Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Community Pharmacies
An active online presence using top-performing social media scheduling tools delivers fruitful engagement and good ROI. The right tools help your overall social media management process push out great content and develop connections in real-time.
Different businesses have different priorities in terms of their scheduling software. Selecting the best social media post scheduler to avoid time-consuming activities or missing your chance to grow a brand makes or breaks any social media marketing & management plan.
Let’s look at a set of social media scheduling tools and highlight the critical features needed for your business needs.
Social Media Scheduling Tool: How it Boosts Your Social Media Marketing Plan
A social media post scheduling app acts as a digital tool that lets you create posts and set them to publish at certain times. With a social media scheduling tool, a social media manager schedules just about any content for your social media pages.
For example, a person posts a text post, an image, a link, or a video at a given time. Most social media schedulers let you set posts to publish anywhere from 10 minutes to several months in the future.
Many social media schedulers allow you to connect multiple brand pages for managing the company or client’s channels in a single place. Then, the scheduler allows you to set a time in the future to post your content to the platform of your choosing.
What is scheduling?
Several paid and free tools allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance. The majority of social media scheduling tools work for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram posts.
Scheduling allows you to plan your social media content. So, it ensures that you always have a steady stream of content posted as evergreen content, such as blog posts, podcasts, and videos.
Notably, planning the content in advance and schedule tweets and posts promotes upcoming events and campaigns. All paid scheduling tools include analytics so that you can see how your content performs.
Also, some offer in-built image and editing tools to help you create images for your posts or upload your own pictures and add filters or text over them. It helps them stand out on people’s newsfeeds and timelines.
Why Use a Social Media Scheduling Tool?
Picking a social media scheduling tool lets you manage your social media profile for your company solely, or you handle more than a dozen clients. Either way, a scheduling tool improves business workflow in these fundamental ways:
1. Helps Focus the Business Goals
When you use a social media scheduling tool, the social media manager stops disrupting your day every time you need to publish content. Then, hosting live videos or posting announcements at a moment’s notice becomes possible.
Business goals become more apparent as the content gets its proper schedule in advance. It focuses the campaign efforts on social media strategy and engagement instead.
2. Save Time from Heavy Tasks
Creating social media posts one by one or as you think of them doesn’t mean great productivity. When using a social media scheduler, the social media manager publishes content in batches or even upload posts in bulk.
Thus, the necessary tasks for the campaign streamline the workflow and take your time management to the next level.
3. Promotion of Advanced Planning
If you regularly publish posts at the moment, scheduling the content in advance remains unnecessary. As a result, the social media campaign strategy suffers.
So, planning each post’s theme or design lets you achieve the growth you want to see. With a scheduling tool, you need to prioritize strategy and plan rather than create content on a whim.
4. Encourage Efficient Teamwork
Scheduling your social media content means you take a more hands-off approach to social media management. Yet, the opposite remains true.
Most social media schedulers support teams. So, all the key players quickly become involved.
5. Time Management
Using a top-performing social media scheduling tool blocks out time in the social media marketing calendar. Hence, scheduling your posts frees you to work on other critical daily tasks while your social media posts go out on time.
6. Social media scheduling tools Extends Insights & Reach
Pre-scheduling tweets or news feed updates outside of office hours help engagement. Remarkably, the scheduling tool remains effective for businesses with a target market that goes beyond local borders.
7. Multiple Platform Management
Managing multiple platforms or social media channels becomes hassle-free. Notably, your pharmacy profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn remain in a central place.
So, maintaining accounts effectively creates a better opportunity for higher ROI. It also helps businesses to diversify their content for the various platforms.
8. Consistent Presence
By pre-scheduling your posts, businesses stick to regular and consistent timeslots to take posts live. It delivers the impression of a steady social media presence.
10 Key Features for Social Media Scheduling Tools
When you search for social media management tools, social media managers find more than a dozen options at various price points. Finding the right tool depends on your budget and the size of your team.
Any scheduler you choose needs few critical functions. So, look for a scheduling tool with these essential features.
1. Primary Platform Connections
Social media scheduling tools boost all the features of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
If your agency specializes in YouTube management, you need a scheduler that works with the social channels you use. Otherwise, you end up juggling multiple tools or unable to schedule the content you create.
What to look for: A tool that supports the primary social platforms your company or agency uses
2. Multi-brand support
If you work for an agency, you need to schedule content for dozens of different clients. If you don’t pay attention, you reach your limit before linking all the necessary social media pages.
Yet, some scheduling tools limit the number of profiles you connect with and the number of brands you associate with an account.
What to look for: A scheduler that has the profile and brand capacity your team needs
3. Bulk scheduling
If saving time goes a priority for your marketing campaign, then bulk scheduling helps. With this feature, you get a schedule a handful or hundreds of posts in just a few minutes by uploading a group of images or an RSS feed.
