Coaches, Save Time on Social Media | How to Batch Your Baseball or Softball Posts Like a Pro and The Best Scheduler for Our Game

Batching your social media posts is a must for baseball and softball coaches looking to grow their business.

If you feed the hungry social media algorithms a steady diet of quality posts, likes, and comments, you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

If you go from posting less than one post per week to posting at least once a week, you should expect almost double your follower growth rate. Similarly, your growth rate can double again if you move to posting once a day. 

This is assuming that you can maintain the same quality in your posts as you increase their regularity. 

All this consistency in the content’s calibur and its output is incredibly time-consuming. 

And if you’re a team coach, private lessons instructor, or solopreneur looking to grow your name, brand, or business in the baseball or softball industry, time is your most precious commodity. 

Trying to ideate and create needle-moving new posts every day, or every few days sucks way too much time to be sustainable long term.   

Enter social media scheduling tools.

These tools allow you to pre-schedule posts to come out exactly when your audience is most active on the platform.

Such schedulers have become a necessary asset for all brands and businesses looking to use social platforms for marketing and growth. 

But, without a solid post batching workflow, the best scheduler in the world is useless. 

Read on to learn exactly what all this means and, more importantly, to learn step-by-step how to do it like a pro. 

Now, let’s slide headfirst into simplifying your social media workflow and having more time to do the things you actually enjoy – like teaching the next generation of ballplayers.

#Benefits of Scheduling Tools for Baseball and Softball Creators

To repeat, “Consistency” is the answer to the question “What is the biggest difference between social media accounts that grow and those that do not?”  

It’s also the answer to a lot of questions in baseball and softball, as all great coaches know.

But in regards to social, we mean having: 

• a consistent theme – what are your posts about and what do they look like?
• a consistent brand voice – how do you communicate with your audience?
• a consistent posting schedule – when are you most likely to be uploading? 

All of this adds up to letting your audience know what to expect from you or your business, and, ultimately, it strengthens your credibility. 

The worst thing you can do is slap something together half-baked and last minute just for the sake of posting something. 

Using a scheduler makes all this consistency easier to accomplish. 

It’s easier to organize your picture and video assets – both the one’s you’ve created and those you’ve curated from elsewhere – in one place.

It’s easier to visualize the look and vibe, AKA aesthetic, of your Instagram, for example, with a scheduler. 
It allows you to realize what does and doesn’t belong and, more importantly, how each asset or style fits in with your overall goals as a brand or business.  

It’s easier to then look at these visual assets that you’ve collected and begin writing feed captions for them all at once. 

It’s also easier to have pre-made sets of hashtags that have already been well-researched and match the different content types you plan on posting on each social media platform. 

It’s a great feeling to just paste in 2 or 20 hashtags – depending on which social media we’re talking about – that you already know are optimized to give your brand the most reach.

Finally, it’s easier to optimize your social media posting times when you don’t have to be personally available to post at those specific days and times manually. 

No one wants to adjust their entire life around posting, nor do they have to. 

If Instagram is your main channel, just look at your Instagram Insights – if you have a business account set up, which you should – and see the audience metrics that tell you precisely the days and times when your followers are most active on the platform. 

Then, set up your schedule accordingly. 

Just in case you were wondering. We are only using Instagram as our main example for the remainder of this guide, because so many coaches in our industry are looking to grow there in the current year. 

But all the same advice applies equally to any social media platform you wish to grow on. 

For example, both Twitter and TikTok give users the option to have a business account and receive all important metrics and insights.  

Side Note:

If you’re wondering why this posting time thing is so important, consider that Instagram currently prioritizes content on people’s feeds that it terms as “new.” 

This means that you have the best chance of reaching people in your audience – and, even better, people who are similar to them – by posting your stuff while they are all actively scrolling. 

But, all of that said, using a scheduler is not a magic bullet. There are none of those lying around. 

Just to be clear, “easier” means something like: “Save time by adding efficiency.” 

It does not mean: “Do way less work and still succeed.” 

So, before we go over your best scheduler options, let’s talk about batching prerequisites.

#The Three Things That Coaches Need to Do Before They Can Batch Their Posts

Again, mostly all the same steps and tactics explained below will apply to any social media platform you wish to batch posts for.

But we decided it would be more useful to get super nitty gritty and specific about one platform, Instagram, than to make this guide more general purpose for all of them. 

Okay, all you technically need to get started with any Instagram scheduler is a smart device, a working internet connection, and an Instagram Business profile. 

To set up your Business profile, all you need to do is:

• Sign into your existing Instagram account
• Go on your profile
• Tap on the three horizontal lines icon on the top right
• Then tap Settings
• Then tap Account
• The tap Switch to Professional Account. 

