When Internet Drops

GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SCHEDULING TOOLS

So, you are in charge of the social media management and because of your innate creativity and skills, you can create content for your page (or pages) basically out of nowhere. But, you still need to count on something: internet connection. Imagine you are in a beautiful eco-camping on the mountains, spent a lot of time typing an inspiring caption for the most amazing picture you edited, and when you press ‘publish’, the WiFi goes down and you lose your post… sounds familiar to anyone? Well, we have been through these during our last training, but thank God we learned some tips and tools that can be helpful for those times when you are not in the office. And here they are:

1. Back-Up! Even though you are having great internet connection, something could get wrong in the social media platform and you can lose your Nobel Prize post writing. So, type it on ‘Notes’ or a Word doc that you can save frequently, and when you are finished just copy the text into your post.
2. Schedule your posts: you don’t know if you are going to have time or good internet connection later, so better start using some of the scheduling tools available. Some of them are free, and others you need to pay to get pretty amazing features. Either way, you can easily program your publications for different social media and also see the notifications of your posts, interact with followers, search for inspiration, and more.
3. Set up a time for create content for your social media: daily chores sometimes detours the attention of the communications activities, so try to set up with your team at least one day a week for just creating content, and try to get as many posts and ideas as you can. Then you can schedule your publications for a month or even a year! (ok, let’s be honest, maybe not). At least your page will have some activity and if anything else comes up, you can still publish it or even reprogram other posts so that the new one can get all the attention.

So, about this scheduling tools…

Here in COMnGO we use and recommend Hootsuite, which we find very practical, user friendly and there is a free version that is accessible for everybody. In this one you can schedule posts for up to three accounts, and you can manage the interactions, messages and assign responsibilities for each person on the team. You can also see what other similar pages to yours are doing and what’s on trend, and get analytics of your social media activity.

To know more about how Hootsuite works you can watch this video:

There are other platforms like SproutSocial and Buffer with more or less features depending on your budget, feel free to surf a little bit more about this tools, and find which suits the best for you, and don’t forget to save.