As a social media professional, how often do you feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of your work day? If your answer is ‘often,’ you are good. If not, let us guess why: there are plenty of little tasks (like finding good content to post, responding to mentions, tweeting) that leave you no time to focus on your strategic goals.

SEMrush’s social media team was once faced with the same issue. And, that is exactly why we decided to create a dedicated social media tool to make our routine less time-consuming. It took only half a year for our amateur tool to grow into a comprehensive social media suite! 

In this guide, we will look at the steps you can take to setup and manage your posting schedule on Facebook and Twitter with the help of SEMrush’s Social Media Poster.

Set Your Social Media Schedule and Posting Goals

In our previous article dedicated to SEMrush’s Social Media Tracker, we learned step-by-step how to analyze your competitors’ social media activity. So by now, you should have more clarity as to how often, how much content, and what type of content you should be posting to stay ahead of your competition.

By default, the tool will set a goal of 4 posts per day, but you can alter this in your settings.

Let’s say, on Facebook you want to post 5 times a day on weekdays and only twice a day on weekends:

Having a personalized posting schedule is very convenient since you won’t have to think about how much you have already posted on a particular day or when to schedule your next publication.

You can always check to see to what extent you are aligned with your goals by looking at the colored bar above the calendar. If you have fewer posts scheduled than you had planned, the bar won’t reach the dotted line:

Schedule Your Social Content

To schedule your first publication, click on any time slot and complete the following wizard with information about your post.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and this is very much the case when using them on social media. If you enter the post’s URL, the tool will automatically pull pictures from it. Select the pictures you want to go with your post by clicking on them:

When scheduling posts on Twitter, don’t bother counting characters for each line of your text. The tool has a built-in character count for Twitter publications, so if you go beyond the limit, it will let you know with a red highlight:

Variety is the spice of life. The tool provides you with four different options for scheduling your content:

• Add your post to the queue, in which case it will be scheduled for the next available time slot per your schedule settings.

• Schedule the same post for multiple dates/times (especially those that perform well).

• Alternatively, choose ‘Post now’ for your article to go live within the next few seconds.

• Save posts as drafts to edit and publish later. 

You can easily move your posts to another time or date using the drag-and-drop feature:

If you are more of a ‘list’ kind of person and prefer seeing your scheduled content organized into a list rather than a calendar, switch to the ‘Queue’ view option:

Create Drafts

It is good ideas that matter at the end of the day. Any cool idea that you might be nurturing but don’t have the time to finish off just yet can be saved as a draft. Being able to save your post as a draft is also great when your text is ready, but you haven’t found an image to go with it, or don’t have a link for it yet.

You will be able to see your draft posts in the calendar along with other scheduled publications or in a separate ‘Drafts’ tab. That way, you won’t forget about them.

Don’t worry: a publication marked as a ‘draft’ will never go live without your permission. To publish it, you will need to open it and hit the ‘Schedule’ button.

Clone Posts

If you want to publish the same post again, you can easily ‘clone’ the original post to avoid repetitive copy-pasting of links. This will also save you from such human errors as misspellings or inserting a wrong link and accidentally posting something you didn't mean to (followed by excuses like ‘It is Monday morning after all.”).

Diversify Your Content Feed

There should always be a healthy ratio between the internal and external content that you post. Whether you want it to be 70:30 or 50:50, it should depend on your strategy as well as on the community you are targeting. The more diverse the community, the more external content you should include in your publications.

Use the ‘Content ideas’ feature to find interesting articles from your favorite RSS-feeds and share them easily.

If you can check when your target audience is most responsive, do so and make sure you are hitting those time slots with your product content.

Analyze Your Facebook Performance

To avoid having to go to your Facebook page several times a day to track new likes, unlikes and your audience growth, use the ‘Analytics’ tab, which will provide you with a quick overview of your page’s performance:

Advanced Hacks

Now that you are well acclimated to the Poster tool, consider some advanced hacks that will save you even more time! Here is a list of our hot keys (which appear if you hold 'Alt'):

We believe that social media scheduling is the art of planning your activities in such a way as to achieve your goals in the time you were given. If done properly, you will be able to:

• Spend more of your time being creative.

• Allocate your budget and human resources wisely.

• Prepare for major marketing campaigns and special occasions in advance.

• Deal with urgent matters without having to abandon your other duties as a social media manager.

With the Social Media Poster, you can schedule your posts months, quarters and years in advance. Once your scheduling becomes automated, you will be surprised by how much free time you all have left to think about more serious stuff!

Tell us what you think about the Poster in the comments below.