Schedule your Easter Bank Holiday

Even if you don’t usually use social media scheduling tools to automate your social media, a long weekend, such as the Easter Bank Holiday is a great time to take advantage of the opportunity that scheduling tools offer.
Here are 5 top tips to help maximise social media scheduling so you can enjoy the Easter break without compromising your social media strategy!

But first… what do we mean by social media scheduling exactly?

It is sometimes easy to miss-out some of the platforms you are using when thinking about social media. Social media is the collective of online applications enabling users to create and share content and participate in social networks. So, it includes the obvious names like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, but don’t forget about platforms like WhatsApp, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr, Snapchat, and Reddit – or anywhere else you may post material!
Social media scheduling is a way of preparing posts in advance, set up in an automated schedule so they will post out even if you are far away from your laptop or smart phone. It’s a handy way of keeping your social media feeds populated when you want to be doing something else.

1.    Consider whether you need to maintain any social media over the long weekend

An important first step: Consider whether scheduling social posts for the Bank Holiday weekend is the best use of your time. For traditional businesses, with ‘9-5’ hours, are your customers really going to be looking for your services over a long weekend?
On the other hand: If your core business is directly related to the weekend – tourism and leisure-focused businesses, there’s every advantage to be gained from maintaining your social presence over the Bank Holiday.

2.    Think carefully about what you will post

It’s important to remember that many of your customers will be looking to relax and enjoy their time over the Bank Holiday, perhaps attend an Easter service so bring that into your social media posts.
If you’re promoting an event or a service that will benefit people over the long weekend, it’s worth a mention, although if you’re doing social media right, your social posts will already be raising awareness in the run up to the weekend, so just a reminder posted via social media scheduling should be enough on the weekend itself!

3.    Think about when to schedule your posts!

‘When’ is equally as important as ‘what’ when it comes to social media scheduling and posting. If you haven’t already considered posting times in relation to your social media, this might be a good time to start! There are plenty of articles around about the best times to post on social media – so build up a picture of the best days and times for your business.
Start off by accessing basic analytics – for example from the Insights section of your Facebook page – and then experimenting. Think about when you get the most engagement from your posts – in the evenings? At the weekends?
Then think about what your social followers will be doing – it’s a good bet that there will be chocolate involved on Easter Sunday…

4.    Choose your automation platforms.

If you’re thinking about automation generally, it’s worth spending some time looking at all the platforms available. Hootsuite offers the opportunity to schedule posts to most social networks. If you’re only using one platform, there are other options; Facebook has its own internal scheduling tool, for Twitter, try Tweetdeck, for Instagram, how about investigating Later.

5.    Remember to update after the weekend!

It can be easy to think that once posts are scheduled, you can sit back, relax, enjoy your roast lamb (Welsh, of course!) and forget about everything – and to an extent, you can. If you’re logging off completely, make this clear on your social posts. Once you’re back to reality, remember to log on and respond to any engagement your automated tweets received.

Read Also: Digital Strategy for Accountancy Businesses

On the other hand, if you’re happy to respond to comments, replies and mentions over the weekend, that’s great – your customers will enjoy the interaction in the middle of an Easter egg hunt or perhaps the Easter Sunday service!

Get to grips with social media scheduling

Scheduling is a great way to maintain a social media presence on an ongoing basis – if you’d like some help to get a strategy for your social media and online marketing up and running, which incorporates automation, get in touch!

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