Social media can often feel overwhelming when you don’t have the right tools to help you schedule everything. You’re constantly coming up with content ideas, creating it and then posting every second of your day.
One of the worst things you can do is not start putting the systems in place to help you spend less time in your business.
If you’re looking to regain your free time or just have more time to focus on your business, make sure you read through these 7 free tools to help you schedule your content.
Hootsuite is a major player in the social media scheduling scene, and their free version is a fantastic option for small business owners with little time.
You’re only allowed one team member, but as a small business, it will likely just be you or someone on your team doing it anyway. No need to worry.
Now you are limited by a few restrictions. First, you can only connect to 3 different social accounts.
Again, this shouldn’t be a problem as a small business owner. You won’t have the time or resources to be on every platform just yet.
The other restriction is only being limited to scheduling 30 posts in advance. This means if you’re post 1 post a day, across 3 platforms, you only need to schedule out posts every 10 days.
Instagram has always been a bit tricky when it comes to scheduling. Third party apps and tools have had to work around the restrictions, but this hasn’t stopped them from providing useful solutions to your scheduling problems.
Later is a great tool for visually planning out your posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, & Twitter.
I’ve used Later to help plan out my Instagram posts for the week, and it’s so handy because they send you alerts and load up your post straight to the Instagram platform.
Even testing it out again recently, they were able to automatically post straight to my Instagram account for me. This was massive as I hadn’t seen any other tool having this feature beforehand!
Buffer is another great tool for anyone just getting started with social media marketing for their business. If you want a tool with a great user interface, that’s easy to navigate, start here.
Buffer offers the same level of posting that Hootsuite does for their free version, giving you access to queue up 10 posts across 3 platforms in advance.
The handy thing about Buffer is that you can create a schedule with specific times you want your content to go out each. This can save you a bit of time adjusting the date and time for each post.
Once you load up a post into the queue, it will automatically go out at the next free date and time in the schedule you’ve set.