Scheduling your social media posts can be life changing. That might sound dramatic, but it’s true when you’ve got a busy day, month or career that doesn’t lend itself to hands-on social media interaction several times a day. We schedule our social posts directly through HubSpot, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (and now video on Twitter thanks to a recent HubSpot update). By scheduling your social posts in advance, you eliminate the need to compose on the fly and free up your time to interact with others, increasing your overall engagement.

Optimization through organization

As a B2B company or entrepreneur, it can be difficult to manage several different accounts across all of the various social media platforms at your disposal. In addition, each platform has its own rules of engagement that make it hard to come across as genuine and personable with mass posting. If you don’t have a dedicated budget to focus on social posting, scheduling your social media posts can be one of the easiest ways to jump-start your marketing engagement.

It can be helpful to keep your social posts focused on a few key channels that you know will get you the greatest points of engagement for your business and customers. When you’re overwhelmed with too many different accounts and platforms, it can result in a mass-posting epidemic that instantly discredits the sincerity of your brand. If you need help keeping things in order, try using a social media content calendar. When scheduling, include the imagery you plan to share, any relevant copy, and for Instagram and Twitter especially, factor in any hashtags you see fit.

Simplify your social scheduling

If you are not a HubSpot user (what’s holding you back?), there are a few other sites you can use to schedule your social media posts:

• Hootsuite allows you to schedule your content across several accounts. Share one tweet among all of your accounts for continuity, or share posts from your main account among several accounts
• Feedly creates a condensed visual of your social media feed, pulling in keyword alerts, Youtube subscriptions, tweets, blogs and other RSS feeds; helping you narrow down your focus on content that you might want to engage with or share in your own feed
• Buffer, unlike the other services, allows you to schedule Instagram content; while it doesn’t post directly for you, it will prompt you to copy and paste your caption and auto-opens Instagram with your image ready to go, which makes quick work of social sharing
• IFTTT (If This Then That) works like a series of simple math problems, allowing you to create formulas that cause chain reactions. If you set up a formula so when you tweet it also posts to your Facebook account, each time you post from that linked Twitter account, your content will be shared on Facebook. Experiment with more complex chain reactions upfront to simplify your life even further down the line.

The key to scheduling social posts isn’t to completely neglect your social presence, but rather to use scheduling to boost your ability to be in many places at once. Try using HubSpot, or one of the other tools above, to schedule your posts and see where you can spend the hours you saved elsewhere in your social media marketing budget to further boost your B2B SaaS marketing engagement.