You can’t afford to ignore the power of social media for bringing in new customers, but you also can’t spend all of your time on your phone, attempting to come up with engaging and exciting social content spontaneously. If you are serious about social media for business, you need to make it work for you, and this is where Asana comes into its own.
What is a Posting Schedule, and Why Does it Matter?
A social media posting schedule is a plan for what you are going to post, and when you are going to post it. You need to post regularly to build your audience, and planning your social media in advance allows you to plot a good ratio of different types of posts to keep your feed interesting for your followers.
There are a number of different theories about the best ratio for your social networks, from the Rule of Thirds (a third of your posts should be your content, a third is shared content from others that appeals to your audience and a third is interactions to build your brand) to the 5-3-2 Rule (Where five of every ten posts is relevant third-party content, three are your posts and two are personal and not related to work to give your feed a more human feel). The one thing all the different rules have in common is that you should mix up what you post.
As SEO expert Neil Patel says: “a good mix shows that while your page is primarily product or service-driven, you haven’t forgotten the human side of things, nor to acknowledge the work that others have done.” Click To Tweet
This requires a little work in advance. You need to curate the third party content, build up a bank of great personal stories and also make sure you are sharing a good spread of your content. If you try to do this off the cuff, you waste a lot of time racking your brains for the right content and you can lose sight of the balance you are trying to create.
Another advantage of having a social media posting schedule is that you can create storylines that keep people coming back to check you out. You can also jump on trends, relevant hashtags and national days as sparks for content in advance. By being prepared and targeting these with your best ideas, you stand a chance of increasing the reach of your posts as people search for related content.
If you note down ideas as they come to you, save images that you like and collect quotes, you will have plenty to inspire you when you sit down to schedule a host of great posts in advance of scheduling them.
How to Create a Social Media Posting Schedule in Asana
Asana is a great app for organising, tracking, managing and scheduling work for teams or individuals. You can use it for free for up to 15 people, and for bigger teams or to use premium features, there are various paid plans too. It is ideally set up as a single home for your social media posting schedule. Here’s how to do it:
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Use the Asana social media calendar template
One of the handy things about Asana is that it provides templates for all manner of business processes, including a social media calendar template. Use it to create a new project.
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Customise the headings
The template will appear in your workspace with suggested headings to help you create your posting schedule. You can choose whether a list or board view helps you visualise your workflow better. The default headings are: Ideas, Scheduled This Week, Scheduled Next Week, Later This Month, Unscheduled. If you think different headings will work better for you, you can edit them to add the terms you would prefer.
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Begin collecting social media ideas
Having a bank of ideas is sensible when it comes to social media for business. This makes it so much easier when you come down to create a week’s worth of posts, or however many you want to produce in one go. If you have the Asana app on your phone, you can jot down ideas for posts whenever they come to you and place them under the Ideas heading. You can also attach pictures that you take or images you find that you want to replicate.
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Tag your ideas
You can add colour coded tags to your ideas, which will help you visualise your output better. You might want to create one tag for the type of content used for the post (text, image, video, infographic etc.), one for the source of the content (third party or your own) and another tag for the network it will go on (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). This will help you see at a glance that you have everything covered that you need when you start scheduling them.
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Draft each post
Once you have your ideas and tags, you can start drafting the post. You might want to create subtasks, which you can assign to team members with due dates. These could include Write Post, Create Image and Schedule on Buffer, for example. Once you find the way of working that suits you best, you could use this task and its subtasks as a template for all future tasks of a similar nature. It will save you time rather than creating a brand new task each time. Save it at the top of your column and choose the ‘Duplicate Task’ option every time you want to add a new idea.
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Move the post into the relevant column
Once you have scheduled the content, move the task into the relevant column to map its progress. Once it is published you might want to create another column (maybe titled ‘Published’) to store your old posts just in case you want to refer back to them or re-use some resources. Following these steps will take the pain out of social media content creation. You will be able to set aside a couple of hours every week or two to create a batch of brilliant posts to entertain, inform and engage your followers, rather than sit there for hours staring at the screen and waiting for inspiration to hit.
You receive reminders of tasks that need completing, so you can keep track of what needs doing and when. This is the perfect way to create the right balance of content for your business, released regularly to keep you front and centre of their minds when they scroll their feeds.
If you can’t quite find the template you are looking for in Asana we can’t recommend Templana enough. It is a great source for free and paid templates created for all kinds of business activities and projects.
Need some assistance setting up a social media schedule or strategy? Contact us for your free consultation to find out how you can save time whilst growing your online presence.
