As a business owner and content creator with chronic illness, I needed a simple system for social media marketing because life’s complicated enough! 

Reduce your time and effort in creating, editing, and scheduling by utilizing social media management programs, cloud storage, and Trello as your project manager. Knowing how to synchronize all your tools to create a simple system for social media marketing is what reduces overwhelm and produces results.

After 2 years of email optins, YouTube videos, blog posts, and nitty gritty research I finally threw my hands up and told my computer screen “I JUST NEED SOMETHING SIMPLE!” So, I decided to create my own system that worked for me by piecing together all the bits and pieces I had found.

Depending on the platform(s) you choose will affect the system you put in place. This post will cover the platforms I’m currently using as of writing this.

Effective social media management tools

Planoly will schedule Instagram posts and Stories with auto-post. As of writing this, Instagram won’t allow auto posting of stories (they’re meant to be on the fly in real life, that’s why they’re called ‘story’) but you will receive a notification on your phone that it’s time to post the saved scheduled post. You simply click and tell it to post now. Planoly also schedules Pinterest pins. I personally haven’t used this part of the platform but the basic is free so it may be worth some research to see if it would fit your needs.

Tailwinds will schedule Pinterest pins and Instagram posts. There’s also a Google Chrome Extension which means I can schedule the graphic straight from my screen instead of multiple downloads and uploads of images. Once I started using Tailwinds’ scheduler my Pinterest account increased over 5,000 more views in the first month. It also will help you with planning hashtags for both platforms and optimal post times from your account’s analytics. 

My business Facebook page is linked to Instagram right now so everything that auto posts to Instagram by Tailwinds is also posted to my Facebook Page. I just want a presence there currently, I’m not trying to grow my business on that platform yet. Having it linked to Instagram keeps me from having to manage 2 platforms. I do the work for Instagram and it’s done for Facebook too. 

This will not work forever but until I have enough content to re-purpose among multiple platforms, just being present and active will do just fine. Facebook also has its own builtin post scheduler if you’re not using Instagram, want something different to post to the 2 platforms or decide to have different posting frequency on the platforms.

YouTube is a platform I’m excited to get into! I will be launching a channel in the next month, I’m working on the content currently. From what I have learned so far is that you can schedule your videos to publish on YouTube with their scheduler. So, then you could schedule the video to post, take the thumbnail and schedule to post on Instagram and even take a snippet of the video months later and put in your Instagram and Facebook stories as repurposed content to give attention to the YouTube video.

Again, I’ll be refining my platforms and sticking to them. Currently, I’m just optimizing my content for each one to be shareable able to be repurposed. 

Choosing the best social media platforms for you

It wasn’t very difficult to choose the platforms I wanted to use with this website. It was difficult realizing I couldn’t do them all at once and how to figure out a system that worked for me, my budget, and my goals.

I’m naturally creative, visual, and organized (for the most part). I enjoyed scrolling Instagram, not Facebook. I enjoyed searching Pinterest and going to the blog articles to learn more. I enjoy watching YouTube videos more than listening to Podcasts, unless I’m driving or am somewhere I need my phone in my bag with an earbud attached.

So, naturally, I would rather spend time on Instagram liking and commenting on other’s content (which I did already) to grow my business’s account than on Facebook. I’m in Facebook groups for business and collaboration but I’m not that active consistently, I just avoid going into the platform. 

I enjoy Pinterest as a visual search engine instead of Google images. I find the pins lead to more quality content than most of the pictures in the Google results, a lot of them just haven’t been linked and optimized which means all you get is the image and not the blog post that supports or expounds on it.

I learn a TON from YouTube videos! Everything from Adobe Suite to starting a website to how to cook something totally different or unusual. It’s a great platform and watching the video keeps me from getting distracted too easily. This will be the next platform I venture to.

You have to choose the platform(s) that works well for your personality and your business. If you use Instagram but personally prefer Facebook, you’ll find yourself scrolling on Facebook and avoiding your business account on Instagram. So, decide which platforms you enjoy being on, because you’ll be continuously studying them and using them.

