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How to Get Automatic Posts on Facebook

automated facebook posting

Creating and automating social content for your retail store may sound intimidating and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. A Facebook content calendar can help you draft consistent, engaging posts that will hone your online presence. With the right process and tools, a Facebook content calendar will actually streamline your social media strategy, saving you time and effort.

How to Use a Content Calendar for Facebook

A content calendar doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated. You can simply start with a blank spreadsheet and add the following categories along the first row:

  • Social media platform (If you’re only using one platform like Facebook, you can add this category later to grow your calendar.)
  • Date and time to post (Will you post daily? Weekdays only? Weekly?)
  • Post idea
  • Audience
  • Visuals
  • Link to assets
  • Link to published post

You can remove categories or add new ones as you see fit. For example, you might categorize your posts by type, like product launches, sales, how-to content, or blog posts. You may also identify the post format, such as Facebook Live, Facebook Stories, a poll, an ad, and so on. You can always adjust your calendar to suit your needs as you continue to use it. 

What Sort of Content Should You Plan?

Now that you know how to start your content calendar, it’s time to start crafting your posts. What type of content should you share on Facebook? 

Put together an interesting mix of social media posts to keep your followers engaged. This is called the social media “Rule of Thirds”: one-third of your posts should promote your business and drive sales, one third should share resources that benefit your audience, and the last third should personalize your business. Here are some post ideas grouped by “thirds”:

Promote Your Business on Facebook

  • Tease a new product or service that will launch soon
  • Disseminate company news or press mentions
  • Share a photo or video of a popular product
  • Share branded or influencer content

Benefit Your Audience

  • Post tips and tricks for using your products or services
  • Share news about industry-wide trends or concerns
  • Share an inspiring or informative blog post
  • Answer FAQs in a post or video
  • Host a giveaway or contest
  • Thank customers

Personalize Your Business

  • Post a tour of your office or workspace
  • Feature an employee
  • Ask for follower feedback with a survey or poll
  • Share a positive customer review 
  • Share user-generated content (with permission)
  • Showcase your company culture

The Facebook posts you choose will depend on your target audience and your marketing strategy, but these ideas offer a starting point.

Look at Audience Behavior and Make Adjustments

After you outline your posts on your calendar, it’s time to publish them. Copy and paste your captions and upload graphics to Facebook’s Publishing Tool and then publish immediately or schedule for later. 

Once posts go live, monitor their performance to see if you need to make changes. Try to learn the following: 

  • When is your Facebook audience most active?
  • What types of posts do they engage with most often? 
  • Are you gaining or losing followers after certain types of posts?
  • Can you directly connect social engagement with other actions, like calling the store or registering for an event?

Consider your audience’s behavior and make adjustments accordingly. For example, if you find that certain types of posts get a lot of engagement, plan future posts of the same type on your content calendar. You might even schedule those types of posts more frequently if your audience wants them. 

If certain posts don’t perform as well as you expect, try changing the date and time you post, or swap that type of post for a different one. Managing your content calendar is an ongoing task that requires constant refinement.

Make Your Posts Automatic

Even with a plan, it’s a lot of work to publish, manage, and monitor your social posts. That’s why it helps to schedule your Facebook posts in advance rather than manually uploading them every day or week. Benefits of automatic Facebook posting include:

Less Time and Effort

When you don’t have your Facebook content planned out in advance, your social media strategy may feel more erratic and stressful. Automating your content forces you to focus on this task for a specific block of time. You’ll create posts efficiently all at once, freeing the rest of your workday to focus on managing your store and taking care of your customers.

Organized Strategy

With an automation strategy, everything lives in one convenient location. Content inspiration, a posting schedule, links to share online, digital assets, are all in one place. You’ll no longer have to pull pieces of your content from different sources to create one post.

Consistent Online Presence

You will need to discover the right frequency to stay present in your followers’ feeds without overwhelming them and driving them away. Regardless of frequency, however, consistency is key to success on Facebook. For example, if you post every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m., because you’ve learned that’s a time when your followers tend to be online, you’ll get more engagement by sticking to that routine. Schedule posts in advance and consistency takes care of itself.

To achieve all of the above, you need a tool that helps you show up in the social feeds of your local audience — and doesn’t require an overwhelming amount of upfront work.

Rely on ThumbStopper to Get Instant Content into Your Feed

Consistent, thoughtful content deployment is where ThumbStopper lets your business shine. We direct high quality content produced by the brands you carry straight onto your company Facebook page. It’s already expertly timed and carefully curated to show your products in their best light, with no effort from you.

