You probably heard about social media scheduling (and even read about scheduling updates with Hootsuite) and by now, you should realize that social media scheduling is important if you want to be successful in this challenging industry.
I used to block out 3 hours of my time daily to schedule blog post and that is insane. 3 hours in a day is equal to 12.5% of my daily time and after deducting my sleep, meal breaks etc., I left with a mere few hours. The lost time will indirectly affect my productivity for the rest of the day.
Want to know the real life of a social media manager? Here are two posts from Buffer and Hootsuite.
I am pretty active on Facebook and recently, I received a lot of messages about how do I cramp several hours to be super productive on social media.
This post is extremely powerful especially for:
- Students
- Freelance social media advocates
- Social media managers
- Plain ol’ social media enthusiast
And before we start, here are two important components to ensure success in social media scheduling:
- Finding the right content to share
- Scheduling updates to various social media accounts
In order to solve this, I will share my social media scheduling checklist with you. Something I do it on a daily basis and safe me dozens of hours in a week!
Finding the right content for sharing
There are several free tools you can use for this and my personal favorite is Feedly.
Feedy allows you to find multiple content under one roof. To make content curation easier, I create specific topics for different needs. Here’s an example of my Feedly account:
As you can see above, each topic is related specifically to a specific niche.
So, if I ever get hit by writer’s block, I would head over to these categories for more information.
Scheduling social media updates using Hootsuite
This is my go-to tool for most of my social media scheduling due to the auto schedule feature. At any time, you can schedule up 5 accounts.
If you are using a Hootsuite Pro plan, you can add up to 50 social media accounts including Facebook groups, Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups.
If you want to take social media marketing to the next level, I would recommend manually scheduling compared to auto schedule feature for more flexibility.
But wait!
The above steps are 100% doable for everyone but without a social media schedule, you are going to waste a lot of time during the process. And we all need more time, don’t we?
How to use Trello for social media planning and scheduling?
My favorite tool is Trello (yes, it is not Evernote or Google Docs if you are wondering).
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process (source).
I use Trello for:
- Daily tasks
- Tasks to be done on specific days
- Follow ups
Here’s an example of my boards on Trello:
If you are wondering, yes — I’m working on Sunday as well!
Each board is categorized by days and topic. So for example, Friday’s board will include tasks I need to complete on Friday itself.
Social media scheduling with Trello
This is what it looks like in the Social Media Marketing board.
I divided the task into two parts:
- Sharing
- Scheduling
For me, sharing task is related to sharing content of others on various social media. You can check out my post on Jeff Bullas’s blog about increasing Twitter followers simply by sharing content of others.
This is what it looks like on my checklist.
Using the sidebar, you can configure the tasks as per your needs. For me, I selected checklists that ease my job a lot on a daily basis. Once the job is done, tick on the boxes on the task and the percentage for completion will increase accordingly.
Trello also allows you to add more members is which powerful especially when you are managing a team. It is excellent especially to delegate tasks to team members.
So, how will Trello help you to manage your social media scheduling?
Trello boards allow me to focus on things that matter most; in this case, it is all about maximizing your time and as well as ensuring the completion of your daily social media tasks.
The above are just the icing of the cake (Trello) and there are dozens of ways you can use Trello for social media.
The reason I choose building checklists on Trello is because of simplicity. Social media is meant to be easy and therefore, you need to make sure you are maximizing the resources you are using to the best of your ability.
Over to you
How do you perform social media scheduling? Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
See also: 30 Best Social Media Management Tools
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