This week, Hootsuite announced that it can now support scheduling Instagram posts, leading social media managers everywhere to rejoice. Although other applications have allowed users to monitor and track their content, Hootsuite’s announcement is enabling full posting from within the app (although you do still have to confirm the post from your mobile phone, unfortunately).
As a marketing professional, this brings up an often-discussed topic in our field. How much should you be scheduling social media content? Or for that matter – any content at all? In an ideal world, we’d all be able to post up-to-the-minute Tweets and be awake at 6:00 a.m. to write a blog to go live at 8:00. But in reality, the ability to schedule things in advance saves marketing teams valuable time and energy by streamlining the process of strategizing, writing and posting content. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that different channels are more appropriate for scheduling than others.
Scheduling Blog Posts
In terms of social media content, blog posts are the most obvious and beneficial pieces of content to schedule to post at a desired time. Maintaining a consistent posting schedule is an important aspect of blogging, and the ability to write blogs ahead of time saves the inconvenience of having to break into a daily schedule to write a new post. It also means that several members of a company can write blogs and funnel them to an editor for review prior to posting them online.
The only downside of scheduling blogs is the inevitability of breaking news in some industries. For instance, fully scheduling blogs a month out for an IT company probably wouldn’t work as new technologies evolve weekly. As long as you know your goals and plan appropriately for having a relevant blog, this is an issue that can be overcome.
Schedulability score: 9/10
The Benefits of Scheduling Tweets
The advantages to scheduling on Twitter might just be as high as blog posts, but, they also have higher risks. The nature of Twitter’s feed means that if your followers aren’t logged onto Twitter at the time you post, they may not see what you’ve shared. This encourages repeated sharing of the same content, which, for the most part, works well on Twitter and works even better when combined with a social media scheduler like Hootsuite. With that, it’s also important to keep in mind that Twitter is highly dependent on trends–if a large news story hits, feeds often become full of news, updates, or voices of concern about the topic. Depending on how dramatic the effect is, a scheduled tweet promoting your newest blog post in the middle of this can cause criticism of your brand not being sensitive to the issue. Lesson being? Schedule, be aware of what you’ve got in the queue and prepare to adjust if necessary.
Schedulability score: 8/10
Managing Facebook Posts through Hootsuite
Scheduling posts in Facebook can have its advantages, but not as many as is shown by channels such as Twitter. Facebook’s algorithm will place your posts where it wants, and in front of who it wants (unless you’re sponsoring posts and that’s a whole other topic). Therefore, the benefit of scheduling the same message to send twice in one day goes down significantly. You don’t know that everyone (or no one) saw your post in the morning, so while you could post it again in the afternoon your fans just might see the morning one. In the afternoon. Confused yet?
There is a definite advantage to scheduling posts if you’re trying to determine your best posting days and times within the algorithm, though; if that’s an issue you’re trying to figure out, scheduling posts might be worth your while to ensure you’re programmatic about when posts are going live.
Schedulability score: 6/10
Should I Schedule Instagram Posts?
A week ago, this wasn’t a question because it wasn’t an option. Now the time has come that you will have to make this decision for yourself. With this new ability, there are bound to be brands that use Instagram scheduling with success, and those that flop horribly. The fact that Instagram was a platform that had to be fed from your smartphone led the feed to be instant, fairly organic, and a little gritty (which was why we liked it). Now, individuals will have the ability more than ever to post images that have been perfected in Photoshop with ease. Will this mean that feeds become filled with boring, “perfect” images? Only time will tell.
Schedulability score: To be determined
Proceed with Caution
Yes, scheduling posts (in any platform) can have its benefits, especially for agencies managing multiple social media accounts for their clients, for small marketing departments, and for those running a personal business on the side who can’t be there to post when they’re working their 9-5 job. But at the end of the day, proceed with caution. No one likes a brand who has content scheduled to the point of being mundane, who doesn’t show any personality, and who doesn’t respond to current issues. Proceed with caution, and you’ll reap the rewards.
[bctt tweet=”@Hootsuite now allows scheduling of @Instagram posts – but how much #socialmedia scheduling is ideal?”]
