A social media marketer’s to-do list is never-ending. Every day is an opportunity to share new content, engage with users, and think strategically about future content. We asked Jenn Reiner, senior social media marketing manager at PicMonkey, to shed some light on the tools she uses to save time on social.
Here at PicMonkey, we want to spend as little time as possible posting content, so we can spend more time actually engaging with our followers and thinking about the big picture. In our workflow, we brainstorm content ideas, prioritize which ones should be published first, tailor each post so that they’re relevant to the channel we’re publishing them in, and then leave the nitty gritty posting details to Buffer, a social media content management site.
We also like to use Buffer to get a sense of our big-picture scheduling. Before we write a new post, we look at our month view to get a sense of what we’ve already posted and what we have scheduled out.
To show you want I mean, I’m gonna walk you through creating and scheduling a Twitter post.
1. Size your post image
In PicMonkey, look through Templates to find a blank canvas, or use one of our pre-made social templates. These are nice because they already have the text laid out exactly how you might want it—all you have to change is the image and the copy. They’re also sized exactly right for Twitter, and you can also find sizes for most other social networks.
In this example, I’ll start with a blank template but once you find any template you like, just click Customize and start editing.
2. Create your social image
From the Editor, create your design. Social media marketers today need to stand out from the crowd in order to get engagement from their audience, so it’s more important than ever to make sure you’re producing unique, high quality content.
3. Write your post copy
In Buffer, write your tweet. A couple cool things to note: You can integrate Buffer with Bit.ly so you can skip a step shortening your URLs. Also, Buffer crawls the page of your blog posts to easily get the meta-image and other images in the post. You can see in this image that it auto-selected the one I made for Twitter in PicMonkey, but I could also use any other images that appear in that article (which is good if I want to schedule this post out a few times with slightly different pictures).
4. Schedule your post
Use Buffer’s smart scheduler to identify the best times to post to your specific audience. You can see, in the week view, how PicMonkey typically posts to Twitter five times a day, at around the same times each day.
Some other helpful Buffer features:
There’s an RSS feed integration that automatically pulls blog content into social posts.
We get real-time analytics to see how our posts are doing. We use this especially for Twitter to determine which posts to edit and repost at a later date.
With the tailored posts feature, we can update the copy for each post so that they’re appropriate for each social channel—right in the same place.
We’re in Buffer on the daily making sure our calendar is up to date and pushing new content out. We estimate that Buffer saves us about 20 hours a month just by making our sharing process efficient. With the time we save, we’re able to focus on what we truly care about—engaging with our users and developing content that matters to them.