Some scheduling apps even let you choose different ways to upload content in bulk. Try to export your content calendar as a CSV and import it into your scheduling tool.
4. Queueing and rescheduling
For many businesses, scheduling social content at a single & specific time appears as one of the goals. Instead, schedule evergreen content to post repeatedly and provide continual value to your audience.
What to look for: A social media scheduling tool that allows bulk publishing using a format actually saves you time.
5. Labeling systems
If your company’s content calendar has a rainbow of colorful labels, translate your organizational system to your scheduling tool. Then, tag content for specific campaigns or label certain media types to maintain structure and keep your team on track.
What to look for: The option to create a labeling system to organize your social media calendar
6. Image optimization
An in-house design team that creates social graphics comes as one of the many tasks on your pharmacy’s to-do list. Sometimes you just need to make some minor edits to an image or resize it for the right platform.
Some social media schedulers have built-in editing features. The tools fix images quickly without adding extra apps or steps to your workflow.
What to look for: A tool that helps you resize, edit and optimize images for each social media platform
7. Hashtag groups
From Twitter to Instagram, hashtags increase the reach and improve engagement. However, typing hashtags manually or copying and pasting them from another document takes time to add them to your posts.
If you use hashtags regularly, ensure to access lists so you can skip retyping or copying and pasting.
What to look for: The option to create and reuse hashtag groups every time you make a post
8. Approval workflows
When you work on a social media or marketing team, you depend on your coworkers’ contributions. You might even need to get their input on your copy or their approval before you schedule a post.
Choosing a scheduling tool designed for teamwork ensures that you get all the input you need without having to sign in to yet another app.
What to look for: The option to assign items to team members or set up approval workflows that streamline the scheduling process
9. Shared calendars
Keeping your team on the same page toughens up the competition. If you work with various clients, keep everyone up to date can seem impossible.
Creating a shared social media content calendar remains a smart way to update your team and get client approval at the same time.
What to look for: The option to share publishing calendars with clients — without making them sign up for the tool or create another account
10. Analytics and Reporting
As a social media manager, you need to do more than schedule content. You also have to track your social media performance and monitor progress toward goals.
Many scheduling apps feature built-in analytics. So, you need to check daily, weekly, or monthly performance and prepare reports for your team or clients.
What to look for: A scheduling tool that also offers comprehensive analytics and the option to create reports.
11. Social media management tools
If you want to tackle scheduling, reporting, and other social media tasks in a single tool, then you need an app that does all the job for you.
Some social media scheduling tools have built-in inboxes. It allows you to respond in comments and messages. Other businesses offer social listening options to join conversations about your brand.
What to look for: A tool that offers engagement, listening, and other features for seamless social media management
12. Routine Updates
Scheduling tools quickly become outdated as social media channels update their APIs or competitors add on more options. Before committing to a scheduling app, make sure that any tool you choose makes regular updates and upgrades.
What to look for: An app with a history of routinely fixing bugs, introducing new features, and supporting platform changes.
The Best Time to Post Using a Social Media Scheduling Tool
Unfortunately, no one-size-fits-all answer magically floods your social media with traffic. Do the heavy lifting yourself to know the best time to post on your pharmacy’s social media profile.
Use tools like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics to find out exactly when your audience is online. If you post just before your audience logs on, you have the best chance of getting your post in front of them.
Even though every audience remains different, some general rules help you start using social media scheduling tools:
1. Facebook
- Saturday and Sunday from 12–1 p.m.
- Thursday and Friday from 1–4 p.m.
- Wednesday at 3 p.m.
2. Twitter
- Wednesday at noon and from 5–6 p.m.
- Monday–Friday from 12–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
- Experiment with 2–3 a.m., 6–7 a.m., and 9–10 p.m.
3. LinkedIn
- Tuesday at 10–11 a.m.
- Wednesday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 7:30–8:30 a.m., 12 p.m., and 5–6 p.m.
4. Pinterest
- Saturdays from 8–11 p.m.
- Any day from 2–4 a.m. and 2–4 p.m.
- Fridays at 3 p.m.
5. Instagram
- Monday and Thursday at any time other than 3–4 p.m
Plan out your calendar ahead of time and ensure that you are carefully timing posts to reach different time zones (where applicable) when appropriate.
Then, consider following these general rules for using social media scheduling tools:
Post once per day. At a minimum, post three times per week. If you post less than three times per week, you give your audience too much time to forget you in between posts.
Remember, your tweets only last about 24 minutes each, so you need to post more often on Twitter than on Facebook. Post about ten times a day to start, then go up from there as you experiment.
Post about ten times per day. Not all of those have original pins. In fact, most of them do content spinning from other sources.
