One Way I Have Simplified Social Media
As we all know part of growing your photography presence is through increasing your social media footprint. This means posting to sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest among others with as much of a regular cadence as possible.
I’d like to use this post to discuss some of my struggles with posting to social media and what I’ve done to try and streamline this process as it may help you save some precious time out of your day as it did mine. I was also able to do this without spending any money which is always a win when starting out.
What I Was Originally Doing:
Up until last month I’ve been managing my social media posts manually through my phone. My general flow would be something like:
Format my images on PC
Write the description on Evernote
Airdrop the images to my phone
Create the post in Instagram and copy and paste in the description from Evernote
Set the location of the post
Post the image at a specific time of day
This was a lot of manual steps for just one post and I rarely posted at the time of day I wanted, which was 9am. This was because I’m at work at this time and as my day is still beginning I rarely have a few minutes to mess around with social media so often my posts would end up going out around noon or later when I took my lunch.
As I started to add more social media sites such as Pinterest I noticed that this process was starting to take a lot more of my time and become a bit of a burden. As a result my posts became less consistent. I quickly realized that if I wanted to continue to grow my social media presence I’d have to find a better way to manage this process.
The Benefits of Web Apps:
This led me to the one place I always go to when looking for tips, Google! I did a few simple searches and came across many articles on managing social media. There were a variety of web applications I soon learned about which sounded perfect as I liked the idea of being able to post from my computer and cut out the phone process completely. That alone would save me tons of time since my images always start from my computer and I’ve always preferred writing descriptions with a keyboard as I tend to have a lot more typos when using my phone.
There were also a variety of additional features that were ideal such as scheduling. This would allow me to set time on the weekend or after work to arrange posts for the whole week so I could then set my posts up and forget about them. I could now finally have consistent posts at the same time, in addition to posting to multiple social media sites at once. Now I just had to decide on which application I was going to go with.
Choosing the App for Me:
I quickly glanced at the applications and a lot of them offered the same set of core features I was looking for. Most of them differentiated themselves based on their more advanced tools which for me at this point was overkill as I currently only post once every other day. Eventually I’d like to post more frequently but right now my goal has been to just post consistently to multiple sites.
Because they all offered a lot of the same features at the base level what ended up being the deciding factor for me was cost. Most of these apps offered a free 14 day trial but there were a couple that offered a free tier and just limited you to a set number of posts and basic features. Hootsuite was one of those and since I only needed to schedule a week or two in advance I could easily operate within the limitations of the free tier so I went with this application.
Using Hootsuite:
With Hootsuite as a free user I could schedule up to 30 posts with 3 social profiles. Again this covered my needs and I’ve now been using it for about a month and figured I’d share my experience with it so far.
Since I’m using the free tier I can’t complain too much but these are some of the things I noticed once I made the switch from posting through my phone to posting through Hootsuite from my computer.
Instagram Image Limitations:
First things I noticed is that you cannot add multiple images to an single Instagram post. I don’t believe this is a limitation with Hootsuite exactly but appears to be a limitation on what Instagram will let you do outside of their app. I was concerned about this as I’ve typically post a few images pretty regularly and was not sure if this would affect how my images were seen on Instagram. However my traction on social media has been pretty small so I was also not super concerned at this point either, but it may be something you’ll want to monitor.
Now that I have done about a month's worth of posts through Hootsuite this has not really been an issue and I still get around the same amount of engagement as before or even a bit more as I can post consistently now.
Instagram Stories:
From what I can tell so far Instagram Stories are not something you can current post through the app, however this may be a limitation with Hootsuite as I see other sites like Later.com offering this feature.
This has not been a problem for me since most of my stories are impromptu things I want to highlight which I tend to capture on my phone and adding the story through the instagram app has been pretty easy. I’ve also found a few other phone apps that have upped the polish on my stories when I announce new blog posts or what set of images I’ll be posting next over the week. If you would like to hear more about this let me know in the comments.
Posting to Pinterest:
You can create a New Post or Pin but not both at the same time.
Facebook and Instagram can be posted at once, however I have not been able to create one post for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. I think this is fine as Pinterest has different options such as which board you need to post to and a different image format 1:1 vs 2:3 ratios.
What I also noticed is for some reason in the app you cannot add the title of the post in Pinterest. This does not make any sense to me as to why they would limit this either on Hootsuite or Pinterest’s end. So for now I add the title to the description and then update the Pin later in the day through Pinterest itself. A minor annoyance but again I’m still saving time through scheduling the pin.
In Conclusion:
Regardless of the limitations I’ve pointed out it’s been very helpful to add a service like Hootsuite to my social media workflow.
The fact that I can schedule and view what’s posting throughout the day and weeks ahead helps me to curate my posts a bit better and most importantly saves me valuable time from having to stop what I’m doing to post. I can now just set one block of time each week to set up my posts and let Hootsuite post for me at the times I’ve wanted.
This will only save me more time as I scale my posts over time and may be something you want to add to your social media workflow. Lastly if you have any app recommendations that overcome some of the limitations I’ve hit please do share in the comments as it would be great to hear what others recommend.