My schedule

Finding time is probably one of the bigger obstacles –if not the biggest– when promoting your services on social media. Taking a good picture, or even googling one, can already take a good 15 minutes of your time. And then you have to edit it, write an awesome caption, think about the hashtags, and only then you can post it. But guess what! Now it’s time to engage with your followers.

Of course, all that effort and time will ultimately pay off. But it’s still tiresome just to think about it. For that reason, coming up with a Social Media schedule is one of the first things you have to do when promoting yourself.

Think about your daily and weekly routines, and try to find the best time frames in which you can work on them. You can either distribute the work throughout the week or try to focus all of it on one or two days. Remember that you can use some Social Media programs and applications to plan your Instagram posts. I recommend Hootsuite, available both as a desktop or mobile app. It’s one of the most popular ones, and easy to use.

Once you ’ ve managed to do that, decide how many weekly posts you ’d like to add to your feed. Recommendations on how many times a week you should post vary from 3 to 14. Such a significant gap proves that there’s no real evidence behind these calculations, but at least they work as a good reference.

At this point, it is important to be realistic and aim low. Unless you ’re a full-time community manager or an Instagram goddess, the more you post, the worst your content will be. And given the nature of your account –a private practice physician, and not some random meme Instagram page–, your community will probably prioritize quality over quantity.

Also remember that, as a rule of thumb, consistency is preferable to volume. Posting 3 times a week is preferable to posting 10 times one week and then disappearing for several days.

You should also know that, for optimal results, there’s a lot more than just posting on your feed and never opening the Instagram app again. You should check your notifications at least once a day in case somebody comments on your posts. In addition to that, it’s highly advised to follow other accounts similar to yours and interact with them. If you like and comment on their posts, they ’ll become aware of you, which opens the possibility to future interactions. Besides that, their followers will also be able to see your comments. That will allow you to also become visible to them, who at the bottom line are potential clients. Think about it. If they already follow a private practice physician on Instagram, why wouldn’t they follow you too?

What are the best days and hours to post on Instagram?

Different sources agree that you should expect the most engagement from your Instagram followers in the middle of the week, during the middle of the day. That means Tuesday and Wednesday, after 11 pm.

Of course, these estimations don’t guarantee awesome engagement levels if you post on those days. But again, they give you some level of reference on when it’s best to post. Also, knowing this information can help you plan your Social Media posts, especially if you want to use apps like Hootsuite.

My weekly schedule to work on my Social Media plan is…

With all that in mind, now it’s time to do some work. Write down how much daily/weekly time you can work on Social Media without it altering your routine, establishing as well the days in which you can do it. Here you should also find small windows of time you can use to check your notifications, follow other pages, and like their content. Lunch breaks, commuting on public transportation… are perfect examples of that.