Post at least once per day on Instagram. We recommend either 1 or 2 posts per day to remain consistent but avoid annoying your followers.
5 Top-Performing Social Media Scheduling Tool for Your Pharmacy Business
1. Hootsuite
Best for individuals or teams with a small budget, Hootsuite remains one of the more established and well-known social media management platforms. The free account allows you to manage up to three social media accounts.
However, Facebook counts for two as you need to have a personal account to manage a Facebook Page. If you’d like to use Hootsuite to manage a Twitter account, Facebook Page, and LinkedIn group, for example, you need to pay for the Pro account.
Key Features
In Hootsuite’s new Composer feature (in beta), they have a media library as well as a Giphy library. So, try to add visuals to your posts to help them stand out and upload them on your own.
With the paid plans, you get access to analytics to see how your content performs. Also, it allows you to set up teams so that your colleagues collaborate.
Hootsuite also produces handy guides and blog posts as well as training for their clients. Thanks to the Chrome extension Hootlet, try to schedule posts directly from news outlets or anywhere on the web.
First, simply click on the Hootlet extension button in your browse, and it brings up a compose window. Then click the drop-down for the social media platform(s) you like to share, edit the copy if needed, and click on AutoSchedule.
2. Buffer
Best for an individual or team with a small budget, Buffer works as an established social media management platform with three pricing plans.
The free plan allows you to have one profile per platform with ten posts. Unfortunately, a Facebook Page counts your personal profile as a profile with the accessible version of Hootsuite.
Key Features
Next, the Awesome plan comes cost-effectively, with ten social profiles and a schedule of 100 posts per profile. Buffer has an in-built image creator called Pablo and uploads video and GIFs.
In the Awesome and Business plans, create a social media calendar and have access to analytics. Like Hootsuite, Buffer also has a Chrome Extension where you create scheduled posts or ‘buffer’ any link from anywhere on the web.
Notably, Buffer has a unique feature where you can re-buffer posts. It remains excellent if you have a lot of evergreen content and tweak the copy slightly as Twitter penalizes you for sharing the same tweets.
3. Sprout
Best for established social media teams with a fairly substantial budget, Sprout comes as a paid-for-only tool. Indeed, it gives one of the more sophisticated social media management tools on the market.
Key Features
Its features include scheduling and an in-built social media calendar available for everyone in the team. The tool makes it more collaborative as you monitor profiles, keywords, and locations while managing tasks to act as a CRM system.
With more in-depth analytics, it contains free, presentation-ready reports used for social media accounts. The tool has a significant element of customer service when tagging and organizing messages for a single-stream filterable inbox.
4. Agorapulse
Accordingly, Agorapulse provides an affordable social media scheduler and management tool for teams and agencies. It offers four plans, from Solos to an Enterprise plan.
Notably, the main difference between each option works for several social profiles and users catered. Although, it contains differences relating to data retention and ad comment monitoring.
Key Features
Try to use Agorapulse to publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube.
Also, social media managers centrally post to all of your social accounts with a queue or schedule. It ensures your content is delivered at the best times.
It allows you to re-queue or reschedule evergreen posts. Try to tweak each post to take advantage of features specific to each social network.
5. Sendible
Primarily, Sendible describes itself as “The #1 Social Media Management Tool for Agencies”. It caters to other medium-scaled organizations, solopreneurs, small businesses, and large teams.
With the tool, it helps you to connect among any social network. Social media managers post directly to your WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, or Blogger blog.
Key Features
Sendible’s geo-targeting features to reach specific segments of your audience. It helps you upload videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Also, Sendible features an integrated dashboard and tools relating to publishing, collaboration, analytics, CRM, listening, and mobile.
In the area of publishing, it allows you to plan, schedule, and publish posts, images, and videos to multiple social networks simultaneously using their powerful compose box. Schedule social media posts, photos, and videos individually or in bulk as far in advance as you need.
Sendible allows you to set your best-performing content on repeat to keep your social media profiles active. You visualize your content on a shared publishing calendar using Canva to help you design better-performing visual content.
Using the Best Social Media Scheduling Tool for Your Pharmacy’s Marketing Campaign
In today’s fast-paced social media climate, it’s hard to keep up. There’s always more to read, more to post, and more people to engage.
As you choose your preferred social media scheduling tool, it takes care of all of the time-consuming aspects of social media to focus more on your audience. Choose your times and frequency carefully, and remember to test and tweak regularly.
The most important part while choosing social media scheduling tools is knowing your needs. The better you know your brand needs, the more you know which areas need improvement.
Ready to streamline your social media workflow and prioritize long-term strategy over last-minute tasks? Take control of your social media!
Check out the social media management services offered by The Social Pharmacy to help you schedule, track, and measure all your social media efforts.
Keyword: social media scheduling tool
