The concept of scheduling everything in advance whether it comes to our personal lives or business goals is beneficial though there are times when you have to take a more agile approach focused on learning/adapting in the moment. The concept of setting things in stone can many times be more harmful than helpful.

Looking at scheduling social media posts and implementing tools on the market, the biggest misconception is that simply posting on social media will produce results – the “If we build it, they will come” mentality – though the reality is much different.

Anyone can post on social media whether it’s manually or through a scheduling tool though not many social media creators or companies implementing campaigns are able to produce results, and that boils down to what was mentioned above.

Looking at the big picture of social media marketing, a fraction goes into posting versus actually being social, building relationships, organically getting love from influencers, etc. and that’s where many companies/teams miss out while suffering from analysis to paralysis (we have to schedule X to accomplish Y because of Z).

In a nutshell, is it bad to schedule social media posts in advance? The simple answer is yes. Once posts go live (and before) your team needs to be engaging targeted social media users to not just get in front of them, but also make them come back and like your recent post, comment, share, etc. That engagement is like gold and pushes Instagram and others to accelerate/amplify content.

Basically, stop thinking about automating social media posting as an easy way out and instead use social media for the reasons it was first created: To be social.