Avoid the Time Suck of Social Media Posting

by Michelle Hummel

Promoting your franchise on social media can increase your customers’ loyalty to your business as well as generate new customers and sales, but finding time to post on multiple social media platforms each day? It’s an impossible task, especially if you want to have any time left over for a work-life balance. The good news is that it is possible to have a post appear on each of your social media platforms each day without it taking an enormous amount of time — if you use a scheduling tool.

Scheduling tools allow you to program an entire week, month or even a year’s worth of content to one or more of your platforms in advance. Most scheduling tools also track your platforms’ performance as well, and you can add Google Analytics as a platform to best gauge which of your posts resulted in increased website visits.

How many followers did you gain this month? What types of posts do they like? Which posts caused an increase in sales or traffic? What types of audience are you attracting, and does it make sense for your franchise? Analytics are key in social media and scheduling tools can give you these answers in a few clicks. The best scheduling tools n will also give you a choice of the type of reports you’re interested in and will auto-run these reports and email them to you when you need them.

A non-timely post performed well? With a scheduling tool, simply hit the republish button and schedule the post for a different day and time in the future with just a few clicks. This helps you get the most bang for the time it took you to create that amazing video, blog or graphic.

It’s important to remember that the life of a Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram post is about four to eight hours, and between 30 minutes to two hours for Twitter. This means that unless your audience is looking solely at your feed, they might have missed your post. If they are looking at just your feed, they probably won’t scroll through enough content to see what you posted weeks or months ago, so it’s perfectly fine to re-post your high-performing posts as long as you’re posting fresh content most days.

Another great benefit some scheduling tools include is the ability to use syndicated content, which is content made public by lifestyle and topical magazines, news organizations, bloggers and others. This is a great way to be able to post content daily (except to Instagram) without having to create the content yourself. Syndicating content shows your audience that you’re not trying to sell them on your product every day and that you care about the topics they care about.

For example, if your franchise promotes a healthy lifestyle, you could set up a syndication feed of healthy recipes, exercise tips and health news. If your franchise is B2B targeting entrepreneurs, choose a feed from Forbes, Entrepreneur and other magazines to help them grow in their field.

One article from the feed can be set to run at a certain date and time automatically, or you could have the feed run into the scheduling tool and you select and even customize the posts you like, discarding the ones you don’t. Worried your audience will click and go to their website, forgetting about yours? Add a linkframe that appears at the top and bottom of the website they’re visiting that reminds them who told them about this great article, as well as a button that allows them to get to your site quickly. You can even customize the linkframe with a strong call-to-action that entices them back to your site with a great offer.

Another great benefit to most scheduling tools is the dashboard that tracks all comments on each platform. Instead of having to open each of your platforms individually to check notifications, then find the comment to respond, simply log into your scheduling tool and reply to comments within the tool.

Popular scheduling tools can cost thousands of dollars each month depending on your needs. Each tool charges by the number of social media profiles that need to be connected, as well as the number of users who need access to the tool. At Web Strategy Plus, we’ve used most every tool on the market for our clients. Some worked better than others as far as cost and reliability go, but in the end, we decided to invest in SEND Social Media (sendsocialmedia.com). It schedules to all platforms and has robust reporting, syndication and engagement capabilities. Check it out online and contact me for an amazing offer just for readers of The Franchise Woman magazine.

Michelle is the CEO and Founder of Web Strategy Plus, a full-service digital marketing agency, where her team of experts specializes in helping franchise owners develop websites, SEO and Social Media Strategies. A published author of three books in her series, “The Social Media Magnet: Everything You Need to Know to Attract Customers with Social Media.” She also holds a valuable Internet Marketing Degree and provides training to help individuals acquire Social Media Management Certification through Web Media University. Contact Michelle at michelle@webstrategyplus.com.