Why We Don’t Use Meta Business Suite or Autopost (and What To Do Instead) [Episode 163]

I cannot believe I have never recorded an episode on this topic, and that is scheduling your content, pre-scheduling your content, and, uh, you know, making like a content plan. This is one of the number one questions I get asked, and I have to be honest. I never, I, I hate it. Not that it's a bad question, I don't hate that people ask me the question.

I hate it because being quite frank, there's no great answer. So, uh, this is gonna be a short episode, but we're going to dive in on, uh, you know, I might, I'll be the first to admit. I, I, there might be better answers out there that I am not aware of, but I don't think, don't think there are. So let's dive into talking about the best way to pre-schedule your content.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions. And you didn't go to school to learn how to be a. Full-time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day, every day.

So let's come hanging out while we chat. All things ease in your marketing and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please. Hi, I'm Melissa Birdsell and I'm a chiropractor in Moline, Illinois, and I listen to the Holistic Marketing Simplified Podcast.

Okay, so first off, let me just say why I hate this question is because like I said in the intro, there's no great answer to the best way to kind of like batch create and pre-schedule your content. And I think it's important to note that I've been doing this for seven years. This is not Molly, not being aware of tools that exist.

I am aware of all the tools we have used, all of the tools we have used, scheduling schedulers, we have used project management tools. I mean, don't even get me started on how terrible meta business suite is. So fun fact, uh, there's actually a running joke in the social media management community about how awful.

Meta business Suite is, it's why I don't teach it inside my programs. It's why we don't use it in our agency. I didn't ever see, I didn't see the like McDonald's CEO eating the hamburger video that like went crazy. Apparently. I never saw that. But I saw a meme that someone else posted who's in the social media management agency who was like, I wanna see Mark Zuckerberg like modeling after the McDonald's CEO eating his own hamburger.

But instead, like he's trying to. Use meta business suite. Like that's how bad it's, I just think it's important for me to at first explain, you would think, oh, this has gotta be a problem that someone solved. Right. And again, I'm not, there are tools out there. Okay. And I will talk to you about those in just a minute, but I want to explain to you why there is no quote, like perfect solution to pre-scheduling your content.

It is the fact that Instagram does not want you to preschedule your content. It is a social media app. It is not a blog. Okay? They don't want you batching out months worth of content and never opening the app again. That is, there's a reason that when you, and sorry, no shade on, like, don't sue me if you're subscribed to a syndicated stock content.

Like, you know, mass, like chiropractic content or I'm sure it exists for acupuncture or whatever. Like there's a reason it sucks. There's a reason you're getting one like is because that's not how social media is intended to be used. And I mean, I could spend a whole, I could, I could spend a whole episode on why your syndicated stock content service is a complete waste of your money and you would be so much better off spending your money in other places.

Noted episode for another day, but unsubscribe from your syndicated. Stock service. Okay. I promise you. It's like doing you quite literally no favorites. It's actually probably doing more harm than good. Anyway, going back to this, like they make it difficult on purpose because they want you to be active on the app.

Okay? You're gonna hear that and you're gonna say, but Molly, I've got patients to see if you're the actual practitioner doing it on your own. Obviously, especially if you're more type A, it doesn't make sense to be like, okay, what am I gonna post today And like, creating it today, even though that's what I do.

I'm just being honest. Um, but this comes naturally to me, right? Because I've been doing it for so many years, which is like another point that I wanted to make on my outline. I had it further down, but I'll go ahead and say it now, is the fact that once you, if you enroll in any of my programs, once you follow my system to the letter for like three to four months, it.

Becomes a snowball effect and it gets so much faster and so much easier. But I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you that like I just sat down and batch created 57 years worth of content in seven seconds. Like that's just bullshit. Like whoever tells you all that, like they are setting you up for failure.

Because when something does actually take time to create, you think you're doing it wrong and you're not. What's crazy is you have spent years and years and years and years in school. Maybe you spent more time like cadaver labs and internships and clinicals and oh my. And like maybe if you own your own practice, you know, you had to take out a business loan to open this practice and you spent blood, sweat, and tears.

Yet, if any marketing endeavor feels a little bit hard, it's like, oh, I must be doing it wrong. I think we can actually waste a lot of time trying to hack our way into things being easier when the reality is it takes, if you're in growth mode and you want to implement a full Instagram growth strategy to become the go-to practitioner in your area using Instagram, that is at least about a 16 hour a month job.

