The end of real-time social media posts?

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Social media giant Instagram announced last month that it was allowing business users to schedule content through the scheduling software, Hootsuite. It has been a long time coming for marketers and social media managers everywhere, but does it mark the end of real-time sharing?

Scheduled content

Social media users using Twitter and Facebook have been able to schedule content for some time now, either through the platforms themselves or third-party scheduling software.
Posts, including videos and images can all be scheduled days, and even weeks, in advance and this allows users to manage and plan their content.

Scheduled stories

It’s not just the introduction of scheduled content that has started the end of real-time content. Social media platform Snapchat once put white borders around photos shared on stories that had been taken previously on a camera, and not through its in-app camera feature.
But last month the platform announced that it was stopping this feature, meaning users can take photos on their phone camera and share to their stories days later, as if it had just been taken.
This clearly indicates that there’s no timestamp or footprint on the content being shared. Twitter made a stand against this a few years ago, by buying up Tweetdeck and effectively closing the scheduling feature down. But today it seems less concerned.

Scheduled vs spontaneous social media

Scheduling is a helpful tool for any business that is managing multiple social media sites, but there is a danger that with the loss of real-time content, posts can become robotic.
On the flip side, spontaneous content is great when you have enough to time to do it, but social media can often get pushed to the back of the queue and then forgotten about.
A steady mix of the two can result in a well-managed, yet engaging social media feed, and often means you get the best of thought out, strategic posts as well as current, on-trend comments.
So, does it matter? Do you need to know when we wrote this blog?