Social Brilliant, Video Four Transcript:

Strategic Social Planning

Welcome to video 4 of Social Brilliant: Strategic Social Planning. I'm
Sarah from Team Edgar, and I'm so excited that you've joined us for this
topic because this is really the core that Edgar has been built on. This is
the strategic social plan that we were using before Edgar even existed,
and then we created Edgar to make this even easier. This type of
planning is so important to create a robust, consistent social media
marketing strategy for your business.
In this video, we're going to go over how to fill up your social media
calendar. We've talked about how to create excellent content for your
blog, how to create great social media posts, but now we're going to
learn how you can generate enough social media posts to fill up your
social accounts so that you're posting consistently, and that can seem a
little overwhelming, which is why we're here to learn how to do it
efficiently.
The answer to making that happen is automation. It's using a tool like
Edgar to schedule your social media posts in batches so that you're not
sitting in front of your computer every time it's time to post something
trying to think of something to say on the spot. We've talked about your
editorial calendar for your blog posts where you're plotting out ahead of
time what you're going to talk about on your blog, to make it a lot easier
for yourself. Automating your social media posts is exactly the same
thing. It's setting yourself up for success so that posting consistently on
social media isn't a big-time suck.
Let's talk about why automation rules and why we love it. This is why
Edgar exists. This is why Laura Roeder, our founder decided to build
Edgar. Originally, it was to make social media marketing for her
business easier. Automation makes consistency easy to achieve. The

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biggest reason you have to automate if you want social media marketing
success is that it actually gets [00:02:00] done.
You are a busy entrepreneur trying to run your business, probably
wearing multiple hats in your business, you have a lot to do. Often, we
have these big grand plans for our social media and our marketing, but
they don't actually get done. We don't actually find the time to do it. It’s
just not a good use of your time to be trying to post live on social media
all the time. Maybe you don't like the thought of automation, you
thought, "Well, I'm not going to do that, I'll just publish my posts live,"
but then it doesn't happen. This is the biggest selling point for
automation, it will actually happen.
You can also review your content and make it better when you use
automation. If you're publishing to all your social media accounts on the
fly every time, you're probably not doing things like editing or giving a
lot of thought to what the purpose of this post is. Maybe you've even
posted things when you're feeling really emotional or mad or something
like that and you regret it later. This isn't going to happen if you're
scheduling things out ahead of time consistently. You will have a chance
to think about it and make sure it really says what you want to say.
You can also see what works and then put it on repeat. Using scheduling
tools like Edgar you get stats about your click-through's and you can see
what's working best for you. You can go back and repeat the posts that
worked and create more of that type of content. We're going to talk about
exactly how to reuse your content authentically.
Finally, this one is really important. You can post at the best times even
if you're not online at that time. You have better things to do in your
business than to be online trying to publish on social media live. You
need to be smart about posting when your audience is online. As an
example, Laura spends a lot of time in the UK but the vast majority of
Edgar customers live in the United States.

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When Laura is having breakfast in the UK, everyone here is still asleep.
[00:04:00] When it's 9:00 AM in California, it's already 5:00 PM in the
UK. If Laura tried to publish all her posts when it's daytime in the US,
she'd have to be up at 3:00 AM her time to post something so that people
can see it in the evening in California, that's just not realistic.
Automation makes sure that you can post at the best times for your
audience, no matter what you're doing at that time.
Let's talk about why entrepreneurs tend to get scared off of automation
sometimes. This is one of the more controversial points in social media
marketing. There are some social media experts out there who say you
shouldn't automate at all. They say social media is social, it's about the
human connection, and if you're doing any automation at all, you're
losing that, but that's just not true. We're talking in this course about how
to automate social media in a really authentic way, where you're not
losing any of that connection.
It's just making your life easier so that you actually have time to
cultivate that connection. If you are skeptical about automation, we
really just want you to trust this for a little while and give the Social
Brilliant and Edgar way of automation a shot. This is the piece that's
going to make a huge difference in your social media marketing success,
if you just jump in and you try automation.
How your posts arrive on the social network is not what makes them
authentic. Your voice behind the post is where the authenticity comes
from. Automation makes social media marketing more effective, more
consistent, and just plain doable for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Sometimes we say the word automation, and we picture a robot writing
our posts or we picture our posts being outsourced to be written by
someone who knows nothing about our business. That is not what we're
talking about in Social Brilliant. We're talking about creating high-
quality social media content, that you are scheduling ahead of time.

