Hey, good morning internet fans! Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, February 24th, therefore it is ‘Social Media Wednesday‘. And we are continuing on Blab, and I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah!

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing good. I’m excited because last week we had a really… I had a really bad episode on Blab. This week, everything seems to be working okay, so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that technology works. It’s a beautiful day out in Northern California, so I can’t complain.

SG: True, true. I’m just… My only problem here is the lighting. I still haven’t quite figured out in this space I’m in when I’m working from here.

RP: Not a problem.

SG: It’s dark on top of me.

RP: As long as the content you provide is quality, I’m sure everybody will be okay with that.

SG: Probably true.

RP: Yeah, probably. And speaking of quality, what we are talking about today is how to post a full week’s worth of content on Facebook in just five minutes. And it is going to take a little bit more time than that initially, but once you get a system down, it’s actually going to be really easy, and we’re going to kind of go step by step through Facebook. And I think the one thing we should talk about is the key difference between posting on Facebook versus other social media, social networks, I should say, like Twitter is, let’s first start with how much content you should be posting because that’s a big indicator. There’s a big difference between posting on Facebook, as an example, versus the amount of content that you should post on Twitter.

SG: Right. Twitter moves much faster, and it’s still kind of chronological mostly. They are tweaking with their algorithm, but historically, since they’ve been chronological and it’s moved so fast, that you really have had to post on Twitter a lot. The recommended, last I wrote was 10 to 30 times a day. And so, it’s a whole another animal than Facebook where you’re between one and four times a day, and four is really on the high end. Two to three times a day max is the sweet spot, but you can get away with once a day on Facebook and still have success, especially if you’re utilizing things like their ad platform, promoted posts, stuff like that.

RP: Right. And for this Blab, we’re talking about that newbie starting out, the one who post one to two times a day on Facebook. But how can I be efficient about it? I think that’s one of the biggest problems that business owners have. They’re wearing multiple hats, and it’s like, “How do I manage social media?” And one of the first steps is just pick one account. Facebook… We like Facebook because I think the last count was like 1.6 billion people are on Facebook if I’m not mistaken.

SG: Yeah, and it’s over 70% of all internet users are on Facebook. And currently, no other platform has that wide reach, and Facebook covers, again, from 13 to 75 or older. And so, there just isn’t quite the broad spread and the giant reach of an audience that Facebook is a great place for small business to start A, because it’s less content, B, because everybody’s target market is on there, whether you believe it or not, it’s they’re there. So, those are reasons why Facebook is often the first one we recommend for sole businesses, new businesses. And it’s an easier thing to swallow and get efficient at and do it consistently with a little bit of extra strategy.

RP: Okay, perfect. And with this strategy, one of the first things you need is content. And so, I’m a big fan of trying to batch things together. So instead of spending everyday trying to find content, the first step in this system is just find a full week’s worth of content which could be as little as five pieces of content that you want to share on your Facebook feed.

SG: Right. And a great place to find that is what are you reading for yourself? For your own self-education, for your own knowledge in order to do your job better, what are you reading? And is any of that content something you could repurpose to your social media? Five pieces of content aren’t a ton of time. You really should be able to find them, and that’s the one where it’ll take you a little bit of lead-up time to do your Facebook in five minutes a week, but it shouldn’t take you much more than 15, 20, 30 minutes to find five pieces of content for the week.

RP: Right. And it’s one those things as you start finding the sources of content, this is going to get easier, and easier, and easier ’cause you’re going to find trusted people. And you should also be putting some of your own content in there. At least once a week, post one of your own blog posts should be one of your Facebook. What we don’t recommend doing though, is just the whole week posting your own content throughout the entire week. And to track it, a simple Excel file. All you need is a date on the one column, is going to be a date. And then your second column is going to be your actual post along with, if you’re going to link out plus where is the image or video that you’re going to source. If you have all of that set up in an Excel file, and again, you have day one, day two, day three, I already have all the content there. That way when you go to post for the week, it’s going to be super simple for you.

