Honestly, I’m not even going to admit how far in advance I’ve written this blog post because it would entirely undermine everything I’m about to say, but bear with me okay?
Scheduling is without a doubt the easiest way to achieve consistency. You can be sat with 100 ideas and ensure that they’ll steadily be published over the following weeks or months. Batching your content is my biggest tip if you’re struggling to be consistent and luckily I rarely see accounts who post several times in one day and then ghost us for weeks anymore, as scheduling your Social Media Grid Posts has become routine for so many small business owners now.
Even scheduling your blog posts and Newsletters can be a wonderful thing, get all of that long content written whilst you’re in the zone and you’ll save yourself masses of time and creative headaches later down the line. (I would say that, I’ve just admitted I’ve pre-scheduled this blog post.)
I even admitted last year that I pre-schedule some of my Instagram stories but… that’s where it stops. I also make sure that the lion’s share of my stories are at least posted (if not created, but read that blog post for more details) in the moment.
It was announced in December of 2022 that we can now schedule Reels, the scheduling of non-interactive stories came out in 2021 and again, here’s a blog post on how I used that to wreck my Instagram Story Views 🙃.
Here’s why I won’t be scheduling my reels and even if they introduce stickers on scheduled stories, I’ll be keeping those to real-time posting too.
I’ll put this in a bigger font for maximum impact…
The whole point of social media is to go on the app.
Oh yeah, it’s super convenient that we can now, theoretically schedule everything we ever need to publish and forget that Instagram even exists until we’re ready to batch that content again. But is that really what’s best for you, your audience and your engagement?
Hella no.
I wrote a post here about how, if you can only post OR engage, always choose to spend your time engaging. You’ll convert more clients by talking to them than posting at them for sure.
I hate to say it, but I don’t trust you that you’ll still load the app and engage as much if you know your content is going out regardless. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. I actually think that Instagram allows us to schedule so it can weed out who’s actually present.
I do schedule my grid posts and some stories, but I refuse to schedule anything else because it forces me to go onto the app and whilst I’m on there – I’m more likely to stop and engage and interact with other accounts. To be honest, I probably fall down a rabbit hole more often than I care to admit.
It also helps you to stay on top of what your audience currently wants, you can actually only schedule 75 days in advance on Meta, but that’s still well over 2 months! Do you honestly know what your audience will be asking for in 2 months time? I don’t! We go one month to 5 weeks maximum and plan our content according to the fact we can be less targeted the further in advance it’s scheduled.
If you can hand on heart promise me now that you’ll go into the app, reply to people’s stories, comment on their posts and be as personable as you are now – even with scheduling ALL of your content – then have at it. But like I said before, I’m just not sure I can trust you…