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All we're automating is the [00:06:00] delivery method. We're
automating in that we're typing them into a centralized scheduling tool
like Edgar, instead of typing them into Facebook live or to Twitter live,
there's nothing inauthentic or robotic about that.
We're only advising that you automate when your social posts are
published. We're not advising that you automate any part of your social
interaction with your followers, that's where things get weird.

It's weird when you're having an employee or someone respond to

comments on your posts, pretending that they're you, and you have no
idea that these comments exist. Someone comes up to you thinking
they've had a conversation with you on your Facebook page, and you
have no idea who they are. This doesn't mean that you as the owner of
the company have to do all of your social media yourself. It just means
that you need some transparency.
You might want to review all your social media posts, but then have
someone else schedule them, then you know exactly what's going out.
Or if you have employees responding to comments, have them sign off
with their name. All different people from your team might respond to
comments on your Facebook page, but if they sign off their responses
with their name, then it's really clear that it's not you responding.
No one is ever in this weird situation where they think they've had a
conversation with you, but you're totally unaware of it. Your customers
don't expect you to respond to everything personally. As long as they
know who they're talking to, they're totally fine with speaking to
employees.
Don't automate any of your social interactions, any of the one-on-one
interactions. That totally defeats the purpose of social media. It undoes
everything you've built by way of know, like, and trust and human
connection. We're just automating how the message gets delivered to the
network, that's all.

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Now that we're going into sending out these posts to your different
social media accounts, the question that we hear really often is, "How
many social accounts should I have?"
Please do not have [00:08:00] multiple accounts on the same social
network. By that we mean don't have more than one Facebook page,
don't have more than one Twitter account, don't have more than one
LinkedIn profile or Pinterest account.
You can have accounts on multiple networks like you have Pinterest and
LinkedIn and Twitter and so on, but don't have multiple accounts on the
same network. Just don't, trust us, seriously, don't do this. We're
repeating that because we see it over and over again. People want to
overcomplicate things. They tell us, "Well, I heard you say that, but it
doesn't apply to me. I need three of them because I have different
projects and different businesses."
Then they come back to us a year later, and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, I
made it so complicated by having all these social media accounts, and
now I don't know what to do with them all." We really see this a lot.
A common example is someone will have a Twitter account for
themselves and then they'll have a separate Twitter account for their
business, which sounds like it makes sense, right? You are you, your
business is your business, two Twitter accounts and people can just
follow what they want, but here's the problem:
For every single social media post, you don't know if you should send it
from your account or your business account, because a lot of things
aren't really directly related. Like what if you just want to tweet an
inspirational quote, well, which account does that fit under? You're
adding this extra layer of decision making that has to happen. You end
up either arbitrarily choosing which account you want it to go under, and
then you have to fill up double the amount of social media posts, or you
end up posting the same thing to both accounts which is really annoying

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to your followers because they're not going to follow two accounts that
are posting the exact same thing.
They're going to unfollow one or they're going to unfollow both because
you're bugging them. They're seeing the same post at the same time from
both accounts in their feeds. Multiple accounts make things really
unnecessarily complicated. Please, just make one account per network.
The simplest way to think of it is that you are you promoting your
business. [00:10:00]
If you're not sure if you should position yourself as you or your business
on social media—and that's really a decision that depends on your
business and your overall marketing position—the default answer that
we recommend is to position as you. You are the expert about your
industry and your business so it makes sense for you to be posting about
your different projects as well as other topics about your area of
expertise even if you have multiple businesses.
Let's say you have a Pinterest account under your name, well on this
Pinterest account you can just have three different boards for each of
your three different businesses. Your followers get to hear from you and
they get to hear about all of your projects and that's good. Someone who
started following because of one project might then be convinced to buy
another from you, and you've kept things simple for yourself without
having to manage these three separate Pinterest accounts.
Always default to having one account and then you can add on more
later. If you feel like you've got it handled and it really makes sense to
add on another account now, then add it on later.
There is, of course, one caveat to this when it comes to things like
Facebook or LinkedIn groups. When we're talking about having one
account per network we're not really talking about groups. You can
definitely have a Facebook page for your business and then have
different Facebook groups for different things. For example, maybe you

