Social Media Things I Have Learned...

Posting is my Pastime these days...

You would think posting on social media on a regular basis would be an easy task, but it's not. Not when you’re planning it as opposed to posting a spontaneous picture for fun. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest and so on, is a lot to keep up with. Along this learning adventure I have been on, I have discovered great tools to help me achieve this with much less stress and I would like to share what I have found. (I'm smirking as I write about making posting less stressful, a millennial would be laughing at me right now.)  Let me preface this by saying, to do what I wanted I needed to switch my Instagram and Pinterest accounts to business profiles, which was not a big deal. Another thing I need to mention is that some of these apps and programs are free and some have free-basic and paid-pro versions. I chose to upgrade a few of them to pro because they better suited my social media needs. (I'm smirking again as I write this, because, really, do I need to have social media needs? Life was much simpler before technology.)    The first tool I love is Buffer. It is the program I am using for scheduling my posts across all my social media platforms. (I pay for a subscription, the free plan didn’t do everything I wanted it to.) There are other websites and apps that do this, but this one seemed easy enough to use. What I like about Buffer is its ability to directly post to a business Instagram account. Most just send you a reminder to manually post your content. Buffer has literally changed my whole outlook on posting daily, to be able to plan a week in advance and put posting on auto pilot is amazing.  Two other great tools are LinkTree and Planoly, both for Instagram. You are allowed one link in your Instagram bio and if you use LinkTree, it brings you to a series of buttons you set up like a landing page that then link to everything you want it to, your other social media links, your website, portfolios, articles, whatever. Planoly helps you set up and visually plan and preview your next 9-10 Instagram posts. By doing this you can make sure you have a beautiful feed and the images flow well together. For example, you don't want to post two similar images or quotes next to each other. (Since writing this I discovered another app called “Unum” that helps plan your feed also, I’m going to try that out as well.) Bit.ly is another great tool. It lets you shorten URL links for Twitter and other platforms where you are constrained by a small number of characters. This is a must if you want to add a url to your captions and posts.  Animoto is a wonderful platform that allows you to create marketing videos easily. I decided to pay for a subscription to be able to get the most out of them. They have an amazing online community. I belong to their Facebook group and have found great tips on making videos and can see examples of what others have created for their own businesses.  There’s still so much to learn and understand. I am still trying to figure out how to make hashtags and keywords work to my advantage, how to time my posts across all my platforms to get the most out of them. I am also debating between buying Facebook and Instagram ads or just keep doing what I’m doing and hope for an organic following. Planning, creating, posting, engaging... social media can be a full time business. I’m hoping it will be come more natural for me as time goes on and not feel like work!