By trusting content distribution to ThumbStopper, you can focus on engaging with your audience, adjusting your planned content, and brainstorming new ideas for future social media posts. Make the most of your Facebook content plan. Learn more today.

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Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It's one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience - with your accessible, branded content - in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
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What Is Social Media Automation?
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[/et_pb_column]
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[/et_pb_section][/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_row]
[/et_pb_column]

Key Points:

 

  • Companies should understand the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure their websites are accessible.
  • Brands that concentrate on accessibility on social media demonstrate care for their customers and build a positive brand reputation.
  • Brands should always consider inclusive design, such as plain, straightforward language, in their social media posts.

 

 

Accessibility may not be a term you usually associate with the internet and social media. You might picture wheelchair ramps, directional signs in braille, or sign language interpreters at live performances. The landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 dictates the legal necessity of these and similar accommodations in public spaces. As we’ve come to rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to buying groceries, it’s become clear that the internet is now also a public space. It must be accessible to everyone. And like other applications of ADA, businesses that do not comply are liable for damages caused by inaccessibility.

 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are an international set of standards to provide instruction on meeting accessibility needs. It’s important for companies to understand how this applies to their websites, especially if they engage in e-commerce. In terms of social media, the requirements are less concrete. But prioritizing accessibility on your company’s social media is essential to your reputation, even if the legal requirements are uncertain. We’ll look at why it’s important to your customers, how it affects the perception of your brand, and how to make these changes efficiently.

Social Media for All

The cornerstone of accessibility is inclusive design: products or experiences that are accessible for everyone regardless of disability. The most important place where this shows up is on company websites where most users expect to also find links to the brand’s social media profiles. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of websites are not accessible, despite the fact that the application of ADA to the internet is over 20 years old. Making websites accessible is a complex process without the use of specialized software like Accessibe or EqualWeb.

Unlike websites, making sure your social media is accessible is a straightforward, ongoing process. Every social platform has been quick to release optional accessibility features. These features are important to many users even if they don’t rely on them to use social media.

Making your social presence accessible tells users that your brand cares about people, not just profits. It’s the same idea as the push for the representation of different body sizes in fashion or more expansive skin tone ranges in beauty products. Brands that meet the needs of underrepresented groups endear themselves to others as well. And while optimizing your brand website for accessibility might be a larger project you aren’t ready to tackle yet, starting with your social media pages is a great way to show customers that you’re listening to their concerns. 

 

Making Content Accessible

Shifting to accessible content means incorporating inclusive design into your creative process. The practice varies by type of media. For platforms that have graphics or videos with captions, it means not only adjusting each component but also being mindful of how they interact with each other.

For example, YouTube’s automatically generated closed captions and subtitles are often inaccurate. It’s one of many examples where the caption generation software has issues picking up strong accents and mumbled words. This could be remedied with handcrafted video transcription services. If that’s not in the budget, the video creator could add their script or transcription to the video description.

None of the technology for accessibility is perfect yet. Teaching computers to digest complex information for human understanding is difficult, and the variations in disabilities further complicate it. The majority of adjustments creators need to make revolve around helping assistive technology better understand their content. Let’s look at how to make different kinds of content accessible. 

Text

  • Use plain language that’s easy to understand 
  • Avoid text in all caps
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word in a hashtag, like #SocialMediaMarketing, a practice called camel-case

Videos

  • Provide descriptive captions. Instead of just displaying the words people on-screen say, explain background noises and other sounds that are relevant to the scene.
  • Add your own subtitles or enable auto-subtitles on the video platform of your choice
  • Use captioning for live videos when possible

Graphics

Distribute Accessible Content

Many users find their new favorite brand through social media. When disabled people (who make up 26% of the population according to the CDC) can’t access your brand’s social posts, you miss the opportunity to connect with a demographic that’s eager to engage in online communities. On a hyper-local level, that kind of connection goes even further.

That’s why ThumbStopper exists to help brands distribute their social content to their retailer network. Retailers can connect with their local audience – with your accessible, branded content – in a more personal way. And since content goes to their page automatically once they sign up, retailers can effortlessly promote your brand online while focusing on running their business. 

Ready to see how ThumbStopper can help your brand improve its reach? Check out our brand reach calculator or book a demo.

 

 

accessibility
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
What Is Social Media Automation?
[/et_pb_column]
[/et_pb_column]
10 Ways to Automate Your Marketing
[/et_pb_column]
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