Scheduling out your social media posts in advance can alleviate a lot of pressure and stress, while also introducing some new potential issues. Here is our take on the pros and cons of scheduling out at least some of your social media posts in advance.
Pro: It can save you time.
The most obvious benefit of scheduling out your social media posts in advance is that it can save you time in the long run. While you still need to plan, draft, select content, and schedule the posts, you can do all this at once for a week or more’s worth of social media posts, which can often result in a more streamlined process then doing this planning and scheduling for individual posts on a day-to-day basis.
Con: Prescheduled posts might clash with current events.
It’s important to be sensitive to local and global communities, especially on social media, and sometimes, if you schedule a post out days or weeks in advance, you might get to the day-of and find that the content falls flat or might seem insensitive. (For example, if there has been a local or regional natural disaster, it might appear insensitive to be posting promoting your business that exact day.) It’s a good idea to keep a mental tally of what posts might be coming up, so that you can move scheduled posts around if necessary.
Pro: It can help your content strategy.
When you’re scheduling your posts in advance, you often schedule more than one post at a time. As such, it’s easier to see the bigger picture for your content. For example, if you have multiple photos from a photo shoot or event, it will be easier to plan on spacing them out appropriately, or craft captions that follow up on each other.
Con: Scheduling software can pose technical issues.
If you haven’t worked with scheduling software such as Meta Business Suite, Later, or Hootsuite before, there can be a bit of a learning curve when setting up your posts in advance. It can help to try a free plan to start out, which might limit the number of posts you can schedule, but it will also let you get a feel for the technical side of the software before you commit to it. Different software can work better with different social media platforms (for example, Meta Business Suite is only compatible with Facebook and Instagram), so it pays to try things out.
Pro: It can enhance the success of your posts.
Depending on the scheduling software you use, you might be able to reap benefits that can make your posts more successful. For example, several softwares offer suggested posting times, which often take into account high-traffic times on social media and analyze what times your posts might be viewed by the most people. You might also take advantage of image editing features, which can make the visual elements of your posts more appealing and more primed for success on specific platforms.
Have you experimented with scheduling social media posts in advance? Tell us about your experiences in the comments!
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