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run online courses and you have a group for each course or you have a
cohort of participants for each course that you put into groups, these
things are fine.
The main point here, though, is to stick with as few accounts as you can
so you don't need a Facebook page for each product or course, just have
a one page for your business overall and you can break out groups as
you need to, if groups are strategy that you like to use. But don't make
people follow multiple pages or multiple profiles on the same network as
much as you can.
It becomes too difficult to promote your products and services
[00:12:00] across those pages and profiles and it becomes too difficult
for your followers to know which one they should be following. Start
with whatever you can manage and build on from there, don't go crazy
right at the beginning. Just go one account at a time, whatever feels
doable and you can always add on more once you have your rhythm.
Now, let's talk about filling out that social media calendar, getting really
high-quality posts published several times a day, every day, how do we
do that? Well, how do you eat an elephant? You do it one bite at a time
and similarly, the way that you fill up your social calendar is to chunk
your updates into bite-sized manageable categories. This is the million-
dollar idea in Social Brilliant and Edgar. This is what's going to make
your life really easy so let's go over exactly how to do it.
These are the core social media categories that we recommend you start
out with. Of course, you're going to tweak this a little bit depending on
your business, but this a great guideline of the core categories that we're
really going to use. That's your blog posts, announcements or
promotional posts, general posts and recommended reads. Let's take a
look at each one of these.
The first category is your blog posts. This is the really obvious one that
we've talked about so far in Social Brilliant. You should be publishing

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social media posts about the content that you create for your blog.
Articles, podcasts, videos, whatever content your publishing on your
website, your blog posts are your main core category for social media to
drive traffic back to your website where people can buy from you.
Next up is announcements or promotional posts for your business. These
are a valuable part of your social media mix, don't leave these out.
People often get scared of promoting on social media and they say, "I
don't want to be one of those people that's just pushing spam all the
time," and you certainly don't want your social accounts to be promos
for your business only, but it is an important part of your mix
[00:14:00].
This shows two examples. The top one is more an announcement from
us, inviting our followers to join us on the SoloBiz Twitter chat. It's not
selling anything, it's just a reminder, having people come join us on
Wednesdays. Then the one below that is actually a sale where we're
promoting our cyber Monday deal. You definitely want to do these type
of posts. You want your followers to know what's going on in your
business and what you're selling, just be sure they're mixed in with non-
promotional stuff too.
Next up we have our general category and this can include a lot of
different things. As the name suggests, it's a place for different posts that
may not fit elsewhere in your categories or you can break it down even
further, you can break out any of these sort of general topics into its own
category if one type of post really works well for you on your social
accounts.
In the general category, you might want to put inspirational quotes.
These can be memes or quotes that you put in image form as well as
text. This type of content gets shared a lot. It's great for getting your
social media accounts in front of new eyes through shares.

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You can put general words of wisdom or philosophy-type posts in the
general category. For example, if your business is a roofing business,
you might create posts about the best tips for maintaining your roof or
why a common roofing practice is maybe not such a good idea.
Or if you teach people how to create online courses, then maybe you
might give advice on how to launch a course or how to plus up the
course value with bonuses, things like that. Little tidbits that show your
business philosophy and your way of doing business.
You can also use the general category to ask your followers questions.
These are important because they spark conversation and engagement on
your social accounts. Conversation is a way for people to form a
relationship with you. For people to build that know, like, and trust
factor so asking questions lets you engage with your [00:16:00]
followers and build that human authentic connection.
Finally, we have the recommended reads category or what we like to call
OPC, other people's content. This is one of those just core bread-and-
butter categories that you see constantly on social media. This is where
you share content that other people have created but is relevant to your
business or your philosophy or just something that you think your
followers will enjoy. This is how you keep your feeds from feeling to
promotional or self-serving. You recognize the great work of others, you
share it with your followers and by doing so you increase your own
know, like, and trust.
Think about your own behavior on social. If someone you follow
recommends something that you really enjoy, it makes you appreciate
the person who recommended it even more. Like, “Man, Amy showed
me this hilarious page that makes me laugh all the time. I love Amy so
much now."
OPC can be a video, a blog post, a meme, a GIF, it can be something
useful, something funny. This type of content is another one that