**Keep in mind though, it’s an easier system when your platforms can all be linked or managed in the least amount of places.**

How to maximize the time spent scheduling social media marketing

I am currently on a schedule of creating blog content 4 days a week. This means I don’t have a ton of time to spend on marketing the content the other 2 days. I’ve condensed some of my work this way:

1. I use Canva to create 3-5 Pinterest Pins for each blog post. Out of those images I choose one to crop to Instagram ratio.
2. I then schedule the pins in Tailwinds over the next 2-4 week slots (as well as a few pins of other people’s relevant content to my brand throughout the same time frame), and
   • while I’m there I schedule the Instagram post with hashtag groups I’ve saved previously while checking the box for Facebook Page posting.
3. While scheduling the blog post image to Instagram in Tailwinds I also go ahead and schedule 2-3 other posts for the rest of the week.

In 1-2 hours at the end of the week I will typically have 2-4 weeks of content scheduled or at least saved as drafts ready to move into the scheduling calendar.

I’m done!

Well, not 100%. There’s always work to be done when you’re an entrepreneur or business owner, but that’s the simple system I’m using right now.

I was scheduling in Planoly for Instagram a week at a time, manually pinning 5-10 pins of others and one of mine in Pinterest throughout the day, and scheduling a post inside Facebook for 3 times a week. Honestly, I hardly made it to Facebook for scheduling. I would tend to check the box for “post to page” also when I manually posted to Instagram if I remembered. I was also creating a new piece of content for this website maybe once a week if I got to it. 

Systems reduce overwhelm by giving mental clarity (even in the world of brain fog), giving a stepping stone path to follow consistently, and simplifying the process so it doesn’t feel like your online business consumes you.

Why creating your simple social media marketing system may feel hard and how to fix it

So the system framework is what we talked about in the last paragraph. Now we’re going to talk about how I keep up with my system while fighting the brain fog of chronic illness. 

Creating a system feels hard because the typical person has always been an employee or joined an already existing venture. 

Meaning, you weren’t responsible for creating a system, you were handed one. Whether it worked well or not isn’t the point, it existed. 

You may be great at following an existing system, you may be great at even perfecting a flawed system or restructuring it, but typically most people are not great at gathering all the information and creating a system, following up on testing it and perfecting it all while accomplishing their goals at the same time. We tend to rush by creating the system and say “I’ll get to that when I can, I’ll just manually post today.” 

We tend to feel like we have to post the picture we take right then, post the blog post we just finished, and pin/post all the graphics we just finished. That comes from being an employee for the most part. We’re used to doing a job and moving on to the next task. 

We aren’t programmed to plan ahead, sit something back, or not rush a task by a deadline. 

Most people don’t even accomplish the necessity of a savings account in case of an emergency, so holding on to pictures, graphics and ideas is a struggle!

I love Trello for this reason. It’s taken some time to learn the right template for my business needs but that’s the great part, it’s fully customizable, syncs to other programs, and it’s FREE! 

Trello will help you create that mainframe of a simple social media marketing schedule that you can follow every single time you create a piece of content.

In addition to that, some tools that help me store my content are:

• I use Google drive to store resources.
• In a Folder named “Blog Posts” is where my template is saved and I write all my posts on Google docs then copy and paste into WordPress.
• In a Folder named “Pics” is where I save further sub-categorized Folders such as “Stock photos”, “Personally Taken Photos”, etc.
• In a Folder named “Social Media Graphics” I have sub-folders of “Instagram” and “Pinterest”
• In a Folder named “Website Identity” is where I have logos, palettes, etc. for the back-end of running the website.

With Google Folders, I can just upload straight from my phone or computer to the apporpriate folder when I take pictures or find a stock photo that works well.

I then have a stockade of resources for later use and scheduling ahead. This prevents the feeling of always being stuck to a camera, keyboard, or phone and from just randomly posting something because I haven’t in a few days and ‘I need to be present’. Yes presence is good, but presence with purpose is best!