MKTG 347 Scheduling Posts on Hootsuite week 11

Hootsuite is a social media marketing medium that helps you manage multiple platforms at once. This really helps make social media marketing a lot easier for digital marketers, one of the tools it has is scheduled posting.

Say you need to share blog posts to a companies Facebook page. They already have the blogging done, they just want a regular schedule for sharing these posts on social media, and the Facebook side of their social media should have weekly blog posts shared. They have all of the posts done for the next two months. It is not the most efficient thing to have to remember to go on the blog website, copy the link, then go to Facebook and create a new post, that's time out of a day that is not necessary. By using Hootsuite you can set up scheduled posts ahead of time.

Once you have your Hootsuite account set up, so there are social medias linked to the account and dashboards are set up, you are ready to set up scheduled posts.

The first thing you need to do is hit the green pencil button to start composing a post.

The next thing you need to do is decide what Social Networks you want the post to go to, as well as what the post will contain. In this text box you can also paste links that will be active in the post, and you can also add media or an image if you need to. 

I created a simple tweet, since this is just an example. 

At the bottom next to Publish, immediately is the default option, however we want to make this post "On scheduled date".

Then you pick the date and time, it must be at least 5 minutes into the future. 

 So I scheduled mine to exactly 5 minutes into the future from the time of writing.

And here is the tweet! It worked.

An important thing to be aware of is the amount of scheduled posts. You do not want too many to far ahead, just incase the direction you want the social media to go to change, you also do not want to forget what you set to post. This makes things easier but this does not mean you do not need to monitor these accounts anymore at all. You also need to be aware of how many scheduled posts you are allowed. I can schedule up to 30 posts a head of time, some have more, some plans can be unlimited. Just know that once those are scheduled and used up, you need to remember when they all end so you can update the scheduled posts.

After initially publishing this post I went back and scheduled this post to be shared on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. So instead of just picking twitter I decided to select all three platforms I have linked to Hootsuite. I also used the more simple post maker on the Dashboard page. I posted the link which will be active on all three channels.

Then you hit this scheduling calendar: 

Pick the date and time you want this scheduled to post. 

Then at the time I picked, I went to check that they scheduled...

All three posts were successfully shared!