Your church’s digital communication is like connecting with a friend. If you call infrequently, you tend to drift apart. If you speak too often, you might feel like the friendship requires too much of your attention. You may consider changing your phone number or letting the call go to voice mail.

The same tension can be found online. While you want to stay in contact with friends and share events from your church and life, you also don’t want to spam your Facebook feed with too much too often.

Consistency is key. Your church’s communication plan should consider the frequency in addition to the tone of your communications. Consider when content will be posted, and how often (daily, weekly or a few times a week), and what sort of content will be shared. Just as infrequent posting says something about your community so does posting too often.

This can be a challenging task. Luckily, there are tools to help you schedule your social media posts so you can plan ahead instead of constantly considering when and what to post.

The first tool at our disposal is the native built-in scheduler on Facebook. This simple tool lets you load a series of posts ahead of time – say before a vacation or the busy Christmas season. This tool can be found in the drop-down menu next to the publish button on your page. Instead of publishing the post, simply schedule it.

Hootesuite.com has been my go-to for scheduling and managing social media accounts for years. I use the free version, which allows me to manage multiple social media platforms at once including Twitter and Facebook and schedule posts across multiple streams. The free version allows you to manage three different accounts through one convenient dashboard.

Another solution that has recently appeared on my radar is Buffer.com. The free version of Buffer is wonderful for scheduling posts but the dashboard only manages a single Facebook account. Despite this limitation, Buffer is a great solution for a church as it can schedule posts for your Facebook page, Twitter and Instagram accounts. If you happen to manage multiple Facebook pages, Twitter or Instagram accounts, you will need to upgrade to a paid version.

By scheduling posts in advance, you only need an hour or two a month to create consistency and an active social media presence. Much of the work of sharing content and promoting events can be scheduled in advance, freeing you from being tethered to your phone or computer daily. Think of it like mailing a letter, once you have placed it in the mailbox, you can walk away knowing it will be delivered, freeing you to focus on other areas of ministry while keeping your social media accounts consistently active.