How I keep up with what I post where
Earlier this year, I had a moment where I was completely overwhelmed by having to keep up what content I had posted where and when. I have about 10 platforms that I’m active on (my newsletter, Patreon, reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Discord, etc.) that all require their own form of communication etiquette, phrasing, and image formatting (nevermind that some platforms like Instagram make it very difficult to manage posting).
I started searching for a solution to get that mess out of my head and onto digital paper where it was accessible and adjustable. I ended up with a Trello board! I heard of people using it before but I never got it to really work for me until I rediscovered it when I saw my husband using it for some project planning.
Why not just use social media planners like Buffer and Hootsuite?
For the simple reason that no social media planner had all the features I needed. Some didn’t give me an overview of my Instagram grid while I was planning like Planoly, some didn’t allow me to post videos like Buffer, some were missing support for a platform.
Mostly though, I wanted an overview of all my communication. This includes newsletters I send out, articles for authors I post on my website, updating my portfolio website, keeping track of what I’m going to put up in my store and updating websites like Artstation that don’t even have an API for remote posting.
Trello allows me to have an overview for whatever platform I want to keep track of with a few different features:
The board view gives me an overview of what images are going to what channel. Adding a new image or just a reminder of what the content is about is easy, because hovering your mouse over the right column and then pasting a screenshot in there will create a new card.
I post to my blog once-monthly, and send a newsletter out to accompany that with the latest pieces that I want to show to newsletter subscribers. To keep track of that, I put the pieces in the “Newsletter” column with the same due date as the newsletter I’m going to send out.
I only post finished pieces that I post on my portfolio on Artstation, but I do want to post three times a week to social media websites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Not all pieces I do can go in the store. Either I don’t think they’re good enough to offer up as prints, or they’re not my IP to sell. To keep track of pieces I do want to put up in the store when they’ve been published, I put them in the “Store” column.
Once the due date has passed and the content has been posted to social media, I don’t archive the card but move it to the SENT column. The reason for that is that it then stays visible in the calendar power-up.
You can add one power-up to your board on a free Trello account. The calendar view lets me see an overview of what I’m posting where and when. You might have noticed that I’ve added tags to all cards in Trello. This is because of the calendar view. The columns that the cards are posted in don’t show up in this view, but the tags do. By assigning them, I can quickly see what channel I’m posting to on what day, and if I’ve planned all the posts I wanted to for that week.
In this way, I’ve planned out my social media posts for the coming three weeks (as of this writing) and planned out the articles I write for selfpub authors for the rest of the year. Granted, Trello doesn’t post or schedule for me but having the when, where and what planned out beforehand is 90% of the brainspace. I do the scheduling and writing of social media posts once every two weeks, to have the mental advantage of batching, and with the added bonus of planning a week cohesively, if the content lends itself for that.
Additionally though, I do use social media planners:
- Planoly for instagram posts (that are reposted to my Facebook page)
- Buffer for LinkedIn and Instagram videos (and Twitter for now, though Twitter now has a native scheduling function on desktop)
Of course, this is no be-all, end-all way of managing your communication. I like to keep an overview to make sure I’m posting consistently and that I’m not forgetting any platforms. I’ve talked to others who take just a few minutes to post to all the social media they need once they finish a piece – for them this might be overkill. However, this has worked for me and since I sometimes see people complain about content management and maintaining different platforms, I thought I’d share how I cope. 🙂
If you want to use Trello yourself, you can sign up using my referral link! https://trello.com/rengin11/recommend (if you sign up through this link, I get a month of Trello Gold with extra functionalities)
Oh and if anyone has tips on how social media could be even easier to keep track of, questions about what I’m doing on these boards – let me hear them!