Automate Social Posting vs. Manually Posting
Social media, digital media, and even blog content take time to create. However, before you even create it, you need ideas for what you’d like to share and how you would like to share it. With schedulers in popular CRM platforms and others, it is easy to automate social posting. But, what are the pros and cons of manually posting vs. auromating? Read on to learn more.
Why Automate Social Posting?
Solopreneurs or even small businesses with less than 20 people often don’t have the budget (budget in this case is time and/or money) to hire a fully-functional marketing team — never mind a professional content manager. Content managers often wear many hats — from strategy and creation to curation and reporting. People choose to automate social posting because they have time at the moment but not in the potential future.
Platforms like Canva make it easy to create a visual and schedule it with your desired content. Why not schedule it as soon as it’s made? It just makes sense.
The biggest reason to choose not to automate is the intelligence of the platform you’re posting to — they know it’s not a human posting. Most social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook earn money based on ad revenue. As a reminder, robots and AI are not humans that can make purchasing decisions. You wouldn’t want to post a piece of content you love dearly only for LinkedIn to suppress it because they know it isn’t shared by a human in realtime.
Why Manually Post Social Content?
So you’ve created your content, maybe even batch-created your posts for the month or quarter. Great. Now, you look at the calendar and know that you post your blog every Tuesday with a follow-up Instagram push on Wednesday morning and a Story for it on Thursday afternoon. These are consistent behaviors you’re manually moderating. But what happens when there is a holiday on Wednesday? Do you push everything forward a day or up a day? Or, what if, similar to Sarah Silverman, you pre-schedule Tweets, but it happens to post moments before a major incident?
This level of strategy and autonomy is important for sharing your worthy content far and wide. You spent the time to create it with the anticipation of maximum reach, so knowing when to post is essential. This level of human judgment is crucial in knowing when to post the content and when to hold back.
When Should You Automate Social Posting?
Should you automate social posting or manually post it 100 percent of the time? Nothing is the best scenario for every business 100 percent of the time, but there is a happy marriage.
Our recommendation for automation is when you know you won’t be in the office or if there are holidays you wish to celebrate with a post. Note, if you post for one holiday, it’s important to be consistent with posting for others so as not to offend anyone. As always, if you cannot share authentic content, it’s better not to share.
So, automate social posts for big holidays — you can even do this months in advance. That way, when the week of the holiday or your vacation comes around, you don’t have to think about what the company is posting.
To start your content strategy in 2024, contact MDINC today. We can empower you to create the best content at the right time for maximum reach.