So about four hours a week. Just being honest and if you're like, I don't have that time, well like. Then maybe it's not important for you to get to grow right now, and that's fine. Like there's also, there's strategies for maintenance. I have an older podcast episode. If you go back to episode 1 45, um, of the podcast, the title is How to Show Up on Social Media.

When You Have Zero Time, I give some strategies on, um, you know, if you're more in like maintenance mode and you know, it won't be that same time commitment. We'll link that in the show notes. But my point in telling you all of this is like. I don't know. I think it's so much of like the AI centered content and it's like, ooh, if I give you a sexy headline that tells you how fast and easy and seamless this is gonna be, you're gonna click on my thing and you're gonna buy my thing.

When I would just much rather tell you the truth, even though it's not as sexy to be like, this just takes time. Right. So like, uh, but teleport yourself back before social media. It's not like this is some new like Yeah, social media is new-ish, but like. You still had to take the time to market your business, whether you were going door to door or going to, you know, farmer's markets or health fairs or whatever.

Like Mark, you have to market your business. So like, I didn't mean to go off completely on the soapbox, but like I said, I think I just get a little like annoyed at all of the Instagram gurus who make it seem like, you know, all of this is just like so fast and easy, and if there's any friction, you must be doing it wrong.

'cause that's not the reality. Okay. Again, I do promise you, I actually just posted a testimonial from a, a longtime hub student on my feed about how she followed my system to the letter for like a year, and she says she's still on a wait list. She barely posts any, like, she mostly just posts stories now here and there, and everyone finds her via Instagram because she followed my system.

So, um, I will link that testimonial in the show notes too, so you can see it really does work. It is a snowball effect. It does get easier. But the reality is this is not like a set it and forget it type thing. Now back to the topic at hand, I literally just imagined myself standing on a box of Dove soap.

Like when I hear soap box, I know that's not what soap box means, but it just made me laugh, peek inside my brain. Welcome. It's crazy here. Okay, so like I said, with all of that being said, I also understand that it's not realistic or conducive to business. So like I said, wake up in the morning and be like, what am I gonna post today?

Especially if you're solo in practice and you're doing this on your own. Now, as you know, I preach, preach, preach. I love you. Outsourcing this and delegating to either someone on your staff if you have that, and I have a program for that. If you go to molly cahill.com/sprint, I'll quite literally help you install your own in-house content creator.

I'm starting my next cohort in June, um, doing things a little differently. This time I'm gonna work with more experienced people. Um, and then I'm gonna have probably another co cohort from our beginning beginners. Holistic marketing hub is also where you could learn, somebody in your office could learn step by step how to use my process that we use for our agency clients.

But what I was saying is, like I said, you if, especially if you're the one doing this, I get it, that you do need to be able to kinda like pre-schedule stuff out. Right? So for, you know, we manage 34 Instagram accounts right now. Obviously we're not waking up in the morning being like, I wonder what we're gonna post for our client today.

We do pre-schedule it all out and create it all ahead of time. So there's a difference in having it pre-done and scheduled or like, you know, slotted in for a certain day versus auto posting. Okay? If the only way you are going to get out content is through auto posting, whether whatever platform you're using to do that, fine, you're not gonna get as good of results as if you.

Just pre-schedule it and like either manually post it that day. Like I said, you're not taking that much time. If it's already all done, literally all you're doing is pushing it out. Or if you use Instagram's like on the app, and I'm not talking about Meta Business Suite or the desktop, I'm talking about the Instagram app.

You load your reel or your carousel load in the caption location, all of that, right before you go to post underneath it, it will say more options. Underneath that you can toggle on to schedule it to post. Um, the soonest is like 20 minutes out. There are certain features that won't aren't compatible with pre-scheduling out in the Instagram app.

And guess what? Those are the same features that aren't compatible with auto posting and other softwares. I promise. I'm gonna tell you what we actually do and the best way to do this, and this is how I teach inside my programs too. For our Instagram management agency clients, for our clients, on our full service packages, we use a program called Planoly, P-L-A-N-O-L-Y.

I have an affiliate link for it, but here's the thing. I don't want you to use it because it's, I mean, you can play around with it, but there's a lot of clunky, I mean, clunky, clunky, clunky steps. Okay? The nice part about it is when you log in and you have everything all scheduled out on your left hand side of the screen, you can actually see like what your feed is going to look like, and like the caption is there and all of that, but it's still not like a seamless process because what is clunky about it is native Instagram stuff performs better.

