There Are Hazards of Scheduling Posts
While keeping up with posting on whichever social media or web sites you manage is deemed to be essential to maintain a base of clients, consumers or fans, it can be so time consuming. Enter the ability to schedule your posts. The designers of the sites have made life easy for us. Just start banking up your posts and hit ‘schedule’. Easy.
But hey, hold on. There are definitely hazards of scheduling posts ahead of real time. Don’t be too quick to decide scheduling is the optimum way ahead. This needs some thought. Weigh up the pros and cons first.
What will I achieve by arranging a bunch of posts to magically appear on my Facebook, Twitter or website pages at predetermined times?
Advantages
Number one for me is definitely time. By scheduling a group of posts to appear automatically, I’ll limit time spent keeping in touch with readers. I could spend 30 minutes, crank out half a dozen FB/twitter comments, put them into my automated feed and not look at social media again that day. Sounds great.
The second big advantage for me is timing. As my readership is international, time zones wreck havoc on posts. Sitting at my computer during the daytime in New Zealand, it rarely occurs to me most of my readers are fast asleep. A bulk of my readers live on US East Coast, an optimum time to post for them is around 3am. Yep, scheduling sounds great.
But I’ve always been a little scared of organising myself to post in advance. A day or two ahead might be fine, but not longer periods. There are definitely serious hazards of scheduling posts and not keeping an eye on their publication.
Disadvantages
I remember reading scathing comments about a very well known writer who had frivolous, chatty posts appearing on all her social media sites during Hurricane Katrina. While anyone who gave this any thought should have realised the posts had been scheduled prior to that disaster, I suspect the writer did lose fans because of her apparent “blatant disregard” of the suffering going on around her.
What about comments or questions? How will a reader react if their response to your post is never acknowledged? I suspect it’ll be in a negative way.
Making a decision whether to schedule or not will be dependent on how important your social media content is to you. But beware those hazards. I will be doing a little forward planning on this website as I intend to be holidaying shortly and will not have ready access to the Internet. But I must keep two things firmly in mind. My posts must be timeless and I must watch for any comments. The first I can do easily. The second? Well, if I fail to see your comment, please understand it is lack of connectivity rather than disinterest in your response.