Scheduling posts

- We've mentioned it before, the scheduling of posts is critically important. You want to be able to get the content out in a time-released manner, so take advantage of technology, whether that's built on the site, or something that you need to rely on a third party tool for. When you schedule your video and posts, you can control when the information comes out. You can easily upload and schedule videos to come out live on a Facebook page with a Facebook Premiere. Or schedule their release on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. This works well so that all the content doesn't come out at once. Even if you might upload 10 videos, set the release schedule so they come out over time. Same thing with blog posts, schedule them. Sit down and get five or 10 done, and then schedule them to come out over a few weeks. Take your time, and sometimes it's easier to be in creation mode, and then schedule it so that when you get busy, it keeps running. You can also do the same with social media posts, taking the RSS feed from your blog or YouTube channel, and having it auto-generate posts. Or you can go in and schedule several things to come out at different times of day. This use of scheduling and RSS tools is really quite useful, and it makes it easy to get the content out there. One tool I like to use is dlvr.it. They offer both free and paid plans, and it makes it easy to take your RSS feed, and then republish to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. What happens is you can go to your blog and enter the URL. It will then evaluate it and find the RSS feed underneath. An RSS feed is just real simple syndication. It's the Xml file that often drives the content. Most blogs or platforms that allow for publishing of individual posts, even a YouTube channel, can generate an Xml feed. This can then be automated to generate new social media posts. So once you've done this, you can start to connect multiple networks. So every time I publish a new story on my blog, it generates a new post on social media. You'll see here, for example, that content is happening. When I post to my personal blog, it's going to automatically reshare that content to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Here I need to reconnect my LinkedIn network, because it occasionally disconnects. That's because it wants you to reauthorize periodically. So when you click on here, you'll see how that is, and if you need to, you'll occasionally need to just reconnect. When you do, it'll ask you to log in to the platform and bless it. This then means that it has permission to post on your behalf. And every few weeks to every few months, you'll need to reconnect that. You see that here are my social networks that I've connected. And under the content, I can add websites or different sources. Notice, I can pick a YouTube channel, and every time I post a YouTube or Vimeo, it's going to drive a post to other social networks. Or every time I share on Instagram, it can re-share that content to Facebook. This makes it easy to get the content out to more places. Dlvr.it is just one of many platforms. It's one that I personally use and I like. There is another tool that's quite popular, and that's HootSuite. HootSuite offers a lot of plans aimed at larger businesses, including the ability to generate very rich reports on a lot of criteria. It's a similar idea where you take the RSS feeds, and then you connect it to different social networks. Once it drives the post, you'll see it appears like a regular post in the timeline. But it's able to pull that information from your RSS feed. While pricing may vary, you'll notice that they offer a variety of plans. Small plans here, that allow you to connect 10 profiles for a single user; much larger plans with support and multiple users, so a team at a large company can get content out there. So depending upon your needs and the size of your company and your projects, you'll find a solution that scales based on what your business needs are. While we mentioned two tools here, you'll find a wealth of options available if you search for social media scheduling tools. Explore some of these so you can automate the process. This way, as you create new content, it's syndicated and republished. You can easily connect your YouTube channel or Vimeo channel to automatically generate posts. It could be not just when new things happen, but it can go through your archives and grab old content and re-share it at certain intervals. This allows you to get those second, third, or fourth posts out there over an extended period of time, to bring people back. I often find that those in-case-you-missed-it posts, or if you'd like to see this again, or a repeat, or a replay, often go over quite well, and it lets people feel like maybe they missed out and they should check that out. Use these tools to broaden your reach, and take off some of the burden for posting.