How Using The Social Planner Can Save You Time And Worry
Transcript
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Hi, I’m Allie, our AI-powered, training personality.
Harnessing the power of social media, is a must-do task for all businesses in this digital age. Social media has created a way for you to expand your reach beyond the limits of terrestrial broadcasting. You can easily and cheaply, share your news, offers, events, and promotions with millions of people! Social media also allows you to give your brand an identity and tell its story! Knowing this, Web Geeks have developed a much-needed tool, we call it “The Social Planner!”. This feature lives inside our marketing platform, ready and waiting, to be utilized by you! It’s there to save you time and effort when it comes to your social media activities. It can even help with content creation! Today, we are going to explore the basics of the social planner feature, by walking you through how to create, and schedule your social posts!
Let’s get started!
To get to the social planner, all you have to do is head on over to marketing in the left-hand sidebar. Here we can see how many social accounts you have connected, how many posts you have made with the social planner, and how many posts you are making per day. If you scroll down, you can see the posts you have made, and when you posted them. Let’s head on over to create a new post, All you need to do is click “new post” and then “create new post”.
The first thing we need to do is select the account we want to post to. Now, at this point, you can either choose a single account or post to several at a time. To demonstrate the added efficiency here I am going to add both our Facebook and Instagram Accounts.
Now, you may be thinking, that there could be problems posting to more than 1 account at a time, due to the limitations of each platform, but don’t worry, Web Geeks have already thought of that! We have added the option to be able to customise each post with our “customise for each channel” feature. By activating this you can still post the same post to different accounts, just altered slightly to fit the platform’s limitations, which makes using the social planner far easier, and faster, than hopping between social media platforms.
As you can see, once this feature is activated we see social media icons here representing the accounts we are posting to. When you click between them, you will see the preview of the post on the right-hand side change to fit the channel you are posting to. If you notice when we click on the Instagram icon, we are told that there is a character limit of 2200. This is where this feature comes in so handy, you could easily write a shorter version of your post for Instagram, then expand on it in your Facebook post. Allowing you to make full use of each platform!
For the time being, we are just going to create a short and sweet post for both platforms. So let’s go to the editor. Here we can type our message, format it, and add pictures, videos, and hashtags. We can even use an AI generator to create content for us! This time I am just going to do it myself.
So what do I write, I know, “Allie is the best trainer in the universe!” that seems like a good post for social media, don’t you agree? Now, I think I am going to add a picture in here, so people can see my training prowess in action. There are a couple of ways to do this. Let’s click on the picture icon to start the process. Then click “upload from media library”.
Here you are able to pick a picture you already have in your media library, by just clicking any of the pictures below, upload an image from your computer, by using the upload media button at the top right, or even do a search for images on sites such as pixabay and upsplash. For now, I am just going to choose a recent picture as I already have one in the library. So I’ll just double-click on the picture and you will be taken back to the social planner.
So, another great thing about the social planner is, even if the pictures aren’t of the correct dimensions, for the channel you would like to post in, it will make it fit within the parameters. So as we can see, the horizontal picture is great for a Facebook post, but when we go over to the Instagram post, the picture now fits within the 1080 by 1080 pixel area.
Now, I am just going to add an emoji for fun, here we go, I think this one will do nicely . And add a hashtag so my fan club sees the post. #allieayeye then copy it all, into the Instagram post. Simple right?
Lastly, we have to decide when we want to post our content. We can either post it straight away, like with most social media platforms, or we can schedule it for a later date. Scheduling, can come in really handy, if you are not going to be around, or be able to post, on the days you want the post to be published. It can also help you to create a steady stream of social media content, without the need to always be thinking about social media. When you have time to sit down and create a few posts you can, then let the system automate their delivery. So let’s see our scheduling options, Just click on the post button down the bottom.
As you can see, you can either schedule a post, send post for approval , or schedule recurring posts. Sending posts for approval is really helpful, this allows you to send the post to a colleague within your organization to check it over before it goes out just to make sure it aligns with your brand and is delivering the right message.
However, what we are going to look at now is scheduling posts. so let’s click on “schedule post”. This will open a pop-up window with a calendar allowing us, to choose the time and date we want the post to go out. Under the calendar, we see that it gives us a time zone too, so if whoever is handling your social media is currently traveling, they are still able to post at the correct times for your business.
The social planner allows you to schedule very far in advance, so it has you covered if your social media person is taking a holiday, or off sick. All you need to do is select a date and then click schedule post. I am not going to schedule this post, as although my boss likes me, I am pretty sure he’s not as big a fan of me, as I am. I think I’ll just save it for later.
Now although, I haven’t personally scheduled a post, we do take advantage of this feature ourselves, so now I will show you how to view the posts you have scheduled.
After we saved the post, we were taken back to the social planner. At the top of this page, we can find a button that says “open planner”, let’s click on that. As you can see this brings up a calendar where we are able to view the posts we have scheduled, just in case you need to be reminded of upcoming posts. You can scroll through the days, or click the arrows to view a particular month.
And that’s all there is to it! Now you know how to use the social planner to create a post, post across various channels simultaneously, and schedule your posts for when you need them to go out! Think of all the time and worry this will save you. Just another reason to make the most of, Web Geeks marketing platform!