On building his fan base, Bruce Springsteen once said:

“Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.”

– Bruce Springsteen

Anyone that has built their online presence knows the truth of this statement. Consistency is critical, but consistency is also demanding.

In this article, we’ll look at one of the key tools to support you in building in an online presence – schedulers. We’ll discuss when to use a scheduling tool for LinkedIn, the benefits and common mistakes. Schedulers are tools that allow you to create your content in advance. Pick a time (or let the scheduler handle the details) and your content will be automatically published to your favourite platform. Some of the smarter options also provide extensive automation like smart scheduling and after publish actions so that you can optimize your engagement.

What are the benefits of scheduling?

There are two main benefits using scheduling tools or apps. Building engagement on LinkedIn is a time consuming process and most of the results are generated in the long trail. However, this process is very time consuming. Schedulers allow you to manage that process end to end and to make the commitment long term.

The second point, is that managing your brand or content is a difficult task and requires a lot of accumulated knowledge. With experience people learn what to post and when, and to work around the algorithm. Scheduling tools can help to fill some of the knowledge gap through smart scheduling, after publish actions, automation and analytical insights.

How does a scheduler help time management, given that the poster needs to be available on the platform to engage with their audience when the post goes out?

Time management is one of the biggest challenges for people posting regular content.

Creating content is a creative process. Its not always straightforward to create content in the exact moment that you want to. You need go ideas and most of the time you need to think of them in advance. Schedulers allow you to do your creative work in blocks, create drafts and saving them for later use. Despite that, we highly recommend to get onto the platform as often as you can and organically engage with your audience. Our stats show that this is one of the key ways to make sure you are working with the LinkedIn algorithm and building a genuine connections, so avoid low effort automation style posts.

When shouldn’t you schedule content?

The key to building your social presence is to create genuine engagement on the platform. We don’t recommend to use schedulers in a low effort way. Don’t just queue up all your content, set and forget it. Make sure you get back on the platform as much as you can and truly engage with your audience. Schedulers should not replace the fundamental process of engaging on the platform, but rather act as a support tool to help you work a little more professionally.

Is there any type of content you shouldn’t schedule?

Fundamentally, no. You should be able to schedule all the normal content that you create and post on LinkedIn. Previous experiments have shown that there is no difference in engagement between scheduled and unscheduled posts (see LinkedIn expert John Espririan’s recent post for details).

That said, all schedulers have their limitations. At Seenly, its really important that we only use LinkedIn approved APIs. That means we have to get approved access for each type of content. As of October 2022, we do not yet support documents & carousel posts. However, images, multi-image galleries, native videos, personal and company profile tagging etc are all supported and part of our standard feature set.

Summary

Schedulers can be great supporting tools for a number of reasons. When should you use a scheduling tool for LinkedIn? Use one if you are finding it hard to maintain the consistency necessary for building your audience, or use one to help find the right times and content to post. If you are looking to post more consistent comment and generate engagement, maybe its time to try a scheduler. Sign up to Seenly today to get the benefits of using a LinkedIn first scheduling tool.

This content was featured in a segment of the podcast LinkedInformed hosted by Mark Williams aka Mr. LinkedIn. During the podcast segment we discuss the pros and cons of schedulers and provide tips to users who might not have previously considered the option.

The podcast, generally, is an amazing resource for anyone with an interest in the ins and outs of LinkedIn. Check it out!

Link to the relevant episode