When you’re running up against a hard deadline and last minute fires are popping up left and right, it can be difficult to string together 140 characters for a single tweet let alone an entire day’s worth of social posting. It’s moments like these when it pays to have all of your social media content planned out ahead of time.

Welcome back to Wrangling Your Social Strategy. This week, we’re looking at strategies for staying on top of your social schedules. If you missed our last entry, go back and take a look.

THE DAILY GRIND

Social media managers walk a fine line between posting enough content to get noticed but not so much that we annoy our followers. Too little and no one will see your well-crafted witticisms. Too much and your followers will stop paying attention.

Each network requires special attention. On LinkedIn, for example, you can get away with posting once a week. Twitter, on the other hand, is a fire hose of activity and if you’re not posting at least five times a day, you might as well be yelling into the void.

Here are some general posting guidelines for the biggest social networks. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary and you’ll likely need to tweak these numbers to fit your followers’ preferences.

• Facebook: 5 times per week
• LinkedIn: 2 times per week
• Twitter: 5 times per day

“Five times a day?” You say. “How am I supposed to post that often?”

Don’t worry. Social media is a bite-size medium and it’s easy to squeeze a lot of life out of every bit of content. Think of social feeds not as linear narratives but as news tickers. It’s okay to repeat yourself as long as you’re repackaging your messages.

Let’s say you’ve written an article about button styles. You should announce this news to all of your followers as soon as the blog goes live. Then, two hours later, remind Twitter about your awesome insights into button technology.

Share a quote from your button blog. The next day, ask a question and present your blog as the answer. Mix it up, keep it fresh and sprinkle those tweets of wisdom throughout your calendar.

Don’t be afraid to dive into your archives, either. Do you have an old blog post about a topic that’s still relevant? Hashtag “Throwback Thursday” and you’re good to go!

Align your posts with your company’s other marketing efforts. Are you releasing a new product? That’s a good week’s worth of social content right there. Company picnic? Update the photo album when you get back to work on Monday. Holidays are also great topics of conversation, especially if you offer an occasion-appropriate product.

CONTENT CALENDARS

Do this right now: open your business calendar and schedule a recurring meeting with yourself every month. This is your content creation time.

It takes effort to prepare an entire month’s worth of social posts and blocking off a chunk of time will help you focus.

You can find plenty of calendar templates with a simple Google search, but Hootsuite put together our favorite. (That link offers a plethora of helpful templates beyond the calendar. Be sure to check it out.)

AUTOMATION IS YOUR FRIEND

After you’ve filled up your calendar, you can start automating your updates. Hootsuite and Buffer both connect to the biggest social media platforms, and they centralize your posting process.

Keep in mind, even if you automate your posts, you still need to monitor your feeds and interact with your followers. We’ll go into that more next month.

BEFORE WE GO

One final tip: it’s always a good idea to keep a week’s worth of non-time sensitive posts waiting in the wings. Save this content for those times when plans go pear-shaped. It’s always better to have these extra posts and not need them than it is to need them and not have them.

Next month, join us for ways you can engage with your audience and create a healthy community!