When scheduling social media content, you typically use a formula to dictate which posts gets promoted on which platform and when. This means you can either re-invent the wheel each time you hit publish… or you can embed that formula into Airtable once and for all to put this task on auto-pilot, already!

Before I show you how I do this, I have a very Captain Obvious comment to share :: SOCIAL MEDIA IS STILL CONTENT! As such, I have set up this Airtable base a lot like my Content Creation and Calendar base which you can download below. You can either duplicate this to create a stand-alone Social Media Scheduling base or you could also integrate it into the rest of your content creation – it’s your call, boss!

SOCIAL MEDIA CREATION

In the first field of this table, I indicate what content we’re using social media to promote. Then, I link the next 3 fields to the other tables in this base to reflect ::

  • The MESSAGE you’re promoting and reinforcing that distinguishes your brand and voice from all the other noise out there;
  • The OFFERS – whether these are paid or free resources – that this content relates to;
  • The PUBLISHING SCHEDULE that allows you to visualize your consistent content output.

This strategy keeps you accountable to staying on-brand and makes sure that everything you publish reinforces your values + message consistently.

Furthermore, you’re able to create all of your related social media content at once. This is why you’ll create a new field for each social media platform you use. After all, you aren’t reinventing the wheel across each platform – you’re generally sharing the same message even though you need to customize it to each platform.

You’ll go ahead and pre-populate all of your posts, all of your images, all of your tweets, everything all at once.It doesn’t matter if you outsource your social media or you want to stay on top of how you’re publishing and promoting. Either way, you can easily see what’s been done, what there is to do and, of course we’ll discuss this next, when it all goes out.

PUBLISHING SCHEDULE

The original message or content you’re promoting will have a publication date on which everything else gets scheduled. The first field of your Publishing Schedule provides a space for this. The next field is linked to the last table so you will also have a space to identify the content this schedule is working with.

There are schedulers like CoSchedule that make it easy for you to schedule social media because it uses a formula to calculate when everything should go out and how often. This is essentially what we are replicating here. The intent is to generate an automated and predictable pattern for your promotional material to go out.

Let’s say you have a YouTube video that gets published a day before your blog post goes out. You also have a Facebook post that goes out the next day and then another Facebook post three days later. You don’t have to calculate your social media schedule manually every time for each piece of content. You can automate this by using formulas.

HOW DO YOU SET UP A SCHEDULE FORMULA IN AIRTABLE?

  • Select and name the field to reflect your choices.
  • Access the dropdown menu and select CUSTOMIZE FIELD TYPE. Scroll down to FORMULAS.
  • Type in DATEADD({Publication Date}, #, ‘days’) and insert the number of days you want to stagger in the # field.NOTE :: You can do negative numbers. For instance, if you publish to YouTube a day before you publish on your blog, you would write :: DATEADD({Publication Date}, -1, ‘days’)

Once you have all of this set up, try creating a CALENDAR VIEW to see when all of your posts are scheduled. In fact, I would recommend you do two things ::

  1. Create a calendar for each social media platform (i.e. one calendar for YouTube, another for Facebook, another for Instagram, etc.)
  2. Duplicate that specific social media platform view, and establish a second calendar that only show the content that has yet to be scheduled.

To create this second calendar view where you can simply focus on the work that needs to be done, you’ll need to create a field that shows whether this content has been schedule or not. I would select either a CHECKBOX or SINGLE SELECT with yes and no options, and name the field “PLATFORM NAME SCHEDULED?” This way, you can easily note when you’ve scheduled the content. It’s a helpful tool not only when you’re working with a team but even when you’re DIY-ing it to track WTF your status is.

Once you apply a FILTER – one of my favorite features for Airtable – you can remove the content you’ve scheduled from view without having to delete it. You can therefore set up your Calendar View to automatically remove work that has been done by setting up a filter that says “where PLATFORM SCHEDULED? is NO” for each social media platform.

Of course, how you set up the details of your base is going to be a reflection of how you work and how unique you are. But this makes it easier for you to not only create your content but also not waste a lot of time or energy trying to figure out when it all needs to go out.