Social media scheduling allows you to create content in advance, saving you the time and inconvenience of constant in-the-minute posting. This way you don’t have to worry about creating fresh content everyday. In this blog post we provide a simple guide to effective scheduling for Facebook and Instagram. 

The first step to scheduling is creating a well thought out, well researched content calendar. We suggest putting together a calendar on either Google Sheets or Excel. You then need to decide how many posts you want to go out per week or for the month as a whole. Here at Focus Online, we suggest posting at least 2 posts on Facebook and Instagram per week, along with regular Instagram Stories.

Once you have decided on the amount of posts, you need to start creating your content. Easy ways to come up with content include looking at what is trending, searching for events in your area, sharing user generated content and highlighting the best features of your company. You can also look at your insights and see which of your posts get the most engagement and create similar content. What’s more, It is important to consider important holidays or days that may fall in the period you are scheduling for, so that you remain relevant to the time. 

Now that your content calendar is populated, it’s time to schedule your content. There are various tools out there that can be used for scheduling. If you have a Facebook page you will instantly get access to a free scheduling tool called Facebook Creator Studio, which allows you to schedule posts and stories. Through this platform, Instagram posts can also be scheduled as long as your Instagram account is linked to Facebook. In order to decide on the right times to post, consult your insights and analytics, searching for what times posts get the most engagement on each platform. 

Once all this is done your content will automatically be published and you have plenty of time to come up with new ideas. One final tip is to create supplementary content in the form of a blog, Facebook Story or Instagram Story, which can be a short video or picture. This gives your content a human feel and it ensures that you stay relevant to your audience.