You'll be prompted to choose between having a Creator account or Business – in the case of professional baseball and softball entrepreneurs, we usually recommend picking Business.

Then, depending on the scheduling tool you decide to opt for, you'll either receive a push notification reminding you to copy and paste the already-crafted Instagram post to upload it yourself manually, or the tool will automatically be posting the pre-scheduled content on your behalf without you having to do anything.

But this is just the barest minimum of what you need.

To actually get the most out of any scheduler, you must do some serious leg work before you even begin using it. 

In fact, there are three prerequisite steps for you to complete even before you can start batching posts together. 

Here’s that step-by-step.

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#1. Have a brand and content strategy in place.

Luckily, we’ve written a ton of resources for baseball and softball pros to check out on these very topics:

• The Ultimate Guide to Establishing Your Baseball or Softball Coaching Brand | Level-up Fast
• The Ultimate Guide to Growth Hacking Strategies and Tactics for Baseball and Softball Businesses
• The Ultimate Guide on How to Use Instagram for Your Baseball or Softball Brand | Beginner to Pro Coach on Social in Six Innings
• Two Must-Haves for Baseball and Softball Coaches to Grow Their Social Media Accounts

#2. Organize your media

First things first – or second, in this case. 

You need to put all the pictures and videos that you have relating to your brand or business into one place – usually starting with their date.

And then, from there, further organize them into labeled buckets based on the types of content themes that make up your specific strategy. 

This is why a content strategy must always come first. It underpins all other steps and choices you’ll make. 

For many who have devoted themselves to high-level baseball and softball expertise, file organization has likely never been a priority.

Trust us, we understand.

But as a solopreneur or any small business owner, you need to be able to quickly find and use all images or videos that you took the time to capture or save.

Again, you can just even start organizing within your iPhone’s camera roll. 

But, as you begin creating more and more content for social media, you may want to get things systematized on your computer instead.  

Once you have this baseline of organization in the bag, you will then label further folders – and maybe even add tags – to individual pictures or videos according to how they fit into your overall content themes.

But that all sounds pretty vague. So let’s illustrate what all this means in detail.

#Example content strategy for instructors

For example, say you’re a softball pitching instructor whose goal is to get more in-person and remote lesson clients while also getting more aspiring pitchers to purchase your “Master the Riseball” online video course that you created and sell.

Between Instagram Feed posts, Stories, and Reels you post a strategic mixture of the following each week: 

1. Pitching drills that your students demonstrate on film.
2. Pitching technique breakdowns using analysis tools to markup and talk about what top collegiate players and WPF pros are doing right.
3. Videos of in-game successes that your students shared with you and that demonstrate their hard work and your teaching paying off.
4. Pictures of new velocity milestones your students have reached – like them holding up a pocket radar score, maybe.
5. Inspirational or educational image or video posts that you’ve curated from other figures in the softball or baseball world.
   
   You likely saved these in Instagram when you first came across them and then screenshotted or screen recorded them so that they can be in your phone’s camera roll or on your computer.
   
6. Short selected clips from your “Master the Riseball” course videos to tease and advertise its awesomeness.
   
   P.s. If you’re curious about learning literally everything there is to know when it comes to creating and marketing a baseball or softball course today, this ultimate video course creation guide we put together is can’t miss.
   

By the way, this “example” has the makings of a completely viable Instagram content strategy for any coach or brand that does private instruction, so feel free to tweak, copy, and paste it for yourself.

Now each of these six different content themes bulleted above will require its own labeled bucket. 

We’re using the word “bucket,” because it's neutral for any system, but depending on how and where you’ve chosen to organize things online, the word “folders” here could also be appropriate.    

We recommend even going a step further and color tagging each individual asset within each bucket to keep track of which images or videos you’ve used already and which ones you haven’t. 

But if that sounds at all confusing, just ignore it for the time being.

The content buckets from the above pitching coach example, in order, could be instead titled:

• Student Pitching Drills
• Pitching Breakdowns
• Success Stories
• MPH Personal Bests
• Curated Inspiration
• Video Course Sample Clips 

Ultimately, you’ll find the file organization set up that works best for your needs. But we hope this helps. 

As in most things, do the work upfront and it will pay huge dividends later down the line.

#3. Bucket your hashtags

We alluded to this step earlier. 

Once you have your content strategy, which gives you the various buckets that your content will fall into, you can then begin researching and creating one set of hashtags that goes with each major bucket. 

Proper hashtag mixes based on search popularity and brand goals are an art that requires its own guide.

