Resources: Planning and Scheduling Social Media Content

Here are the list of tools mentioned in yesterday’s Tech4Good SWFL Roundtable discussion Time Management and Social Media Scheduling.

National Awareness and Giving Days

Curated by the NPTech For Good, the National Awareness and Giving Calendar entails the dates with the corresponding Hashtags and websites. We put the information into our public Google Calendar. See the Instructions on how to include the event into your own Calendar views.

How can this help your organization?

Subscribe to the Google Calendar, so you can overlay it over your organization’s calendar and see it in the context of your organization’s calendar
Select the dates and awareness topic matching or adjacent to your own organization’s mission. (Art, Environmental issues, ChildHealth etc)
Brainstorm some ideas how to piggyback on a national conversation with organizational relevant information.
On Twitter and on Instagram, search for the hashtag, see what the conversation was and figure out at what level your organization can contribute.
Follow the links in the calendar to learn more about the Awareness days, about the partners and if they have a network you can join. Consider signing up and attribute a few resources to get involved into the global or national initiative.
Support organizations in the area who fit the corresponding Awareness days.
Curate information around those Awareness Days, that are complementary to your organization and share with your own constituents and with a blog post or two establish domain competency and thought leadership (for lack of a better word)
Review your own publications on your website and schedule relevant links post for the respective calendar days on social media.

Editorial Calendar for WordPress

A great tool to combine your WordPress site and your team’s content production is EditFlow plugin or the commercial version PublishPress. This way you can your editorial team can manage everything on site.

Another great tool is CoSchedule that includes Social Media postings, right on your post edit screens, for scheduling resurfacing blog post in the future (7 days after publishing, 1 months after publishing etc)

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Buffer analyzed your social media accounts and finds the right times where your audience in online. It allows you to add posts to be shared to a queue or buffer and will automatically post your sharing at those determined best times. This will prevent you from overloading your followers with too many mosts that go unnoticed and also posts to the right times, especially when catch up with your reading list in the middle of the night.

You can download the Buffer app and “share with Buffer” to add your post into the hopper. It also helps through ‘dry season’ when you are away from the computer or have nothing to post, Buffer could still be working on your queue.

Social Pilot is my favorite tool for bulk posting as you can schedule posts by uploading an csv file. Other services can do this, too, but they won’t allow you to do image posts. And if it’s not a link with a social graph it doesn’t perform well as a mere text only post.

A few members enjoy working with HootSuite and schedule posts to all social networks though its website.

Some members also collaborate with Virtual Assistance to keep a constant flow on social media and on Facebook. Mark Benson mentioned his Bontita365 Facebook page, where he shares Events happening in Bonita Springs every day.

Curation / Listening Tools

Brand24 – listen to the Internet about certain keywords.
Feedly for RSS Feeds, to create your own magazine style reading list and stay current on your subject matters.