by: AskPat 980 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 980 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.
All right, now here's today's question from Jeff.
Jeff Campbell: Hi Pat. This is Jeff Campbell from NewMiddleClassDad.com and I've got another question for you. Thank you for everything that you do and thank you for answering some of my questions previously. My question today is around scheduling posts on social media. I know you batch your podcasts and blog posts well in advance. Right now it's June and I imagine if you take this question it'll be in the fall when I hear it. Right now you're probably preparing posts and podcasts that will air in September or October or later.
I'm wondering how far in advance you schedule the corresponding social media posts to go along with those things. Do you schedule those now at the time when you're recording them, or do you schedule them once they've gone live or shortly before they go live? I'd just like to see a little bit more about how that process works. I don't currently schedule any of my things until they are actually live on my site, and I don't know if that's the best way to do things. Thanks for everything that you do, Pat. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to hearing your answer.
Pat Flynn: Hey Jeff, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. Social media posts for my podcast episodes and my blog are done through a tool called CoSchedule. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] What CoSchedule allows us to do is to ahead of time plan out our social media posts as we are editing and as we are formatting that post. What typically happens is the post will be produced anywhere between twelve to eight weeks beforehand in terms of me recording the podcast or me starting to write the blog post. It isn't until about four weeks before that somebody on the team . . . And we do it that early because we're just trying to get ahead of schedule in case anything happens and we can just basically be ahead of schedule and have a little bit of flexibility. But even if it's one week before, that's totally fine too, even the day before. I like the fact that we're doing the social media planning and the posts before we hit publish so that the moment we hit publish all those things, the social media posts, are happening as they are going.
For us, four weeks out the teams starts putting things into WordPress, taking the thing that was in my Google doc, and formatting it into a blog post, or taking those mp3 files that were already uploaded to Libsyn for my podcast host and then structuring the blog post and embedding the mp3 in the player inside that blog post, all those things. Within WordPress . . . This is the cool thing about CoSchedule and WordPress: they speak together. You can fill out the CoSchedule fields within your WordPress site and vice versa. So as we are crafting the post and getting it ready for scheduling four weeks later, we can actually also write in copy for tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn posts, and all those kinds of things. We actually write those out, and what's cool is it automatically generates the link back to that post after that post is published, so it knows how to do that so that you're not just like, linking to a dead link and then you kind of have to fix it afterwards. So it does that, it also pulls images from the blog post too, even the preview of the blog post, so that is really helpful too, so that when it goes live it just works. CoSchedule does its thing.
They also have a tool called ReQueue that allows you to reuse some of those things in the future if you're promoting older things. That particular tool within CoSchedule is more . . . Very similar to MeetEdgar, but where I feel CoSchedule is really cool is you can plan your social media posts as you are writing your blog posts or creating the blog post for your podcast episodes ahead of time, so it's done pretty far in advance. Typically we have one go out immediately, and that's the other cool thing: You can set as many as you want. You can have sort of a rhythm and a template of how many you want to go out and at what time after that post is published. I think the way we have it is immediately after we publish—and we set this CoSchedule tool within our blog post to do this—immediately after it's published the social posts go out, and then on Twitter it follows up three hours later with a different post. Not the same one, but a different one that we've already pre-filled out, and then a day later, and then I think three days later, and then one week later, so we have multiple instances already in place for the post to be published and promoted. If you go to my Twitter stream, you can probably find the pattern set exactly.
So that's how it works Jeff, and CoSchedule is the tool. If you want to check it out, AskPat.com/coschedule. That is an affiliate link just so you know. I want to just be up front with that, but it's a great tool. I've had multiple conversations with the team over there and they're just fantastic and it's an amazing tool, so CoSchedule. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]
All right. Thanks Jeff. I appreciate you. I know you have a teeshirt already, so we'll figure out what we'll do with those extra ones that we can give away or something. We'll figure it out, but I just want to thank you again for your question. For anybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask it right there on that page.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Marilyn Vos Savant: “Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.” Don't give up guys. All right guys, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.