They want you using the app. If that's nothing, if that's all you take away from me today and you're like, why are my results so bad? It's because you're trying to hack something that isn't designed to be hacked. Okay. So they want you using their, their fonts. They want you using, you know, their music and their features.

Sorry, one more sidebar. I swear I'm like fired up today. Maybe I had too much coffee. If all of this is sounding like, God, Molly, this sounds like so much work. I mean, like I said, go back to what I said in the beginning and then return to why you're doing this in the first place. We're not just doing this for funsies, we're doing this because there are people in your community.

Who are searching for answers and desperate, maybe they've been to their primary care doctor and not gotten answers or whatever, and they don't know you exist. So we're not just doing this as like a checkbox. And Molly said, I should post my clinic on Instagram. Like, no, like this is because there are people in your community who need you, and this is the way that so many people are finding and vetting their practitioners agree with it or not.

It is just the truth and it's how things work. I mean, truly, it really, really is. I mean, I wouldn't have a 60 person Instagram management wait list if this is not something that actually works. Anyway, going back to Plan Elite, that's what we use for a lot of our Instagram management clients. But I'm telling you right now, if you go to like, well, I'll figure it out.

I'll go use it. You're not gonna like it. You're not gonna like how you have to do it because we, our clients send us their raw video. We then pull the video into Instagram's edit its app. Two episodes back I did, or maybe four episodes back. You can just go to molly cahill.com, search edits, or you can Google Molly Cahill edits, and one of the episodes should pull up, or we can link it in the show notes.

I did an episode on the Edits app, which is what we use to edit all of our client reels. It's what I use to edit my own reels. It's free. It's an app made by Instagram. I love it. So the client sends us the video, we pull the video into the edits app. We edit, you know, trim out what needs to be trimmed. We add the text.

We then download that video back to the camera roll. And then we're uploading that video to plan and writing the caption so that the, the client can approve it and like already see the copy that's over the video. 'cause like just last week we had a client who was like, uh oh, you used the word treatment table and we can't say treatment.

It's like, oh yeah. So like, it's important for us, for the client to sign off on the text that's over the reel. Right. Same thing with carousels. If we're making it in Canva. Or if we're making a native carousel. When I say native, I just mean we're actually using the Instagram fonts over the image, like the more casual we have to create those, and then we have to download them, and then we have to upload them to plan only and then write the caption and all that.

Then when it comes time to post, I have two girls on my team who I have bought iPhones for, and their whole job is just to log in and post our client's content. When you post from Plan Lee or other schedulers to Instagram, guess what it does? It still downloads the reel or the carousel back to your camera roll.

It copies the caption in your clipboard and then you still have to post it. So as you can see, this is why I don't teach that for like an average practitioner because it's a lot of download upload. Like I'm just imagining myself doing a dance, fight, fight, fight. And like I said, it's, it's not saying, I'm not saying it doesn't work.

Clearly it works for us, but that's just, 'cause that's how we've been doing it for six years. Right? You know what, our agency's kind of like a well oiled machine. It's like if you still use paper charts or like travel cards, you're like, you know what, I'm not switching 'cause like, this is just what works for us.

And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Another gal on my team, Kimberly, she has her own, um, Instagram management agency, Kimberly Ellis marketing, if you wanna look her up. She does, uh, all of our quality assurance. So after we create the content for our clients, then Kimberly logs into each client and checks it all for typos.

Or, Hey, this hook could be a little stronger. Or like, Hey, this text bubble should be moved here. She kind of just like polishes up the content, right? Her agency uses metrical, which is another option, but again, it's the same exact thing I just told you. There's a lot of downloading, uploading, downloading, uploading.

So what is the solution, my friend? And this is what I teach step by step inside of Holistic marketing hub, as well as inside my group coaching program. The content Sprint. Are you ready for it? Drum. It is a freaking Google doc. It ain't fancy. Okay. Quite literally, in my opinion, the best way is to batch out two weeks of content at a time.

A month is too much. So many different things could happen in a month, in my opinion. We batch two weeks at a time, four posts a week, and I have a specific formula I follow called my content ecosystem where I plug in those eight posts or two weeks worth of posts. I've done multiple episodes of my content ecosystem.

