Business owners hate how much time social media eats up in their day-to-day operations. Automating content - versus simply scheduling it - frees up hours every week. At Downstage Media, our favorite tool for scheduling and automating content is MeetEdgar. Let’s break down specifically how we use it with the PAGER method for our clients, so you can figure out if it’s the right tool for you.

How do I use MeetEdgar with the PAGER method for social media?

Scheduling versus automating

Add your social media profiles

Create categories

Set your schedule

Load in content every two weeks

Enjoy the freedom

One way to save time with your social media is to create content in batches. That’s nothing new. People have been talking about that for a decade now.

Here’s what not enough people are talking about:

You can create set up an automation so that all of the posts in a batch are continuously going out.

At Downstage Media, we recommend creating ten social media posts every two weeks from one of the categories in the PAGER method.

But if you schedule each one to go out on a specific day and a specific platform and a specific time, that’s still adding a manual element. You’re saying, “Publish this post on Tuesday, July 12th at 11am on LinkedIn. Publish this post on Tuesday, July 19th at 11am on LinkedIn. Publish this post on Tuesday, July 26th at 11am on LinkedIn.”

With automating your content, you just tell the software, “schedule any of these Promotional posts on Tuesdays at 11am on LinkedIn. And when you run out, start all over again.”

Do you see how that’s way less labor-intensive?

MeetEdgar allows you to automate your content like that.

The lowest tier price for MeetEdgar (at $29.99 / month) allows up to 5 social media accounts. But you are not going to spread yourself and your team that thin. Instead, you are going to connect two social media accounts.

Two. Do you hear me?

Two.

Ideally, two that aren’t owned by the same company.

Once you have set up your social media accounts, it’s time to create some categories.

In MeetEdgar, you assign your content categories. The lowest pricing tier includes four categories. And for one brand that’s a perfectly fine amount.

MeetEdgar has a few default categories, but I change the name of them to go with the PAGER method. I go into each category in-depth in Simple Social Media, but for the purposes of this blog post, suffice it to say that you’re going to switch them up.

Change the name of your categories to:

• Promotions

• Articles

• General

• Engagement

For your Random content, simply tick the box that says “Included when selecting random content to post.”

Now that you know what categories your content will fit in, it’s time to figure out when that content is going to publish on social media.

Next you’re going to set your schedule.

Decide what day of the week you’re going to post each category and on which platform.

As a starting point,

Here are some additional tips we’ve found at Downstage Media. Your mileage may vary depending on your audience’s habits, your schedule, and your platform. But here are some things we’ve found:

• Schedule Promotion posts at the times your audience is most likely to be on that platform so they are most likely to see it. We refer to Hootsuite’s Best Time to Post on Social for this info.

• Schedule Engagement content toward the end - but not at the end of the week. You want to be able to reply to people, just not when you’re in weekend mode.

• Schedule Articles posts at the end of the week / on the weekend when your audience is in “kick back and reading mode.”

• Schedule General posts in the morning to give your audience a quick nugget of information, information, or entertainment right at the start of their day.

Also, you don’t have to schedule both platforms at the same time and day. Your brand can get more coverage across both platforms if you vary the different categories on the different platforms. For example, Downstage Media’s Promotions content will go out on LinkedIn at 9a ET on Tuesday (as in the screenshot above). I could also have Downstage Media’s Promotions content go out on Instagram at 2p ET on Wednesday.

Okay, so we know where you’re posting, we know what category it’s going to fit into, and we know when it’s going out.

Next is to actually load in the content itself!

With the PAGER method, you create content in batches. At Downstage, we present posts to clients in batches of ten in our Content Stockpile. Once those posts are approved, they are ready to be loaded into MeetEdgar’s Content Library.

Note: I wish there were a way for this to be automated. But I haven’t found one yet, despite the amount of Zaps I’ve tried to create. Please let me know if you can find a work around!!!!

So, here’s what you do:

1. Choose your category: with the PAGER method it’s Promotions, Articles, General, or Engagement.

2. Select your social media accounts: with the PAGER method you’re only posting to two account. Remember?

3. Craft your content. Plus, crate variations on each one by changing up the visuals or changing up the images.

That’s it! Then you can be confident that you now have ten posts loaded in to that category.

There are advanced features too. You can schedule posts to go out only once.
Schedule them to go out on a specific day. Or schedule them to go out up until a certain day. (We’ll get into that in a subsequent post when we talk about more advanced features.)

Two weeks later you can do it all again. Or not.

See, that’s the thing. If you see a social media account and there is a post there from the last week, you’d consider it up-to-date, right?

So even if you don’t post anything else except those initial ten posts, then you would have ten weeks of content finished. That’s still enough to put your brand in a good light. And you wouldn’t have to do anything else if you didn’t want to for ten weeks. Ten weeks! Done. In the can.

That’s the power of MeetEdgar and automation.

Are there other tools out there?

Yes. MeetEdgar isn’t for everyone.

But for most small marketing teams, it’s a tool that is designed to save them plenty of hassle. And most importantly, plenty of time.