SG: Right. And you have it all in one place. And if Excel is not your thing, I’ve known people that use a Word document for the same way. Whatever floats your boat, makes it easier for you, do it because easy is part of the key. But you just put all in one place, and then you open up Facebook, and you schedule it out. And that’s the one platform where I don’t recommend using a third party tool. I don’t recommend using something like Hootsuite or Sprout Social or whatever you’re using for other platforms. Facebook likes that you’re using their own scheduling tool, their built-in scheduling tool because it’s a little bit more real time. They want to keep you in the platform, and so you’ll see a difference in your reach, and there are some sites out there that the bigger brands don’t see any difference. But for a smaller business where their followers are anywhere from 100, 200, to a couple thousands, you are going to see a difference in your reach between scheduling natively within Facebook, and that’s also why having that spreadsheet or the Word document and having it all compiled, so it makes it easy for you to just copy and paste, dump, copy and paste, schedule, and get it done in a really quick amount of time.

RP: Right. Perfect. So let’s say we’ve collected our information. I have my Excel file. I’ve got five, six, seven days on there. I’ve got all my content in there. It’s Monday morning. I’ve got my cup of coffee, and I got five minutes. So how do I get a full week’s worth of content posted on Facebook in just five minutes?

SG: You pull up the document where you’ve saved everything. Pull up obviously your Facebook page. Copy, paste, schedule that for the first day and so you can just… And once you’ve schedule it, it just stays there on your page so you can just schedule another one. So you’re not having to refresh the page. You’re not having to go back. It’ll just schedule everything for you and your little box you have on your page is just right there ready for you to copy and paste the next one. And so you should be able to copy and paste five status updates in under five minutes.

RP: Yeah, and the key thing there is that obviously a lot of people will default to the post button and sometimes when I schedule out my content I accidentally clicked the post button. What you really want to click is that little down arrow or not down arrow but the little triangle to the right.

SG: Yeah. It’s a down arrow.

RP: Is it… Okay. Triangle, down arrow, or whatever it is to the right, and you have the option to post into the future, and that’s what you want to do. So on Monday I’ve got my Excel file, copy, paste it on Monday, boom! It’s gone. Go back to my Excel file. Grab my next comment. Copy it in to Facebook and then click the down arrow, not post and click schedule, and that’ll bring open the calendar and go ahead and pick Tuesday at whatever time you want. And we do recommend in the beginning that you pick some different times throughout the day to get an idea of when people might be engaging in more often, and so you can do that through the entire week.

SG: And a great way to start to figure that out is looking in your insights. It’s really easy if you up above, you’re an admin of your own page, up the top you’ve got a box named insights, and then on the left hand side if you click posts, you’ll have a little graph at the top of the page that’ll give you the… It’ll be a 24 hour clock graph and a lot of times it looks kinda like a whale graph, and it’ll tell you when people on your page tend to be online. And if you hover over… And then right below it it has all the seven days of the week, as you hover over each day of the week, the graph adjusts based on that date and time.

SG: And so you can see what the peak is for that particular day and you can make note of that in your spread sheet. And so that would make it even faster is if you do that when compiling your content. Like I have a cheat sheet for all of my clients that we update about every four weeks. We redo the content. And so I just have a cheat sheets Word document that has a table with the optimal time to post for every single day of the week for each client, and so then you can plug that in your spreadsheet. Then you’re not guessing. You’re doing it against analytics, and it’s also on your spreadsheet so you can easily, when you hit schedule, pick the date and go okay, Tuesday is at noon, so type in 12:02, so it looks a little more real, it’s not right on 12:00. And do the 02, 03, 12:15. Have little fun with the number, a little bit off so it looks a little bit more realistic, but at least you’re posting near the peak of when your followers are on Facebook, and they’re more likely to see your post.

