I’ve been using RecurPost’s free social media scheduler to plan my content marketing for a number of months now, alongside Hootsuite and have found it a useful part of my social media strategy. Today I’m sharing a simple walk-through of how to set up your first social post to help you get started over there.
What is RecurPost? Recurpost is a social media scheduler which allows you to create content and post it out across varying platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Google My Business at given times. These dates and times can be picked by you, based on your understanding of audience activity, or at a predetermined time RecurPost has calculated given it’s knowledge and developer API keys with each social platform.
How I use the RecurPost free plan for social media scheduling
The RecurPost Dashboard
The dashboard on RecurPost allows you to do several things;
Plan your content - scheduling your content ahead of time allows you to avoid having to log in every single day to each social media platform in order to post something you have to say. This is useful for your audience, because they love story flow, but it is particularly useful for you, because you can concentrate on the customer service commenting and platform engagement during the week. This is a crucial part of your marketing plan.
Create Libraries of Content to reuse - beyond regular social media content creation and scheduling, there is another side to RecurPost that I like a lot and that is the ability to be able to create libraries of content that can go out at specific intervals to save you from repurposing by hand.
Analytics - on the free version of Recurpost you won’t find huge analytic data, but if you opt-in you can get an email once a week with basic stats on engagement, pots numbers and followers.
Watch the video above for a look at what the dashboard looks like.
My thoughts on RecurPost’s Free plan
Pros
The dashboard offers a number of ways to view your content strategy
Quick and easy to get going and find your way around
The mobile app has been easy to use
You can create content libraries which will post on your behalf during scheduled time frames. This makes content that you wish to repeat occasionally much easier to handle.
They have created ‘variations for Twitter’, which is great for recurring content that you want to tweak, so that it looks fresh and remains eligible under Twitter’s SPAM rules
The support team is small, but fast and efficient with your queries
There is a good video library for help in the ‘knowledge base’
Cons
You can’t post video using the free service
The dashboard very occasionally glitches
You cannot engage with comments and messages from your social media – but I’m sure somewhere there’s something that tells us that in-platform engagement is better
Statistics – you don’t get any real analytics on the free plan, but this can be done directly from your social accounts, or through using other online tools.
Overall I feel that RecurPost has been one of the simplest scheduling platforms to get started with, albeit the lack of video posting facilities on the free plan. It is easy to use, simple to learn and has certainly helped me get to a much better place with my social media strategy planning.
My favourite feature which you just don’t find elsewhere, is the content libraries. I can put together content that I wish to mention at regular intervals, like my newsletter link, or a link to an older blog post. Once I have set the interval I wish it to be repeated on, it is out there doing it’s thing without intervention from me. This makes my life really easy!
So, if you are looking for my recommendation, then this is it – RecurPost has everything you need to get started, especially if you pre-plan for products/service launches… which you are, right?!
How much does RecurPost cost?
RecurPost pricing starts at £15 a month with the ‘small plan’ allows;
3 Social Accounts
100 Recurring Updates
10 Recurring posts per account
10 One-off posts per account
Not available on the free plan;
2 RSS Feed
Team Members
Post Approval
Video Updates
Import updates from other tools
Unlimited Tweet Variations
White label reports
What are the general RecurPost Reviews?
From what I have seen online the service and system has good reviews generally and I think if you are a small business, or a one man band then giving their free plan a try might be worth is to see what possibilities it holds for you.
Why should I pre-schedule content for my creative business?
Social Media is a really great tool for maximising our customer’s perception of our brand and their willingness to sample our products and I find it wholly underused by Etsy shop owners and creative artists.
Social Media is essentially cost-free if we discount ads for a moment, so it’s a great place for us to start shouting about what we do. It takes time though, so if we are clever with the time we spend, then we can achieve a lot! I probably spent on average no more than 15 minute a day on social media with my product business and I created plenty of leads and shop traffic as a result.
From 2019 social media is also likely to become much more transactional, meaning your customers have an opportunity to buy directly from you on social media. This means that missing out on being consistent with a clear brand message and presence, means missing out on potential sales.
I found that creating a plan ahead of time when it came to shop updates, shows and new product launches helped me to see clearly how I could create a story flow that excited my social followers enough to want to click through to my website, attend an event and much more importantly buy what I was selling.
Using a social media scheduler to help me post that very intentional content, meant that even if I was running late one day in production, I didn’t have the headache of posting on social media, because tools just like RecurPost are created to do that for me.
I’m all about time saving, in a much more productive and intentional way and so should you be!
Takeaway
Not all social media schedulers are created equal, so I would make sure that you go in and have a play first. Once you have an idea of whether this tool will fit your purpose, then you can schedule a lot more content to go out this way and decide later on when exactly you need to upgrade.
Remember that scheduling your content ahead of time makes for better;
Launch planning
Content strategy and story telling
Allows you time to concentrate on other things
