twitter

[Link] Capture conversations from the social web

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Social Media Tools Short Description
[Link] Drag, drop, a few clicks and you can have the
WordPress theme you wanted

[Link] Clean up and manage who you follow, find out who
isn't following you back, Find out which inactive
accounts you follow, easily search inside your
Twitter stream and link Google+ to your Twitter
account

[Link] A Completely Free Social Media Dashboard, Packed

with Amazing Features

[Link] Linking consumers, bloggers and online merchants

by tagging images on the web.

[Link] Monitor, analyze and engage with social media

[Link] For Journalists & PR Pros

[Link] NameNinja is a domain brainstorming tool that can

help you find good domain names based on

what people are actually searching for

[Link] Better Facebook Analytics than you ever thought
possible

[Link] Panabee is the simplest way to brainstorm names

for domains, blogs, and mobile apps

[Link] Detailed profiles and more awesomeness

[Link] Social analytics for Marketers

[Link] One place to stash all the things you love

[Link] Bring awesome apps to your desktop

[Link] Find the press releases journalists and bloggers want

to see

[Link] Enables organizations to become Socially Engaged

Enterprises

[Link] [Link] User generated news

Makes it easy to discover, manage, and protect your
Twitter social circle

[Link] Find out how influential are you on twitter

[Link] See important key performance indicators such as

the visibility of a page in social media.

[Link] Profiles put all of your social networks in one place

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Social Media Tools Short Description
[Link] Easy Social Media Analytics all your data in one
place

[Link] Website news and analysis social platform

[Link] Advanced Google Analytics made simple

[Link] The KPI for social media performance from

Sociagility

[Link] Social Media stats in your hands

[Link] Socialcam is the easiest way to share videos

[Link] Real-time social media search and analysis

[Link] Social Search Engine

[Link] Super-charge your company's social media efforts

[Link] listen to what people are saying about your business

online

[Link] Social platform for your photos and videos

[Link] B2C Client lists

[Link] Monitor billions of conversations

[Link] Engaging everyone everywhere

[Link] Capture Short 15 Second Video Status Updates that

are shared instantly

[Link] Social monitoring made easy

[Link] Trapit works for you 24/7, capturing what you

want, serving it up fresh and spam-free all day
long

[Link] Real-time news platform

[Link] Follow a @user's followers, Follow a @user's

friends, Follow using a Twitter list, Follow by
copy/pasting a list

[Link] Automated twitter management

[Link] Your personal real-time browser, connecting you with

your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace,
LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz

[Link] A 'GPS' for navigating influence online

[Link] Finds the hottest stories from twitter for you to

retweet

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Social Media Tools Short Description
[Link] Send direct messages to multiple followers at once

[Link] Yellow Pages for Twitter

[Link] Aggregate all your online stats in one place

[Link] Display the most recent tweets that are posted by

having them scrolling down the screen

[Link] A new follower? Should you follow back? Find out

if you have common followings with them, and
which people you follow that follow them.

[Link] Social analytics tool that builds profiles according to

twitter timelines

[Link] Get a custom brand page for your tweets

[Link] Detect and catalog the technologies used by your
favorite websites

[Link] Video blogging

[Link] Get results from your friends

[Link] Lets bloggers conduct real-time interviews over the

web

[Link] Who follows who?

[Link] Helps you buy and sell with people around you

[Link] Mix multiple feeds from across the social web and
add them to your site

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Document Sharing Sites
Here are a few of the best doc sharing sites. Some only accept
PDFs, others accept PowerPoint presentations. But all of them
can drive LOTS of traffic and help your rankings if used correctly.
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

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Video Sharing Sites
Video is HUGE HUGE HUGE. People love watching videos, and
written content is usually “skimmed” instead of read.

Granted- you don’t have to do video. But technically you don’t have
to do anything I’m recommending.

But trust me- good videos get good results. So here’s a list of sites
to use:
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 Google Video ([Link]/videohp)
 [Link]
 Yahoo! Video ([Link])
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

Just make sure that when you’re making these videos, they aren’t
too commercial-

y. For one thing, many sites will take down a commercial video very
fast.

Plus, you don’t get readers from YouTube to visit your site by
trying to sell them something. Instead, just give quality
information and tell them that they can learn more on your site.

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If you’re submitting videos to a lot of these sites, I highly
recommend using a tool like Traffic Geyser or a service from a
place like [Link].

Press Release Sites

There’s a reason why tons of SEO courses right now are
recommending press releases. They’re good backlinks, they drive
traffic, and they help your website look like more of a real
business.

Note that the paid options work the best, but free options can be
powerful too.

Paid PR Sites
 [Link]
 [Link]

Free PR Sites
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

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  [Link] And there are TONS more.

Similar to the video distribution, I recommend using a piece of

software or a service for the distribution. Fiverr has a lot of great
gigs for this, or you can try something like PressBot.

Social Networking Sites

Even though these links used to be near-worthless, they’re
becoming more and more powerful. There are several reasons
for that, but one of the big ones is that they’re VERY easy to
share. So for example if you have a Facebook fan page, it’s easy
for people on Facebook to share anything you post there with
their friends on Facebook. This is how things go viral- which is
**usually** good for a company. So what social networking
sites should you check out? Here are a few:

 [Link]
 Google Plus ([Link])
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]
 [Link]

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