Over the last 3 years of me utilising scheduling tools to help manage my businesses, the social media landscape has changed.

Just over 3 years ago, I discovered PostPlanner – a website that not only posted to Facebook groups and pages for you but also allowed you to bulk upload tweets into Twitter and more recently, but as aspect I never used, Instagram too. More about Instagram scheduling later! PostPlanner worked awesomely, I could spend a Sunday night finding content in PostPlanner and schedule in the time for the week ahead and bingo – my time was freed up for the rest of the week! There was / is however a cost and it’s more than financial.

Facebook is a great place to run a business, afterall it’s the most popular social media platform out there, billions of us use it and a mahoosive 1.15 billion of us are daily users. But Facebook, AKA Mark Zuckerberg isn’t daft. Zucks has realised that on the back of the FB success many other apps were developed to help businesses – these scheduling apps in particular. This is why over the last 6 months or so you may have noticed a decreased ‘reach’ on your Facebook posts. You’ve been creating what you believe to be engaging posts, mixing up your content, collaborating with other businesses but you’ve still stagnated when you should have been growing.

Why?

Algorithms – they’ve changed! Don’t they always? In laymans terms, the only terms I understand, Facebook want their content to be native – that means no links to external sites. Consequently this means that scheduling apps such as Postplanner, Hootsuite and Buffer WILL STILL WORK but Facebook won’t like that you are using them and therefore your reach will be down.

WHAT CAN I DO THEN?

This doesn’t mean you can’t plan ahead, infact I encourage you to, it really is a timesaver. But you can plan for Facebook within Facebook itself. If you run a business page on Facebook then you could do better than to download the Pages Manager app for your phone – now only does it give you insights into your ‘likers’, it’s a Facebook app and you can schedule from it to your page. And even better – IT’S FREE! I did a quick tutorial on this a couple of months ago, here’s the link for it.

Within your groups on Facebook, be it closed, secret or public you can also schedule your content from there. Again, plan ahead, schedule for a week and see how you get on.

WHAT ABOUT TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM?

There are a number of apps which you can use to schedule for Twitter – I recommend Hootsuite, Buffer and Tweetdeck. They are all very similar, Tweetdeck is just for Twitter however whilst the other two incorporate Instagram and Facebook too.

Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook doesn’t allow third party apps to post on it’s platform – these means that even if you use Hootsuite or PostPlanner to schedule your posts they won’t be posted without you having to manually post them on your phone at the time you dictate. You will receive a notification which will then open up Instagram for you and guide you through the steps.

My favourite Instagram scheduler is Planoly – this allows you to import a number of images and see what your newsfeed will look like before you schedule them. And again it’s FREE!

 

Does this clarify scheduling and algorithm changes? I know that running a business page or creating interactive groups can be challenging. I’m here to help you is you need me