A mistake that many make on social media is that they post things in batches. Rather than spread out the posts throughout the day, they load everything up at once. This poses a challenge for both businesses and individuals because doing so will (a) annoy your fans and followers as you "flood" their feeds with posts, (b) limit the potential audience since only a portion of your fans and followers are monitoring social media at any particular time during the day, and (c) reduce the overall exposure as you make EdgeRank and other algorithms "mad" with your batches of posts.
One way to avoid this is to use scheduling tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and, of course, KPA Local Engage.
As humans, we often operate in batches. When we surf the web, we usually do so in longer stretches rather than in bits and pieces throughout the day. Unfortunately, that means that our engagement on social media is similarly batched.
Here's how to fix it:
Images
We all come across images that we want to share on social media. For sites like Facebook, you really don't want to post more than one an hour and probably no more than 4 or 5 a day. You have a couple of options to build your library of images to post.
I save the images in folders. Call me old school but I like housing the images locally (as well as through Dropbox) and sifting through them when I'm ready to post.
Another way to do it is to create an images folder in your bookmarks. Just save the link that contains the image and you can go through and post it later. Either way, you'll probably want to purge the images once they're posted - nobody likes seeing the same image twice. I do keep some of the best "timeless" images in an archive folder and include the date that I posted it in the file name. One such image that I posted in the past is the one shown above - Smokey and the Bandit is as timeless as it gets.
Thoughts
I'm a terrible mobile typist. Blame it on the fat fingers. As a result, I hate posting long status updates through mobile devices. If it's not an "in the moment" post, I use the voice recorder on my phone to save thoughts as they come to me. A couple of times a week I go through and transcribe these posts into my scheduling tools and spread them out throughout the day.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I'm not a big fan of post dropping. On all of the networks other than Twitter, I schedule posts during times when I'm going to be online whenever possible. I like to be able to respond to people who comment on the posts, so just because it's scheduled doesn't mean I'm not watching.
Some posts are too timely for this method, of course, in which case I'll go ahead and struggle through my fat-finger syndrome to get them posted immediately.
Links
For the most part, I find my links early in the morning and schedule them throughout the day. Again, the timely rule applies; you don't want to schedule breaking news.
Occasionally, there are links that come along that are important enough to save and post in the future. These are usually resource links. For example, if you find a video that describes several tips and tricks on SYNC, you wouldn't necessarily just want to post it once. With a link like that, I would save it and post it again and again for as long as it was still valid. I've actually scheduled something weeks ahead of time knowing that it's valuable today and will still be relevant in 2 months.
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As I've said in the past, I'm not a fan of using tools to completely automate your social media engagement, but if you use them properly you can maximize your exposure by posting the right content at the right times.
Hat Tip to Adam Ross for inspiring this post.
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