Whether you’re working with a brand or if you’re the brand yourself, scheduling your posts is the best way to save yourself time in the long run, while also not running out of content to post as everyone else seems to be posting a bunch. Simply knowing to schedule, though, isn’t enough to make that schedule work for you and for your content. All of the algorithms at play, and the individual interactions you might have combine to make for a complicated set of rules to follow while also trying to look spontaneous. Here are four tips for making social scheduling work for you.

Their Schedule Determines Yours

You’ll learn pretty quickly when your followers are online, because if you’re putting out work of consistent quality, they’ll be engaging with you at roughly the same times. This is especially useful to know if you have a lot of followers in a different time zone than you are, or halfway across the world from you. This tells you that your schedule should probably keep them in mind when posting regularly.

Posting Frequency Depends on the Outlet

Since Hootsuite is one of the best-known social media schedulers out there, we recommend taking their advice on how frequently to post on the different social outlets out there. They recommend posting 1 to 4 times a day on TikTok, 3 to 7 times a week on Instagram, writing between 1 and 5 tweets per day, and to post once or twice a day on Facebook and between 1 and 5 times a day on LinkedIn. Of course, none of this works if you don’t have the goods ready. That’s where planning your content comes into play.

Plan Ahead

Don’t just plan to post, but exactly what you’ll post. If you know what certain social outlets need most, write and plan around that. You can probably pull individual frames from a video if you’re posting images elsewhere, and reuse content creatively, but for the most part, you need to plan out your 7 – 28 TikToks every week, your once-daily Instagram posts, and so on. You might tell a story, or you might simply work on a theme. Whatever it is, make the quality consistent.

The 10 AM Rule

Hootsuite also says that posting at 10 AM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays is the best time for any social media posting. Scheduling everything around this helps you know when and where to put your best stuff so that you can find exposure based strictly on the power of the algorithm. Just make sure your other posts seem regular, consistent in quality, and on-brand for whatever you’re selling and saying.

Having a social media and PR team on your side is one way to take a lot of this off of your plate. Keeping your voice, your image and your brand intact throughout regular posting is their job, leaving you to ideate and just present your best face online.