Your sign to stop posting in real time

Most creatives, creators, and business owners will say the same thing:

“I did not get into this to become a social media expert.”

If you don’t want to spend more time on social media apps than absolutely necessary, you should probably schedule your posts. It saves you time and allows you to focus on socials when you want to, instead of each time a post needs to go out.

No matter how you feel about specific social sites, they may be critical to your business, and I’m all about lowering the barrier to entry.

If constantly sharing is zapping your energy, scheduling your posts in advance can allow you to dip in and gtfo when needed.

While most socials reward you for also engaging with other posts and generally being active on the platform, there’s no reason you can’t intentionally manage when that happens.

What a lot of folks don’t know is that you can schedule posts on most platforms for free. No third party, paid tools needed.

I’m going to walk through a few of them, how to schedule across platforms, and whether it’s worth upgrading to paid tools.

While you can schedule individual posts on each of those platforms separately, Meta provides a FREE tool to schedule across them all at once.

Meta Business Suite includes a built-in content planner that lets you schedule posts for:

Here’s what you need:

1️⃣ A Facebook Page - Not your personal profile, an actual Page. You don’t need to post on it, ever. You just need it to exist.

You can create a new page by logging into Facebook then visiting www.facebook.com/pages/create

2️⃣ An Instagram account connected to that Page

Once you’ve created the Facebook page, go into Instagram → Settings → Accounts Center → Accounts → Add Accounts → Connect your Facebook Page

3️⃣ A “Professional” Instagram account - Creator or Business (either works). Personal accounts can’t use Meta scheduling.

On your Insta profile, click the three lines in the upper-right to get into Settings then scroll down to For Professionals where it says Account Type and Tools.

You can switch your account to a Professional account and follow the prompts.

🥳

Now, whenever you’re in the Meta Business Suite you just look for the “Planner” area to schedule posts.

You can use it on desktop (easiest) at business.facebook.com/latest/content_calendar or through the mobile app.

If you need to adjust anything later, go back into the Planner and click the post to edit or reschedule.

TikTok does have a built-in scheduler but it’s much simpler than Meta’s. There’s no calendar view, no batch uploads, and you can only schedule about 10 days ahead. But if you just want to prep a few posts in advance without paying for another tool, it gets the job done.

The most basic of basic, LinkedIn lets you schedule a post for the future via the clock icon next to the post button. Easy.

If you want to see or edit your scheduled posts, click on the post area → click on the clock icon → View all scheduled posts.

If your content lives across more than two or three platforms or you need to plan weeks at a time, that’s when a paid tool may become worth it.

Native schedulers are fine for “I just need to get this posted,” but once you’re coordinating TikTok + Instagram + Facebook + LinkedIn (or running multiple accounts), you’ll immediately feel the friction.

Paid schedulers solve that by giving you one drag-and-drop content calendar, one place to store all your drafts, and one login for everything.

They also unlock long-range planning for launches, campaigns, and recurring content rhythms all in one space. Bouncing between native tools make it hard to visualize the big picture.

For most small businesses or solo creators, the best paid options are:

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