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encourages a lot of shares. People are likely to share posts to funny
content or inspirational content or informative content, anything that's
useful or makes an emotional impact gets shared.
In addition to these universal categories, you should also have your own
unique categories that work for your business. This is anything else that
you want to have in the mix that makes it easier to keep your social
media content organized. Here are some ideas of your unique categories
based on some of the unique categories that Laura, our founder, uses.
You might have a category for tidbits from your e-mail newsletter, you
might have regular updates about new products or new features, maybe
you want to share testimonials from your clients, you can share photos
of your product, people using your product, behind-the-scenes
[00:18:00] of making your product or behind-the- scenes of your office
or your business. Maybe you have specific types of helpful tips that you
share. Whatever makes it easy for you to chunk this down and keep your
social media content organized, make a category for it.
For example, if you make bracelets and every time you create a new
bracelet, you post a photo and a description of the bracelet then that's
one of your categories. Categorizing your social media posts makes it
really easy to fill out your calendar and to know exactly what types of
posts you need to create and how many you need to create, so you're not
starting at a blank page every time, sitting there wondering what are you
going to post about today?
Now it's time to do some math. You probably didn't know that this
course involves math, but it does and it's pretty simple. Once you sit
down and do the math, you'll see why the strategy of using categories is
so valuable and makes consistent social media posting doable.
Let's say that you're going to do six social media posts per day, five days
a week and honestly, that's a whole lot of posts. You definitely don't need
to do six posts a day, especially not on all of your social networks and

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not if you're just starting out with social media marketing but as an
example, let's say you're doing six social media posts a day, five days a
week.
That's 30 posts a week because 6 times 5 equals 30. Now with four
weeks in a month and 30 social media posts a week, that equals a 120
posts per month so just 120 posts can fill up a whole month of your
social media calendar.
Now, we break that down by category. If you have six categories, that's
only 20 social media posts per category, per month. You're going to have
20 inspirational posts, 20 recommended reads, 20 links to your blog
posts, et cetera.
Whatever categories you choose to use, [00:20:00] if you have six of
them you only need 20 posts per category, because 120 divided by 6 is
20. 20 posts for category seems totally doable, right? You can definitely
do that when you're planning this out ahead of time and that's still a lot
of social media posts. What we're talking about here is a pretty advanced
and established strategy.
If you're not ready for six posts today then do three posts per day. With
three posts per day, that's only ten posts for each of your six categories
per month. Or if you're not ready for three posts per day either, then start
with one post per day and build up. One post per day, that's only three to
four posts per category that you have to write each month, and you've
got your social media set for a whole month. You can very easily sit
down in one day and get that all written out and scheduled ahead of
time.
When you break it down like this and utilize your categories, it becomes
very manageable. You just decide how many times a day you want to
post and you do the math.
The next step is to decide on your mix of categories, and what we
recommend is that you sit down and you assign a percentage to each

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category to start with, and then you can kind of tweak those percentages
as you go and as categories kind of come and go from your schedule.
Categories are going to come and go based on promotions that you're
doing, holidays maybe, times of year. Categories come and go. You can
mix up your categories and your percentages as you see what's working
for you. You'll figure out the right ratio for you by trial and error as you
go along. It's going to be unique to your audience, so don't get bogged
down with, "Oh my gosh, I have to figure out just the right percentage
right away." This is just another tool to help you find the right mix for
you.
Let's look at an example of what that mix of categories might look like
for some example categories. This is based on what Laura, our founder,
has used in her businesses and custom categories that we like to use.
The first category that we have is the [00:22:00] inspirational posts
category, and that's 20% of our posts. That's a big chunk. Remember,
that type of content gets a lot of shares.
Then we have tips or philosophy type posts from Laura or other leaders
in our company for 20%. Laura likes to pull these tips from blog posts
that we've created in the past, or things that she said in interviews, or just
general business philosophy that we believe in as a company.
Next, we have our evergreen blog posts for 20%, this is the content that
we've created for our website. Whether that's written articles or podcasts
or videos, whatever we've created. And we say evergreen blog posts
because we're not just talking about whatever we created this week or
last week. We’re talking about all of that amazing content that we've
created over the course of our business in the past.
You will have some content that you create that's timely or short-lived or
maybe seasonal type stuff. Those posts just won't make sense if you post
about them in the future or out of context, but, for the most part, you
want to try to make most of your blog content evergreen. You want to