And we wrote that guide in our ultimate baseball and softball hashtag resource, so check it out if you’re interested in mastering this often neglected facet of the Instagram game. 

Going back to our earlier Instagram pitching coach example, she would want to start by creating a series of hashtags that relate to her first bucket, “Student Pitching Drills,” like so:

#pitchingdrills #fastpitchdrills #pitchingstudent #softballpitchdrills #softballdrills #fastpitchtraining #softballlessons #pitchinglessons #pitcher #travelball #travelsoftball #softballmoms #travelballdads #softballdads #softballers #softballgirls #softballlife #onlinelessons #privateinstruction #youthsports 

You may now know that Instagram lets you put up to 30 hashtags on every feed post. 

However, we only included 20 hashtags in the example above for a good reason. These 20 hashtags are meant to work for everything in that specific bucket as a baseline. 

When creating ready-made hashtags for each content bucket, you will want to leave around 5-10 spaces for hashtags that are more specific to each individual post. 

Here’s some questions to help you uncover those post-dependent hashtags:

• What names might describe the actual pitching drill?
• Does this drill help improve a particular pitch or some other important mechanic?
• What else might describe what’s seen in the video?
• Does the coach have any branded hashtags that she always uses?
• And where was this video filmed? The algorithm likes when you add location-based hashtags, so what city, state, batting cage, or park was it? 

If you were that hypothetical softball pitching coach that we keep referencing, you would then repeat this hashtag exercise for every one of your six content buckets.

Again, put in the work during 1 long morning or afternoon, and reap the benefits for weeks. 

Unfortunately, these bucketed hashtags will need to be refreshed a bit every few weeks, so that Instagram doesn’t think you’re spamming with all your consistency – but doing so is quick and easy work once a workflow like what we’re recommending has been created.

#How Baseball and Softball Coaches Can Batch Instagram Posts – Five Simple Steps

Now that you’ve completed the prerequisite steps 1-3 detailed above, it’s time to actually batch your Instagram posts, so they can finally be scheduled.  

To keep things simple, let’s return to our same softball pitching coach example.

Remember, she was trying to schedule her 6 posts just one week ahead of time. 

Her batching steps would be:

1. Choose the 6 visual assets she wants to use from her 6 designated content buckets that week. 
2. Edit or stylize these 6 visual assets as she likes to fit her brand. 
   
   She’d use any photo or video editor that she prefers. And employ something like Canva to add her logo, text, and icons, until every image is undeniably coming from her and her brand.
   
3. Take each set of pre-made, bucketed hashtags and add 5-10 unique hashtags that are relevant to each individual post, as explained above.
   
4. Write all 6 of her captions in one go – cross-checking them to ensure that the brand voice and tone are consistent and that each one offers a clear call-to-action (CTA) for her followers to do something specific. 
   
   This call can just be a small audience ask, but doing so can have a major effect on your engagement. 
   
   Caption CTA examples for her student pitching drill might include: “Double tap if you’re trying this drill,” “Tag a fellow pitcher who should try this,” “Have you tried this drill before?”
   
5. Figure out which posts go on which day. Basically, their posting order and how they’ll look together in her feed.
   

Okay, you are now ready to actually use a scheduler.

All this organization of creative images and videos and writing copy – meaning the captions and hashtags – seems boring. And it sort of is. 

It’s also a major portion of what professional social media marketers do all day. 

Let’s be super clear, again: 

The three pre-emptive baseline steps followed by the five actual batching steps explained above must be done no matter what Instagram scheduler you use.

But, full disclosure, the people that build schedulers know these are the necessary steps, so they’ve created features to help you accomplish almost all of them faster and easier.

#What Content Can Professional Coaches Actually Pre-Schedule

This depends on the specific scheduling tool you go for.

Some tools will let you post everything ranging from Instagram Stories to Instagram Carousel posts, AKA, posts that have the option to swipe right or left to see multiple images or videos. 

While other schedulers have limited features and will only allow for a single item – either one image or one video – to be posted at a time.

In our short list of options below, we’ve chosen reliable and feature-rich schedulers that we’ve actually used ourselves. 

There are free and almost-free options out there that can be found by Googling “free social media scheduling tool,” if you’re curious.  

But, in our experience, these free software tools tend to:

• Go in and out of business regularly
• Have limited feature capabilities
• Have limited or no customer support and online how-to’s
• Be plagued with technical issues preventing your posts from actually getting published when you need them to. 

Okay, let’s dive in. 

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#What Instagram Scheduler To Choose for Baseball and Softball Content

When you’re comparing schedulers, you'll want to consider several main points: 

• What is your budget?
• Which social media platform or platforms do you want it for?
• How easy is it to use?
• Which features do you care most about?

