How to Schedule Your Social Media Posts *TEMPLATE*

As a race director, do you often keep a running list of all of the cool things you would like to share on social media about your race…in your head? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. With everything that you have to keep up with on a daily basis, it can be hard to take a second to come up with a good message and post when the moment strikes.

The secret to posting regularly and meaningfully, as with many areas of managing a race, is to plan ahead, be organized and make a commitment to achieve your goal. What does this look like for your social media marketing? It’s, quite simply, knowing your race, creating a schedule posts and pre-posting them in a timely fashion.

What to Post

It’s difficult for anyone to tell you exactly what you should post and when. Your race is unique, with its own special nuances, team, goals and audience. With that in mind, you will have a ton of great stuff to post, trust us!

Before you begin with the actual posts, create a fast list of what your audience would love to know or see about your event. Perhaps you have a fresh team – they’d be great to highlight, for example, every other Tuesday with the hashtag #TeamTuesday.

What else could you post about?

• Cool race location – Know cool facts that people would like to know about it? What about new developments around the area? You can take pics, do a live video or post a relevant article to get people excited about the location.
• Updates on the race – Maybe you have a meeting with your venue, food vendor, permitting… take note of these milestones and plan to post those through pictures and words.
• Swag – Medals, awards, cool collateral included in bags. Second to the actual racing part of an event, participants loooove their swag, so get them excited about it!
• Registration milestones
• Special discounts
• Sponsors and partners
• Advice about training, prep for the race, etc.

Create Your Schedule

Now for the fun part! Start creating your schedule of posts. It can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, why reinvent the wheel, when we have one to share with you? (You’re welcome!)

It’s recommended that you post at least once a day, so for the purposes of this particular schedule, you can do one post per day. Determine from your past social media analytics (you can take a look in Facebook Insights on your page) when the best time of day to post is for you.

To complete the schedule, first fill in all dates that you would like to post through about one week after race day. Then, you’ll want to determine important dates for your race like when registration opens, when early registration ends, when registration will end one week out, reminders about parking, directions – anything to do with the event that must be communicated at a particular time.

Start filling those days out first with these posts. For images, save the ones that you’d like to use with the date of the post as the filename (don’t forget where you saved them!). You might just use great photos from past races or have a graphic designer design a few for you.

Next, determine if you have particular days you’d like to post something. For example, every Monday could be a #MotivationMonday quote image, story with image or a #MusicMonday playlist for training or for the day of the event that you suggest for your participants. Tuesdays could be feature a training or gear tip. Wednesdays, you can honor sponsors, etc.

Don’t be afraid if you have holes in your calendar. You’ll probably have plenty to post on things that happen on the fly.

Set It and Forget It

How’s your schedule looking? Pretty exciting, right? Now, how are you going to actually make sure that you get all of these great posts live when they need to be? By pre-scheduling posts.

In Facebook, it’s super easy to do. Give yourself a few hours to do this one day before things get super busy for you. Simply copy and paste your copy into a timeline post on your race page. Attach your image, then hit the down arrow next to the “Publish” button. Click on “Schedule, select a date and time and voila! It’s set to go out.

Posting consistently and often will help keep your current and potential participants engaged on a regular basis and ensure you don’t miss any information that they could find useful. It also helps you connect more meaningfully leading all the way up to race day and even after. Social media doesn’t have to be a pain for you as a race director and, hopefully with our advice, it can actually be more fun!