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keep posting about it in the future. You put a lot of work into that content
and you want to keep getting it in front of new eyes. This is 20% of
posts from stuff that we wrote recently, from stuff that's three years old,
whatever. Use the content that you've already created. New people in
your audience are going to see it every time you post it which drives
new traffic to your site.
Next, we have questions for engagement and that's 12.5%. You can see it
can get really specific depending on your categories and the posting mix
that you like to use. Then we have links to interviews for 10%. These
can be interviews that Laura did or podcasts that some of our team
members went on. It can be partner podcasts or webinars that we've
done with other companies.
It can be interviews where we've interviewed someone outside of our
team. [00:24:00] This is one of those unique or custom categories that
our team likes to use. We love to do these because not only do we get to
post about the interview—which the interviews always have great
content that we feel is really valuable to our followers—but we also get
to tag the person who we were talking to. Remember in the last video we
talked about tagging other companies and other people when you
mention them.
That's a great way to cross-promote and get shares for both you and that
person. Tagging them is a way of exposing them to our audience and
thanking them for their time with us.
Next is links to CTAs for 10%. CTA, of course, means call-to-action.
This is a call-to-action to sign up for our e-mail newsletter or sign up for
a course that we're offering or a webinar that we're putting on. It's asking
them to sign up for something where we're providing value in exchange
for them giving us their e-mail address.

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This is a great way to build your e-mail list and build the know, like, and
trust because you are getting their information so you can continue to
contact them and build your relationship in the future.
Now we have these smaller categories like a call-to-action to go to one
of our other social networks. We're going to talk about this one a little
more in the next video, but if you want to grow your reach on social
media you should link to all of your other social media accounts.
If we're posting on LinkedIn, we want people to know that we have a
Pinterest account too. These are calls to action where you say, "Hey, go
check out my Pinterest account." Or if we're on Twitter we'll say, "Be
sure to follow us on Facebook," things like that.
The next little category is tool recommendations. People really like to
know what tools Laura uses to grow the business. This is a custom
category that works well for us, and it's 2.5% of our posts.
Lastly, there's the straight-up product CTAs or promotional posts. These
are the posts that say, "Hey, [00:26:00] we have this product and you
should come buy it," and that's 2.5% as well. It's in the mix but we're not
beating people over the head with it.
Now that we've established some example percentages, it's time to do a
little more math to nail down exactly how many social media posts we
need to create for each category. Remember on the last slide we decided
we wanted this many social media posts a day, this many days a week,
and then we got a total of 120 posts a month, or whatever the number
was that you decided on.
Then you just break that total down by these percentages. 20% of 120
posts means that we need 24 inspirational posts and 24 tips and 24 blog
posts and so on. Remember, we're crossposting to all of our different
social networks, so you need 24 inspirational posts total. You don't need
24 for each network. Make 24 posts in total and then cross-post them to
all of your networks at different times.

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We've created this fun planning tool for you called the Social Brilliant
spreadsheet, and you can find it amongst the course materials so that you
can use it yourself. This spreadsheet is actually the original Edgar. This
is how we were managing social media marketing for our business
before Edgar even existed. Then we built Edgar to further automate this
process and make it even easier. This is a great place to start when you're
first writing and planning your social media strategy that helps you
visualize it.
What you do is you make a copy of this for each month and you fill in
all your social media posts as you write them, and then you just copy
and paste your posts into Edgar for scheduling. It's a great way to track
how much fresh content you're creating and to visualize the mix of
things that you're publishing. Just enter the categories that you choose at
the top, decide on the posting percentages and then fill out the
spreadsheet with all of your different updates. [00:28:00]
In the example that we've been using you'd enter 24 posts in the blog
post column and 24 posts in the inspiration column and so on, and then
you can copy and paste those into a scheduling tool like Edgar.
We'd really recommend that you do this when you're first implementing
your social media marketing strategy until it just becomes ingrained in
the way that you do things. You will eventually get a good feel for, hey I
really need to add more content to this category or that category, but this
spreadsheet will help you stay organized and consistent as you get
started with the Social Brilliant way of social media marketing.
Now we've created the posts and it's time to actually schedule them, so
you can copy and paste those posts that you wrote into Edgar to be
published on your social accounts for the future. Because they're
scheduled already, you don't have to worry about being online at the
right time to post them. Your posts are going to be published at the best
times for your audience no matter what you happen to be doing at that
time.

