Benefits of scheduling

Have you ever heard anyone say: "To be successful, you have to be consistent"? Well, it is also true for social media. If your goal is to grow your follower base, you must show up daily. Not just on weekdays. Every day. Even on the weekends. And potentially also on every holiday.

Even if you go on a vacation, you still have to post on social media. Once you start, you can't stop. That is if you would like to grow fast. But how is it possible to be present every single day? This is when scheduling comes into the picture.

What is scheduling?

So what is scheduling exactly? To put it simply, scheduling is the process of planning and organizing your posts in advance. The more posts you have scheduled in the future, the more time you will have to focus on other things. Don't get me wrong. You still have to write the same amount of content as before. But instead of writing it daily, you can write it all at once.

Let's say you allocate 2 hours every Sunday to schedule the next week's content. I personally aim for two posts daily, so I have to write 14 posts every Sunday. How do I do that? During the weekdays, I write down everything that comes to my mind that I could write about. At this point, you might ask:

Why don't you post your ideas right away?

That is a very good question! But the answer is pretty simple. When I have a post idea, I just quickly write down some keywords about it that are enough to remind me what the original idea was. I collect multiple ideas during the week.

Then, on Sunday, I sit down when it is time to plan the next week and look at my notes. In these two hours, I decide which ideas are the best and in which order I should post them. This is also the time when I write the actual posts. The keywords become sentences, and a new post is born. I run a grammar check, and the post is ready to be scheduled.

I prefer this much more over having to write something every day. Furthermore, it also helps with writer's block.

Writer's block

If you are a content creator, you probably know what it is. Writer's block is when you suddenly cannot write anything. You don't have the slightest idea to post. You just sit there and stare at the screen. It is very frustrating, but scheduling can help you with that too.

Without planning, writer's block can be a huge problem. It comes when you least expect it, and if you post every day, you simply increase the probability of it happening in the worst possible moment.

In the alternative scenario, even if writer's block hits you in the middle of your dedicated writing time on Sunday, you still have the whole week's ideas to choose from. If you wrote down your ideas during the week, you decreased the chance that you would run out of them.

Even if writer's block lasts for days, you still have a chance to write down some ideas for Sunday in the remaining days of the week.

Benefits

So what are the benefits of scheduling? Let's see:

As a first, you can pretty much eliminate writer's block from your life. But remember that this is only true if you regularly keep track of your ideas during the week. You can use a note-taking app or a piece of paper, or if you choose to go with StormScribe, you can use its built-in draft feature.

Second, you are free to take a break if you want. Having a week's content scheduled in advance means you can ignore social media for a week if you want to. Your accounts will still be updated with fresh content every day.

I have to mention here that ignoring your account altogether for a whole week is not the best idea, but more on that later. The point is that you can take a break if you need one. This was not the case before scheduling.

Finally, if your goal is to grow on multiple platforms simultaneously, scheduling is absolutely the best way to do it. If you choose the right tool, you can schedule your posts on multiple platforms at the same time. You only have to write the content once, and the tool will take care of the rest. Choose the tool that covers most of the platforms you are active on.

Scheduling is not cheating

Some people feel that scheduling your posts is somewhat cheating. While the statement is debatable, I think it is not true. You still spend lots of time coming up with new posts, and you are still the one who writes them at the end. If the idea is yours, it's perfectly fine to schedule it.

Of course, it can be done in the wrong way. If you consistently post at 13:00 every day, it is pretty obvious that your posts are automated, and some of your followers will probably notice it. Especially if you are a larger account with thousands of followers. Choosing the right scheduler can help you with that by randomizing the publishing time of your posts. StormScribe has four different buttons when you schedule a post: Morning, Noon, Afternoon, and Evening. You can, of course, also set the time by hand if you need that.

Here's another tip: scheduling is not enough. Even if you post randomly every day, it's your job to follow up on your posts. If someone comments or shares your post, it is a good idea to reply to them or at least like their comment/share. This way, you can build a follower base who feels you care about them.

When posting is automated, you only have to care about replies during the week. You can set up a weekly routine that makes handling your accounts much easier.

Summary

Some prefer scheduling, and some don't. It is a personal preference. However, I encourage everyone to at least give it a try. If you are active on a single platform, you can even use its built-in scheduling feature, given that they have one, without registering to any third-party website.

But a scheduler app can be a huge time saver if you are active in multiple places.