We’ve covered a lot about social media management for business so far on the Click & Repeat blog, but there’s one key piece missing: the actual management.

I hope you’re feeling more confident about your strategy overall, but if you’re stuck wondering how you’re going to stay on top of posting to your social accounts, I’ve got you covered here.

But before we get to the actual social media management tool, let’s talk about your strategy.

Making a Social Media Schedule

In the last post, I talked about creating a schedule. You can do a post every day if that’s manageable for you — and it’s what the algorithms love, so if you’re trying to boost engagement, go for it — but it’s not necessary (and who has time for that??). I suggest starting at two consistent posts a week and bumping it up once you feel like you’ve gotten the hang of it. Here’s an example schedule:

• Tuesday: Dog training tips (#TuesdayTips)
• Saturday: Client highlights (#SuccessStorySaturday)

…You get the idea, but what we’re going for is a consistent schedule that makes it easy for you to plug in content. I also recommend using a hashtag for each theme (try doing something clever that’ll stick in peoples’ minds).

Hashtags might seem a little played out, but here’s the kicker: you can follow a hashtag on social media, the same way you can follow an account. So people might choose to follow along one of your hashtags just so they can see that content. (And if someone else is using the same hashtag, people who click on it will be able to find you there.)

And just because you’ve settled on two consistent posts doesn’t mean you can’t post more if the need arises. More is better on social. Feel free to sprinkle in additional posts as you have events, workshops, products, or other new things to share!

Find Your Content

All right, you’ve got your schedule planned out. Now, how do you populate it with stuff? There are two types of content you can (and should) be sharing:

• Original content (ie. stuff you make yourself)
• Curated content (ie. stuff you recommend looking at)

The first one is pretty obvious; it’s all the content you’ve been making with your awesome phone photography skills and excellent copy writing skills.

But, what’s curated content? Basically, it’s just cool stuff you want to share (that’s related to your industry/the type of content you’re posting).

But isn’t that stealing?? Nope! As long as you’re not passing it off as your own work, it’s actually considered good strategy to share content made by other people.

According to HubSpot, you should be using the 80/20 rule: 20% of the time, promote your own stuff (classes, workshops, products, blog posts, ebooks, etc). 80% of the time, though, you should be sharing non-promotional content.

An easy way to do that is to share blog posts, graphics, videos or other content created by people outside of your company. This not only takes a lot of work off of your plate in terms of content creation, but it also shows your followers that you are less interested in promoting your own stuff than you are in giving them the best online experience possible.

That, in turn, establishes you as a thought leader in the community you’re engaged in, which leads to trust and authentic engagement, which eventually leads to… You guessed it! More clients.

(A caveat to this: Don’t just blindly share links to things without vetting them first! Make sure you’re actually looking at/reading through the stuff you’re sharing. That way you can avoid any unpleasant surprises…)

Don’t know where to start with finding outside content to share? Check out the vet clinics, groomers, and other dog-related businesses in your area. While you don’t want to share links from your direct competition, you can absolutely share form industry thought leaders, too! Want more tips? Look back at this post I wrote a while ago for my favorite strategy to corral content in one place using Feedly!

Buffer: A Stress-Free Social Media Management Tool

If you clicked through to that other post, you’ll recognize the name Buffer. It’s a social media scheduler that lets you dump in content all at once. Then Buffer posts it for you on the day/time you’ve indicated.

If you’re not the kind of person who’s posting daily, looking at all your stats, creating targeted social media campaigns, testing content, etc — which, as a beginner, you’re probably not (and let’s be honest, I’m not either) — you’ll be just fine using the free version of Buffer.

In your account, you can add multiple different “campaigns” to manage posts in different places. For example, I’ve got three campaigns: One that posts to my main Click & Repeat Facebook page, and one for each of two Facebook groups that I manage.

I’ve set up my preferences for my campaigns, so it knows which days and times I want to post to those places. About once a month, I gather all the content I want to share for the next few weeks, go into Buffer, and add it into my queue. Then I don’t think about it again until the alert on my calendar app reminds me that I need to add more posts to the queue.

Voila! Social media management, done in just a few minutes every month.

The other nice thing about Buffer? If last-minute things come up that you want to post about, you can add them into the queue without having to rearrange the whole thing. Just click on the day that you want it to be posted and put the content in.

My only additional caveat here is that you should still regularly be going to your page to look at engagement on your profile, respond to comments, and otherwise engage with people! It’s important that it still feels obvious there’s an actual person behind the brand. (Not just a robot churning out content.)

Bonus Content

I hope this roundup of blog posts on social media has you excited and ready to go make awesome content. And please feel free to share what you’re making with me there! I’d love to see it.

For everyone who said they could use some photo editing tips, I’ve got you! I’ll be back next week with a bonus post on my favorite (free) tool for editing on your phone.