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You can load up your content a week at a time, a month at a time. You
can get as far ahead of your social media as you want to, so you don't
have to worry about it consistently.
When you're creating your content for the month, we would suggest that
you don't worry about leaving room for live posts. You don't need to
think, "Oh, I'm going to want to do a few live posts here and there so I
don't want to do too many scheduled ones." Because, really, you can
always do more posts, just fill out your calendar according to that really
fun math that we did and then you can always add on more from there.
Post live whenever the urge strikes you, but schedule in advance as
much as you possibly can to make sure that it's going to happen.
This is a really important topic. Can you repeat the same social media
posts? Yes, you absolutely can. You can totally repeat the same social
media posts. In fact, this is one of the founding principles of Edgar. The
reason that you're [00:30:00] using the Social Brilliant spreadsheet and a
scheduling tool like Edgar is because you don't have to start from scratch
for every single social media post.
You can repeat your content over and over again and you're building this
library, this backlog of content that sticks around and can be reused. Of
course, the first question when we say this is, “What happens if someone
sees something that I've already posted?”
The answer is nothing happens. We tend to get really, really worried and
we're like, "Oh, I posted this inspirational quote, but I want to post it
again a few months later, but what if someone already saw it the first
time?" Well, so what if they already saw the first time? We have this big
story built up in our heads about what's going to happen, like someone's
going to be super offended that we sent out the same inspirational quote
twice in one year, but it's just not true.
Most of the time, it doesn't happen anyway. Remember, you see
everything that you publish, so it seems like a lot to you. You're seeing

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every single social media post, but your audience only sees a tiny
fraction of those posts. A very small percentage of your audience
actually sees any given post because only a small percentage is actually
online at that time. They only see what's there in their feed when they
sign on during the day. Most people are not scrolling through your
Facebook page or your Twitter profile every day looking at every single
thing that you post.
Honestly, the odds that someone will see it more than once are pretty
small. Even if they do, they don't really care. Repeating your posts is
really only going to be a problem if you're repeating the same thing like
10 times a day, then it's going to get really annoying.
If a post gets a lot of engagement and shares, what will happen the next
time you post it? It's going to get more engagement and shares. When
we're publishing to social media, we’ll often stumble across something
really great, like a question that everyone responded to, or a video that
everyone shared, [00:32:00] but then we never post it again.
Even though it worked really well, it got us a ton of new followers or it
got us a ton of traffic, we still don't post it again. This is a habit we want
you to break. We want you to start paying attention to what works really
well, and then post it again a few months later. More than likely, it's
going to do really well again. Remember, the bottom line is that you see
everything that you post but no one else does.
When is too soon to repeat a post? As a general guideline, we say you
should avoid repeating the exact same post more than every three
months or so. This will depend on your schedule and the types of
categories that you're using. Generally more spaced out is better.
There are exceptions to this, of course, things like daily prompts that you
repeat every week are totally fine. Maybe in your Facebook group, you
have daily themes that you post, that sort of thing is fine to repeat more
often.

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For your evergreen blog posts or inspirational quotes or funny videos or
whatever, try to avoid repeating them sooner than every three months.
The great thing about creating your social media posts the Social
Brilliant and Edgar way is that your library of content just keeps
growing over time. You're naturally going to repeat less as you continue
to add posts.
Something else that we highly recommend is using variations of your
posts when you repeat them. This is really important for Twitter because
their terms of service actually prohibit duplicate content. You can't
repeat the exact same thing on Twitter. It's against their terms of service.
You can tweak the wording of a post in so many ways to get a lot of
different variations. Doing this not just for Twitter, but for all of the
networks can really boost your engagement and your clicks. That's
because a follower who was totally uninterested by one variation
[00:34:00] could be convinced to click or share by another.
For example, here are four variations of the same post that we created in
Edgar. The first variation is a headline. It's the title of the blog post that
we're linking to. The second two are pull quotes from the article. And the
last one is a question. These are all linking to the same blog post, but
someone who was not convinced to click by the headline might be
convinced to click by one of the pull quotes or they might want to
answer the question.
Variations allow you to repeat your content in a really authentic way that
calls out different aspects of your content and attracts attention from
different members of your audience. When you're using variations, then
you can also post the same links, the same content more frequently
without your account looking like a robot. In this example, these four
variations are linking to the same thing, but they look like four very
unique posts.

