How can I save time on my social media?

Good morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

This is the burning question… how to save time.  The two best tips to save time are:

1. Write all your posts for a month in one go
2. Schedule your posts in advance to come out at set times of day

That’s it!  Easy.

STEP 1: Posting In Advance

I use this high tech (not) excel file which you can download, where I write all my posts for each day before I schedule them.  After I have written them and they have been posted I go back and write down the number of likes and comments each post gets, this makes it MUCH easier for me to see at a glance which types of posts are popular and which ones aren’t.

I sit down at the end of each month for 30 minutes and write each post for the following month, this saves me time and stress of having to think up ideas each day/for each post as the month goes on, and I know that the posts I am writing are adding value and that it is fitting in with my plan for my Facebook page.  This can be used for LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks as well.

STEP 2: Scheduling Your Posts

There are a few different tools you can use to schedule your posts….

• Tweetdeck:  FREE.  This is a program that you download onto your computer, iPhone or iPad.  You can link your Twitter accounts, Facebook profile, Facebook pages, Google Buzz, foursquare and LinkedIn account all to Tweetdeck and schedule all of them from here.  The only issue with Tweetdeck is that if you are posting a link it will come out as a link eg www.bitly234.com instead of showing up with an image as you can do when posting on the actual Facebook page.  Also if you want to post an image as part of the post again it will show up as a link not an image, so this isn’t ideal.
• Hootsuite: FREE.  Similar to Tweetdeck, but this is all online, however they do have app’s that you can use on your iPhone and iPad.  You can link your Twitter accounts, Facebook profile, Facebook pages, LinkedIn account, MySpace, wordpress, ping.fm and Foursquare to it.  The advantage it has over Tweetdeck is that you can track some analytics with it.
• Sendible: FREE.  This is a website where you can post onto Twitter, Facebook profiles, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Blogs, and more.  You can schedule in posts with links and images and there is a dashboard that also offers you reports and analytics.  This is the one I use and I love it, I have a paid account so that I don’t get ad’s with my posts which costs $5 a month.
• SocialOomph: FREE for Twitter, however to use it to schedule Facebook and blog posts it is $29.95/month.  Given the options in terms of free applications out there, this one is only really something to look at if you are primarily using Twitter, there is a lot analytics and tracking in it, but it is really very much based around Twitter.

There are also another 10 mentioned in this article on the AMEX forum, the ones in the article are mostly based around Twitter and Facebook, although they do also mention Hootsuite.

If you can write all your Facebook page posts in advance, and some of your Twitter or LinkedIn ones this will really save you time in the long run.  My favourite tool for scheduling is Sendible, but whichever you go with as long as it works for you then that’s what is important.  Try it for a month and I am sure once you have done it you won’t go back!

Your task for August should you choose to accept it is to schedule your posts for the month, mine are already done for Facebook, now I am tackling the rest!

If you use another tool that I haven’t mentioned here please let me know I’m always looking for new options to explore.