I finally stopped doing social media the hard way

The most important part about social media marketing is consistency, and Publer is a great tool to help.

Kim Ellis has tried a couple of scheduling tools, along with a couple of AI automation tools and Publer is the first one she’s actually paid for. In this blog post, she gives her honest take on why this was the one worth the money.

L&D Free Spirits has four social media channels, LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky and YouTube and for the past year I’ve posted manually to all but one of the social feeds. For LinkedIn I used the built-in scheduler, but all the others were ad-hoc.

The only platform which I was close to being consistent with was LinkedIn.

Years ago, I was introduced to Buffer and I liked it, I used it to post on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn. So, when Free Spirits was born, I figured why not keep using it. But it really bugged me that it would have issues tagging people and companies on LinkedIn. Tagging can increase your reach massively and it’s better to do it on the original post then to go in once it’s posted and edit it, that can properly tank your reach.

I suppose a workaround would be to tag people in the comments and I’ve heard pros and cons for that approach. Some people say tagging in comments is more forgiving when the tagged don’t engage with your post. But the algorithm rules change so frequently, and everyone has an opinion it can be hard to know what’s right and what isn’t.

The new platform

When I say new, it’s not new, it’s been around since 2012, and Andy Candler has been telling me about it for well over a year, so it was on my radar. This year I wanted to increase the Instagram following, LinkedIn continues to grow and is still our main channel but the whole only posting once per day irks me when things are going on.

So, I figured I’d have a bit of a dabble with Publer and took out their 7-day free trial.

I promptly added all four accounts plus my personal LinkedIn account too (because company page posts only get seen by around 1% so I wanted to post more Free Spirits content from my personal account). So that’s five accounts set up and ready to get going.

The strategy

Free Spirits has a marketing spreadsheet (provided by Maisey Marketing), and it is customised to our business and the types of marketing we would do. A few months ago, I added my personal LinkedIn to it too so I could track what was going out across both profiles.

Our other social channels aren’t on there, and I’ll probably not include them for now as the LinkedIn content is like our lighthouse – it steers what’s being posted and when.

My new strategy for this 7-day trial was simple… schedule a heck of a lot of posts and see what happens.

I must admit I got a wee bit obsessive with it; I get like that when I’m trying out new tech.

But did it work?

Pretty soon I’d scheduled a week’s worth of posts, I could reuse posts, tweak the content then post in a different channel. I only had to upload media once, pop on the alt text and I would use it again just selecting it from the media bin.

When we have a new podcast episode, Mark Gilroy provides me with three clips to use on the socials – now I was posting them onto YouTube shorts. Spreading the stories of our guests.

And I figured, why stop there, our webinars are run through OpusClip, then some 60 second clips get shared too. We know platforms love video so increasing the amount of those seems a no brainer too.

Did I mention I get a little obsessive with things?

To give you an idea of how a typical week would now look, here you go:

Plus, it has a bulk upload tool, so the 365 tips of the day I created in Canva all got scheduled in Instagram pretty easily. I say pretty easily, I spent an hour with the image links in the wrong column and couldn’t understand why they weren’t uploading but their chat support sorted me out really quickly.

So, is it worth it?

Everyone who does social media marketing will tell you the same thing.

Consistency is key.

And it’s true, if you’re not posting consistently the algorithm won’t remember you. Each platform has its own rules and those who play by them can see their content promoted to more people.

More people = more views = more followers = more potential customers.

Needless to say, after a week I decided to go ahead and purchase the annual subscription – it’s coming in at over £250 (but remember that’s for five channels) and to me it’s worth it.

Where I was ad-hoc across 3 channels before I’m now consistently posting across five. My followers are increasing and my engagements are increasing. To give you an idea of numbers, over the past week I’ve gained 26 new followers, my reach has increased by 50% and my engagement by 4%.

There are free platforms out there which you can use to schedule your posts, so you don’t have to pay for a platform like Publer…but there are times when you should invest in your business to just make your life easier and this was one of those times for me.

Yes, I can do it all manually but the past two years since I started the social media posts for Free Spirits, I hadn’t been consistent.

So, it comes back to the age old saying, just because you can do it by yourself doesn’t mean you should.

For £250ish I’m saving myself hours, I’m scheduling further ahead and reaching more people.

For me and Free Spirits, it’s worth its weight in gold.

If you’d like to try out Publer and see if it works for you, hit the button below.

Note: this is an affiliate link so Free Spirits will get a kick back if you purchase a subscription, but all views are my own and aren’t influenced in any way.