- [Narrator] Social media managers live and die
by their posting schedule.
There's only so many times you can post per day
without annoying your audience,
so you need to plan ahead if you don't want to waste a slot.
But how do you decide what to post and when?
How do you balance self-promotion
with sharing the content of others
and contributing to the conversation?
Bigfoot digital came up with the 4-1-1 social media rule,
which is something that I follow and I find quite useful.
The 4-1-1 rule breaks down the types of content you'll post
into three different buckets
and then tells you how many times you should share them
in terms of a ratio.
So, they break it into new content posts,
reposts, and then self-serving posts.
Self-serving are promotions, links to your website,
things that have a business value.
Reposts are shares of other people's content.
And then new content posts would be content you're putting
out there that's editorial, so new blog posts for example.
And what they're saying is: for every self-serving post,
you should also share someone else's post,
and then you should share four new content posts
in that timeframe as well.
So, that's why it's called the 4-1-1 rule.
Four new content, one repost, one self-serving post.
And this ratio could be really dependent
on how often you're posting per day,
or per week, or per month,
but as long as you stick to roughly that ratio
you should be pretty good.
But this isn't the only rule. There's actually several,
and Buffer actually covered quite a few of them.
So, if you go to this post, you can see some people talk
about 5-3-2, so five content from others,
three should be content from you,
and two should be personal status updates.
That's one way to look at it.
They cover the 4-1-1 rule as well
as 555+, the rule of thirds, the golden ratio.
But actually Buffer looked at what they share,
and they could see that nine times
they're sharing their own stuff
for every one that they're sharing of other people.
So they have a 90/10 ratio of content.
I don't think it really matters
specifically what ratio you decide on.
I think it's really important to just make that balance
between sharing your own content and sharing others.
And it really depends on your business
and what you're trying to achieve with social media.
I mean, the more editorial you go,
the more sharing of others' content that you do,
the better engagement you're going to get.
But of course, that also has less business value.
If you go full-on business value,
then maybe people won't engage with your content
because it seems very self-serving.
So it's really just striking that balance
and finding what works for you.
If you don't know what works for you yet,
then I recommend just going with the 4-1-1 rule
because it seems to cover most of the bases.
One important thing to note,
that when you are scheduling ahead of time
and you're following one of these ratios,
is how far to plan ahead.
I recommend not planning too far ahead
because you can get pretty carried away
and have a whole year's worth of content,
you know, scheduled.
I don't think that's actually pretty good
because you lose a lot of serendipity
and you can't jump on new trends.
If you're inspired to post something someday, you know,
adding it to the queue is a little bit less impactful
than posting it right away.
So, what I try and do is I schedule six weeks
of content ahead of time, and then I keep 20% of the slots
reserved for anything that I come up with that day.
So I can always drop something in,
but if it doesn't need to be posted urgently
I just add it to the end of the queue.
So, whatever ratio you choose
or how often you plan ahead really doesn't matter.
What does matter is that you have good intentions
and well-reasoned arguments behind what you chose
so that when your boss or a client asks
what you plan to post and when you plan to post it,
or if they come to you with a post that, you know,
maybe it doesn't fit your schedule,
then having a well-reasoned social media calendar is the key
to proving that you know what you're doing,
and then they can trust you to keep doing it.
And that's really, really important
to every social media manager.