How do I Save Time with my Social Media Posting as a Freelancer *

*This is a collaborative post.

Being freelance and looking after a fair social media accounts for various clients plus a couple of my own, I like to keep on top of everything I can with scheduling. It is literally such a game changer and means I can spend time planning content weekly, schedule it and then let it post in its own time so I don’t have to be online all of the time. There are a lot of tools out there to use but my Social Media Management Tool right now is ContentCal.

ContentCal is a Social Media Calendar that allows you to plan, schedule, edit Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram posts and even use their web clipper tool to fill up your Calendar while browsing the web making scheduling even easier and quicker. I love the idea of being able to schedule news clippings and relevant articles right from the very page without any faffing around! It also has the ability to save commonly used phrases or hashtags as a ‘Snippet’ which is great as I have clients that use the same hashtags for Instagram as we’ve tailored them to what they do and use them for crowdsourcing at events!

If you’re into analytics, like I am, then ContentCal makes reporting super easy with colourful graphs and charts make key information digestible and easy to understand for my clients. It shows you follower growth and engagement as the click of a button which is something all of my clients are really interested in and saves me a lot of time digging through the analytics on various apps when they ask for them at the drop of a hat. It will also alert me when it’s the best time to post when my engagement is at its highest without me doing any extra work or research, dreamy!

My favourite feature of ContentCal is just how easy it is to use; the drag and drop feature means I can chop and change my content in the simplest of ways ensuring all that all content is varied. I don’t want two posts next to each other that are too alike in case people think it’s a post they’ve already seen, so I can pop that event photo into next week and bring that foodie photo up to tomorrow without really thinking about it.

The previews are also how the post would look on whatever social media platform you’re looking to post on so it’s far better than competitors I’ve used in the past as I’m very visual with how things have to look. Every single one of my scheduled tweets just has to have a photo so it catches people’s eye to draw them in and I love being able to see how Twitter will arrange them.

Being a Social Media Manager has been made so much easier with the use of ContentCal and at just £9 a month for a single user like myself it’s a no brainer! If you’re part of a bigger team then you have the option to collaborate so you and the team can all be on the same page when it comes to content ideas and posting. Such a great piece of kit!