From content creation to speeding up your creative process, this month, we’re focusing on all-things social media. But perhaps one of the most tedious aspects of staying on top of your online presence is actually posting. Pulling imagery and creating captions on the fly in between client meetings and venue shopping only works for so long, after all. In order to have a thriving feed free of typos and poor quality imagery, it’s so important to come up with an editorial calendar and have the proper tools in place to help you post when it’s time. Today, then, we’re breaking down our favorite tools for social media planning and posting. Read on—and get ready to fill that feed and plump your page with thoughtful, planned, pretty-as-ever posts.
Later
Later is one of our favorite tools for visually planning and scheduling out your Instagram posts and tweets (you can use it to schedule Facebook and Pinterest posts as well, but we prefer to do those directly within the platforms). It includes a super smart visual content calendar, so you can plan out posts weeks in advance. Plus, its intuitive drag-and-drop feature allows you to see what posts will look like in your feed before you actually post them—a major bonus for ensuring you’re sticking with a cohesive aesthetic across your account. Plus, for those with a business account, Later will actually automatically post for you (rather than just notify you when it’s time to post like other scheduling apps do)—so you literally don’t have to lift a finger when it’s time for that pretty post to go live!
Planoly
Planoly is another awesome option for auto-posting to Instagram on your business account’s behalf. In addition to a visual planner, a smart drag-and-drop feature, and a seamless schedule that will post your planned images and content directly to Instagram for you, it also offers amazing analytics tools—allowing you to better understand your audience and post accordingly. Major bonus—Planoly also allows you to plan, arrange, and draft captions for your Instagram stories in advance as well (though you’ll have to do the actual posting for stories on your own ).
Aisle Planner Style Guides
This was touched on this in yesterday’s post, How to Speed Up Your Social Creative Process with Sourced Co— Aisle Planner’s style guides aren’t just for planning weddings. We love using Style Guides as a place to store content for future social media posts. Simply create a Style Guide specifically for social media content, then drop in the image you want to post and leave a comment on the image with your caption. This allows you to create a library of backlog, evergreen posts (i.e. posts that don’t need to be posted on a certain date or at a certain time)—that way, when you haven’t posted in a while or your feed is feeling a little lackluster, you can simply pull one of your prepped posts from Style Guides and voila!
Aisle Planner Calendar
The Aisle Planner Calendar is another great tool that can be used for far more than wedding planning. We love the idea of creating calendar events for your social media posts. To do this, simply create an overarching project like you would for a wedding called “Your Business Name - Marketing” (or something of the sort!). Then, head to the calendar and simply create “events” on it. We definitely suggest putting your wedding weekends on the calendar to remind you to share behind the scenes posts leading up to them as well as any other events you are going to that would be good for content.
Overall, there are tons of tools out there that allow for easy social media planning and posting—the above are just a few of our favorites! We highly recommend downloading a few of these tools and getting creative with the array of AP tools you have access to in order to make pre-planned social media posting as easy and breezy as those weddings you plan!
About the Author