Honestly, it's a lot. If you're listening to it on the podcast. I listen back to it and I was like, Ooh, this is probably too, too much information. I would just recommend joining the Hub and learning it fully from me in there. In my two week batching system, I literally list out posts one through eight and I'm like, okay, one post is probably gonna be a time sensitive post.

And then another one's gonna be a conversation starter, which you've heard me talking about. Another one needs to be a collab posts. We're gonna have two that educate on recent chief complaints you've gotten from new patients. We're gonna have two that are repurposed top performers from content you've posted in the past.

We're gonna have one that's got a little more personal lifestyle flare. And literally you just plug it in like a puzzle. You put it onto the Google Doc with the date. If it is a graphic you made in Canva, you can hyperlink right to the Canva file right there. Um, and then have the caption hashtags written underneath the Google Doc.

If it's a reel and you know, you're in the clinic, you can either, you know, upload the edited reel to a Google Drive, which I would not recommend because that's like one extra step. Or you can take my advice of having a practice phone, like if you've got multiple people in your practice, I go to the Amazon renewed store and buy refurbished unlocked iPhones.

Go back and listen to my edits at app episode. That's hard to say. And literally in your Google Doc for when it's like, okay. You know, April 1st post is named Pregnancy Sciatica Reel in the Edits app. And then when it comes time to post, you would just grab your caption off the Google Doc. You would know that that reel is waiting for you inside of the edits app, and you would just post it that way.

Or if you do want to preschedule, you could like block out, let's say like an hour on a Monday morning. After you've already done your, your two week content plan, or it could be a one week content plan. Two weeks feels like a lot to my brain. Usually this, that's how I teach. 'cause you can kind of see my full like content strategy come together more in two weeks than you can in one week.

But let's just say you're batching out one week at a time. You know, maybe Monday morning or Sunday night or whatever you wanna do. You log into the Instagram app, you go like you're gonna post these four posts or eight posts or whatever, and then you schedule them out. Like I said, right before you post, you scroll down to the bottom.

You'll see more options and then you'll see schedule. The downside of that is that it's not super duper intuitive as to where those posts live. Like if you logged into Meta Business Suite, it doesn't cross over, so like you're not going to see where those posts live. You have to find those posts in the, if you do that, you will find all your scheduled content.

If you navigate to your profile, then go to the three horizontal line hamburger menu in the top right. That's your settings. And then you will go into where it says professionals, account type and tools, and then scheduled content. That's where you will see, um, content that you've got scheduled out. Like I said, it's gonna, I can't remember the exact, like, you'll have to just play around with certain things that it won't let you schedule.

I think if it's got like, um, certain songs and certain stickers and features, you can't preschedule it. But if you like. Update your app or get a new phone or whatever, like all those drafts are gone. So I, that's why I like having it on a Google Doc and I would not schedule out more than like a week, maybe two at the absolute max.

And then just to kind of wrap up this episode, Pete, I wanna just go ahead and again talk about why, if you have the time, the most advantageous thing to do is to Yes, go ahead. Batch, create a week two, whatever. Have it pre-scheduled, like have it like ready to go. Just to manually log on and post it, because that is the time that you can like block out 10 to 15 minutes to reply to old comments.

I have so many people complain to me about not getting comments, and when I look on their feed, they've never replied to a single comment that they actually have gotten. So like why? What's anyone's incentive to comment on your stuff if you're not actually replying? Right? So just reminding you that this is like social media.

When you log on to actually post your posts, that's also a great time to go and do your outward engaging where you're like commenting on other local businesses posts and sharing to their stories. Um, you know, posting on your stories, your, your availability and doing that. But like I said, I don't want you to hear that and be like, I don't have time for that, and not post anything at all.

Like I said, that's the perfect scenario. That's where you're gonna see the most traction if you're doing it that way. But again, if you don't have time, you, that, that's how I would kind of like hack the pre-scheduling. So, okay. I hope this wasn't confusing. I, I just, I get this question all the time and I can't believe I've never answered it, but again, it's just because it's so, there's just not a great answer.

Well, actually the answer is like, it's there. The reason it's, you know, not easy to pre-schedule is, is by design. So please, if you still have questions after listening to this. DM me, I'm always available in my dms. If you are a current hub student listening to this, make sure that you watch your How to Batch, create two weeks worth of content lesson.

And um, I also have a screen share tutorial on how to schedule out the content in the Instagram app. So. I hope you have a wonderful day and thanks for being here. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast?

Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly a Cahill, that's C-A-H-I-L-L.

I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.