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Let's say we publish this blog post on Monday, it's not going to look
robotic if variation one is posted on Monday and then variation two is
posted on Tuesday and so on to get exposure for that blog post the week
that is published. Variations make it authentic and they make it useful for
your audience to see these different aspects of your content.
A really key thing to remember when repeating content is to make sure
your content is evergreen. Create your content so that it makes sense no
matter what time of year it is, it has to make as much sense in January as
it does in September. It can't ring untrue if it's posted at different times
and sometimes this is really subtle.
An obvious example would be, “I'm all snuggled up with snow falling
outside.” If you post that in July, unless you're in the Himalayas maybe,
people are going to be really confused. [00:36:00]
Sometimes it's more subtle. If you post something like, today's the best
day of the year, and it turns out that someone's just been assassinated,
that's probably not going to look great to your audience. Now,
sometimes this stuff just happens, you can't predict the future so don't let
this stuff worry you too much. The key is to make your content as
evergreen as possible. So if you happen to publish something on the day
a beloved public figure passes away, it's still going to make sense. Try to
think would this update really makes sense at any time on any day?
The way that automation starts to look really inauthentic is if you
pretend that you're doing something that you're not. If you write a social
media post that's like, "I'm sitting here right now working on my latest
blog posts,” but that’s not what you're actually doing, it's going to look
weird. If an automated post says that you're doing something and then
you publish a live post the same day that tells people you just went on
vacation or something, it's not going to look right.
That's where people become wary of automation and you start losing
followers. Don't write posts like that unless you're publishing them live

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and you don't intend to repeat them. Your automated posts that are being
scheduled ahead of time and that you plan to repeat should be evergreen
and should feel authentic no matter when you publish them.
Another big question that we get is, can I post the same content on
multiple social media networks? Yes, you can and we highly recommend
that you do so long as it makes sense in context.
For example, don't use a Twitter @ tag on Facebook. The account names
are different for each network. The tag that you use for Twitter isn't
going to work on Facebook. It's going to look weird in a Facebook post,
and people are going to wonder why it's there. It just doesn't make sense
and that's what you want to avoid when you're cross-posting.
Something that's really easy with a scheduling tool like Edgar is to
cross-post [00:38:00] the same content on different social networks, but
to do it at different times and on different days to really mix things up.
This helps make sure that if someone follows you on Facebook, and then
they go over to Twitter to see what you're doing, they're not seeing the
exact same feed.
Instead of posting the same post with the same link on three different
networks on Monday at 9AM, you can post on Facebook on Monday at
9AM and Twitter on Tuesday at 7PM, and so on. You’re cross-posting
the same content on all of your social networks, but you're doing it on
different days at different times so that each social feed is a little
different.
It mixes things up for maximum exposure, both across the social
networks and across days and times. For example, if a person is logging
into social on their lunch break, and they take a look at both Facebook
and Twitter, they'll see different messages from us instead of just the
same message in several different places.

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So, let's wrap up strategic Social Planning. Automation and scheduling
are your social media BFFs. You should definitely be automating your
social media marketing for your business.
Chunk it down into categories that make it easy for you, and use the
Social Brilliant spreadsheet and Edgar to cycle through your evergreen
posts so that you can publish them over and over again.
This library of social media posts is something that you're going to build
over time. Maybe you start out right now with one month in your
spreadsheet and your Edgar library, and then you add two months and
then you add three months and by the time you have three months, then
it's really easy. You just cycle through those three months over and over
and you keep adding new posts and new variations as you go to fill up
your social calendar.
Then add in those live posts as much as you'd like. You know your social
accounts are never going to go dead because you've got them automated,
[00:40:00] so that just takes the pressure off. Now, you can throw in a
live post here and there and take the time to engage with your audience
when they comment or respond to you.
Finally, keep experimenting with your categories, with your posting mix
and build as you go. I'll see you in the next video.
[00:40:20] [END OF AUDIO]

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