RP: Yeah. And I think one of the key things with that is that there’s so many articles out there that when is the best time to post on Facebook, and they’re giving you big data information. However, big data information may not be relevant to your target audience, and what’s great about Facebook is that when you go and look at your insights, it will tell you for your actual page when most people are actually checking it out. Now, the big thing is in the beginning you’re not going to know this, so you need to just kind of vary the times. Try something in the morning. Consider something in the evening. Also consider are you east coast, central, west coast time. So we’re on the west coast. I’ve got to post content early in the morning sometimes for my east coast followers. And so you need to have that flexibility, vary it in the beginning so that you can kind of get some numbers. You have to collect the data first, and you’re not going to do that right out of the gate. It’s going to take couple of months before you actually have some real data that you can start trusting.

SG: Right. But if you had your page for a little while, you’ll have some data in there that you can at least use as a base to work off of. And then from there you can look and see which days and times are performing better. And maybe even though Facebook said noon on Tuesday was great for you and it totally tanked, next week try another time. And see if something works better than… You just kinda play with it, and that’s what’s nice about social media and online marketing is you can just tweak it and adjust it until you figure out what’s your sweet spot for your page.

RP: Right. And the other thing I want to say is that since you’re posting all of your content on Monday as an example is that don’t forget about your Facebook page. Every morning as you’re having that coffee, log in to your business page and check and see for comments. Did anybody send you a message? Anybody like? Can you engage in other ways? Even though you can post a full week’s worth of content in just five minutes, that’s really not being totally solid. It’s a great way to get your content out there so you can check that off your box, but you still want to engage throughout the week.

SG: Right. Scheduling your content really just gives you the consistency. You’re consistently on your page which will help with engagement, but you definitely still need to engage. If you can’t… If a comment comes in mid-day and you absolutely can not respond right at that moment, if you can, do it. If you happen to have a comment come in and you’re at lunch, and you can put a quick comment out there, that’s better, but at a minimum every morning when you are sitting down with your coffee and you’re surfing Facebook, take a look at your page, see what your notifications are, and see if there’s any way you can increase the engagement with your followers, and monitor it throughout the week.

RP: Alright, perfect. I think I… A quick recap and then this episode is done, and that is first of all, you just need to collect information. There’s a number of different places that are out there, Social Media Examiner, Business to Business. What are some other places people can go to look for social media content as an example.

SG: Well, they won’t necessarily be looking for social media content ’cause they’ll be looking for content…

RP: I know, but I look for for social media content. So I mean it as an example.

SG: Only we care about that. There’s lots of places, John Liemer’s Facebook. Mari Smith’s Facebook primarily, but there’s a million.

RP: I’m a big Gary V fan. Posts Planner make some great content.

SG: Yeah. Brian Kramer is huge with interaction and community. There’s a lot of places you can find social media content and advice for you, for improving your social media strategy, but like we said, what are you reading for your own self education to improve your job and stay current in your own trends and your own industry? And see if that content is good content to share with your followers and your end user. Would your customer benefit from reading that article or knowing that tidbit fact? If you would tell a customer a fact or share that article the customer, that’s good content to share in your social media.

RP: Yeah, perfect. So once you find those sources, open up an Excel file. Date is going to be the first column. All of your content, what are you actually going to post, write it out, like you are actually posting it live on Facebook. Any link should be included, mentions of images, video, all of that information’s there so you don’t have to think about it. Come Monday, whatever day it is that you want to do, go to the first line on your Excel file, copy, post. The following day is going to be Tuesday, copy and paste, but don’t post, make sure you click the down arrow, future date it. Try out some different times throughout the week. You’re done now for that week, and now it’s really about checking your analytics at the end of the week, also making sure that you have additional engagement throughout the week on Facebook.

SG: So it’s super simple, three easy steps to do your week of Facebook in five minutes a day.

RP: Alright, perfect. That’s it for today’s show. Thank you everybody for joining in and watching. We will be here same place, same time, same computer screen with another episode of Social Media Wednesday. Sarah, as always I appreciate the time and energy that you put into the shows.

SG: Thanks Ryan, it’s always fun.

RP: Alright, perfect. Alright everybody, hope you have a great rest of the week, and we’ll see you next week.