There's a vast array of schedulers you can choose from on the market. You'll have to find the one that suits your needs and lifestyle the most, and that's what we'll help you figure out below.

Let’s jump in.

#Later

Despite supporting Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, Later's main focal point is Instagram. 

Later is a top choice for private instructors, coaches, and solopreneurs. It is easy to use and has tons of explainer videos and help documents if you get lost. 

Their Starter plan starts at $15 per month with 1 profile per social account with 30 posts each month, per platform.

And you’ll see soon that it’s the most affordable of all the options we’ve put together. 

And their Premium plan is $40 per month for 3 profiles per social account and 150 posts each month, per platform. 

Features include:

• A visual content calendar that lets you see how your post will look next to each other in your feed.
• Drag and drop images for all scheduling.
  
• Analytic tools for tracking content performance and giving you hints on the best times to be posting. 
  
• Link in bio tool. If, for example, you have a SeamsUp profile and a website, and you also want to offer affiliate products, this is an almost must-have feature that solves the single-link per account dilemma of Instagram.
  
• Content Library, for storage available on the go. Basically, you can use Later as the storage and organizer of your visual assets instead of your phone or elsewhere on your computer.
  
• User-generated content collector. It links to your Instagram and makes it so every post you save goes directly into your content library. This is great for private instructors who want to find and organize all of the social proof of improvement from their clients’ posts or share inspiration and education from other figures in the sport.
  
• Instagram Reels can be auto-published.
  
• Instagram Stories can be pre-scheduled.
  
• It now has automated posting for carousels, AKA multi-image posts.
  

#Hootsuite

With over 15 million users choosing their services, Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools in existence and for good reason. 

It has emerged as the biggest player in a fairly crowded market. And many large brands turn to Hootsuite to schedule their posts across all major platforms. 

Hootsuite supports scheduling posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Their Professional plan starts at $49 per month with:

• Unlimited scheduling
• 10 social media profiles and 1 user
• Automated post scheduling
• Basic analytics
• Live chat support if you get stuck
• 30-days free trial

And their Team plan at $129 per month includes:

• Unlimited scheduling
• 20 social media profiles and 3 users
• Custom analytics 
• User permissions
• Custom branded URL
• 30-days free trial

Hootsuite does not support:

• Adding location, tagging people directly in the scheduling process
• First comment posting

#Sked Social

Sked Social markets themselves as the “#1 All-in-one Instagram Tool,” and in terms of what you can do with it, we gotta admit that it is well worth its self-proclaimed title. 

If you're basically looking for an all-in-one app that can do all the work that goes into Instagram-specific content uploading for you, then there may not be an option in the market more suitable to do the job than Sked Social.

One key difference between Sked Social and the other two schedulers we’ve looked at above is that it really only allows you to create different types of Instagram posts and then it has the ability to publish those Instagram posts on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.

The other schedulers allow you create and post individually to each social media platform, so things like your post’s captions can be customized to make sense in the context of each unique platform. 

So with Sked social, you wouldn't want to say something like “Check the link in bio”, as that might not be the best CTA or sound as native on Facebook or LinkedIn – where you’re able to simply put links into posts.   

But, limitations aside, their Instagram features tick about every box you’d want. 

Their pricing for their Fundamental plan is at $25 per month. 

Its features include:

• Unlimited users – instead of a single user that other schedulers offer.
• Drag and drop visual planner and social media calendar that gives you a preview of your posts prior to being posted, similar to Later.
• Automated Feed posting
• Queueing your content in time slots and automatically posting them: schedule recurring posts by simply picking out your preferred times
• Carousel posts
• Instagram Reels can be auto-published
• Instagram Stories planned and scheduled
• Link in bio customization
• Exporting and sharing data
• First comment hashtag posting
• A Hashtag manager that makes creating and adding your hashtag buckets a breeze
• Adding location, products, and tagging users to your posts directly while scheduling
• Built-in photo editor
• Customizable timezones for better audience targeting within posts
• Analytic tools: story insights, post insights, and audience insights
• Best times to post suggestions
• Canva in-app integration
• 7-day free trial

#Wrapping on How to Save Time on Social Media for Baseball and Softball Entrepreneurs

And this concludes our post-batching and Instagram schedulers guide. 

We hope that this will have helped you get a better idea of which management tool would be best suited for you and your business. 

But software tools and popular social media platforms change fairly regularly. But utilizing logic and systems for organizing and mass-creating content have been essentially the same for decades. 

So, most importantly, we hope you’ve learned how to create and post consistently great content for your brand – wherever that content ends up living in the next ten years.

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