Keeping your social networking and blog active for your business can be pretty tough–finding the time to create the content is hard enough, and a busy day or week might make your blog update drop off of the To-Do List. Worse yet, you might have a billion ideas one week, and be drawing a blank on what to write the next. And social networking can be an even bigger pain: how do you keep your Twitter and Facebook active, without having to interrupt yourself several times a day to update?
Fortunately, you can take the sting out of the process by scheduling your blog posts and social networking ahead of time! It’ll make all of your content look more active to your visitors, because you’ll have updates posted on the regular, and encouraging people to visit you (and potentially hire/buy from you)? Definitely a good thing!
Schedule Your Blogs
A regularly-updated blog can definitely do wonders for creating buzz about you and the awesome things you’re doing. And, when you schedule content in advance, your blog will also look more attractive to search engines, because the content is spread out over time–releasing too much content at the same time can look like potential spam! Scheduling your content is also great when you have a lot of ideas, because you can get all of your writing done at once, and spread it out over several days, weeks, or even months.
If you’re using WordPress, when you create a new Post, take a look at the Publish menu, to the right of your writing window. In that, you’ll see several options for making your post viewable or not, but the one we’re interested in is Publish immediately. Click on the Edit link next to that, and you’ll be able to select a future date to schedule your post! Then, click Ok to set the date. Once you’re done writing your post, just click on the blue Schedule button, and your blog will automatically update on the date and time you chose.
Social Networking In Advance
Planning ahead isn’t just for blogging, either–you can keep your social networks active by scheduling in advance, too, with the help of some handy web apps. HootSuite and TweetDeck are two of the most popular platforms to manage your Twitter and Facebook presence, and all you have to do is sign up for free, and then add your Twitter and Facebook accounts to them.
These apps are fantastic, because now, if you want to hit the morning crowd and the afternoon audience, you don’t have to sign in multiple times. You can schedule all of your updates just once a day, or even once a week, and have plenty of time to make your entrepreneurial magic without interruption. You can even send the same update to multiple places at once, so you can tell your Facebook and Twitter followers about your latest news in a single step.
To schedule your updates, all you need to do is look for the calendar icon (HootSuite), or clock icon (TweetDeck), and click on it. Then, a calendar will pop up, allowing you to set the date and time you want your update to go out. Finish your update as you normally would, and the magic of the interwebs will send it out at the date and time you selected!
Oh, and in case you were wondering? This post, and the Tweet or Facebook update that probably told you about it? Yep, scheduled in advance. It works for me as a constantly-busy small business owner, too, so give it a shot.
