Social media is a potent tool for building your brand and business. With new tools and features being regularly released across all platforms, social media and digital marketing are more competitive than ever.
Managing your business’s social media marketing can easily become a big time suck.
And let’s be honest, most businesses don’t have big budgets to spend on employing a team of people to run their social media operations.
Creating a simple and productive management system will ensure you get the most out of every minute, getting the most done in the shortest time.
Here are the best techniques to manage your business’s social media.
PUT YOUR PLATFORMS IN ORDER
There are a wide variety of social networking sites available online. Many people may be duped into believing they must be active across all platforms in order to have an impact. This is simply not true.
Every social media platform has distinct clients that might or might not match your own audience. Give more importance to the channels you believe will best connect with your target audience. What social media channels does your intended audience prefer? Focus on those platforms and make yourself stand out after you have the answer to that question.
CREATE A CONTENT PLAN
Want to save even more time? Then it’s time to get writing!
Take one day during the month to create and curate content for the rest of the month or months ahead. This way, all you need to do is check in for comments once the post is published. Creating a content plan for the month ahead will be a huge time saver for you. Plus batching this work means you’ll be focused and engaged when you’re writing, which is going to mean you create better content!
Bonus tip: If there is a day when something needs to be scheduled right away, you can just slide the content into the planner without changing anything afterwards.
TIME TO GET SCHEDULING
Now that you’ve written all your social media content ahead of time, use a scheduler to automatically post all those updates to your accounts. There are schedulers out there that allow you to upload and schedule content for days, weeks and months in advance.
You can use services like Buffer, Later or Hootsuite to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Pinterest. These tools will save you from having to publish content to each profile individually so it is a great tool to increase efficiency and productivity.
DON’T SPEND TIME SOLELY ON ENGAGEMENT
Engaging with donors and followers is important. But do you often feel like engaging is taking up too much of your valuable time? Instead of spending countless hours replying to tweets, checking your Instagram feed, or responding to direct messages on Facebook, find ways to multitask.
Try engaging with followers only when you are doing another task, such as walking the dog or listening to a podcast. This will ensure you don’t get sucked into the social media rabbit hole.
TEMPLATES ARE YOUR FRIEND
Templates are a secret weapon for saving time on your social media marketing. Not only do they save time, but they also make your account look branded, polished, and professional.
One of our favourites to use is Canva; they have templates for just about anything—social media posts, ads, stories, and videos to showcase your products or services. Once you start creating, you can save even more time by designing new content from previous posts.
As you can see, there are a few tips and tricks to make your day less about cramming time between social media platforms and more about making vital connections with your audience. Try to select and test a few to see what works for you.
Don’t try to incorporate too many changes at once. It takes time to build and manage a successful social media strategy.
Subscribe to our newsletter and receive tips, hacks, free resources and much more every week.