Social media can easily become a time sink when it’s used without clear focus. Small businesses that don’t have the marketing resources of larger companies can still use social media effectively as a vehicle for connecting with their audience, increasing engagement, driving traffic to their website, and boosting sales, without investing all their free time.
A careful allocation of resources and a concentrated effort are the keys to making social media work for your business. Measurable objectives, efficient strategies, and a solid understanding of where your audience is located on social media are also very important.
Do you struggle to find the time for social media or have a hard time keeping all your pages updated? We’d like to share with you some time-saving tips that will make Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest easier for you.
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Create content in advance
Having to come up with tweets or Facebook updates just before the hour comes for you to update your social pages not only takes time, but can interrupt your workflow. The brain needs as much as 30 minutes to regain the same level of attention it had before the interruption, and social media can easily fragment attention, leading to reduced productivity and wasted time.
A way to ward off the social interruptions that come with switching between platforms all the time is to create your social content one week or even a month in advance. You can always add to this content during the week, as you discover new bits worth sharing or respond to your audience, but the bulk of your content should be ready before the first posting of the week.
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Re-purpose existing content
Content such as blog posts, LinkedIn articles, or longer Facebook updates that are time sensitive can be re-purposed and shared multiple times. It takes a bit of creativity to craft different versions of a share, but it’s not hard.
The first share can be the title of the original piece, the second a paragraph or quote from the blog post / article / update, and the third a question that the content answers. In this way you can use existing content several times.
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Actively curate relevant content
It’s easier to curate content than to create it. More than that, it adds diversity to your social content and ensures that your updates are not all about your business or blog.
With apps and browser extensions like Evernote or Pocket, you can save content as you browse the web for future use. You can then use the content scheduling tools mentioned above to automate your content curation. Another benefit of curating content is that you can catch the eye of those who created it, who then may share yours in turn.
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Schedule updates
One of the most time-consuming aspects of social media is updating your profiles daily. While this can take as little as a few minutes per network, the different types of updates required and the switching back and forth between networks can add up to a lot of time.
A more effective approach is to devote an hour or two on a particular day of the week to scheduling updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the other networks you use. Social management tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite help you do this under the same dashboard. You can also use specialized tools like Facebook’s own business page scheduling feature.
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Limit your efforts to two or three platforms
Pareto’s 80/20 principle or the rule widely observed in nature and business that 80% of the results come from 20% of your actions applies to social media as well. You may be active on 10 social networks, but 2 of them probably bring you more traffic and more engagement than the other eight.
Look at your data using analytics built into your social networks of choice or Google Analytics to understand which websites work best for you. For some industries it’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. For others it could be Instagram and Pinterest. Once you know where the traffic and engagement comes from, you can focus your social efforts on those networks that can really make a difference.
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Auto-publish blog content across your social pages
One of the most effective ways to save time on social media is to automate low-value, repetitive tasks, like copy-pasting blog links to share them on different social networks. Blogging platforms like WordPress allow you to auto-publish your post at the same time on Facebook, Twitter, and other social accounts.
If you don’t use WordPress, you can try workarounds like social macros provided by IFTTT.com. Content publishing is one marketing processes that can be safely automated regardless of how you use social media.
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Use alerts to save time on responses
Another time-consuming aspect of managing multiple social media accounts is responding to mentions or joining in conversations that are relevant to your brand. While the mobile apps that most social networks provide can notify you when your Twitter handle gets mentioned or someone asks a question on your Facebook page, you have to interrupt your work to respond to these.
A more productive way to handle responses is by setting up brand alerts using Google Alerts. This enables you to get all alerts in one place. You can then respond to alerts at the same time within reasonable intervals, i.e. three or more times a day, in the morning, at noon, and in the evening.
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Outsource content creation
Social media marketing eats up a lot of content. Most networks require at least one update a day, with Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook is requiring even more updates. If you don’t have the time to create this content yourself, and your staff is either too busy with other tasks or doesn’t have the necessary skills to create engaging content, outsourcing is the best solution.
The benefits of keeping your social pages updated make the monthly cost of paying for content worthwhile. In the long term, the return on investment can be significant, to say nothing of the increase in your online presence and improved search engine ranking.
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Batch your social efforts
We already talked about the disruptive power of interruptions and how it is important to create and schedule content in advance and use automation whenever. Another strategy that can help you save time is batching social tasks. Switching gears all day between the fast-paced Twitter, steady Facebook, and the more sedate LinkedIn is not the most effective way to use your time.
Optimize results by batching similar social media tasks at the same hours. You can post content in the morning across all networks, curate & post more content in during your lunch break, and respond to non-urgent interactions in the evening.
This leaves only urgent interactions to be taken care of during the day, and if you channel all your support-related questions to one network only, i.e. Twitter or Facebook, with the right alerts/notifications you can easily keep them under control.
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Measure only what counts
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook offer you plenty of stats and insights into your social media performance. That doesn’t mean however that all those stats are equally important, or that you should track and monitor all of them daily.
Choose the metrics that matter most to your business based on the behavior of your audience. Metrics such as repeat visits, conversion rates, or total interactions can reflect the efficiency of your social media marketing better than total visits, follower count, or even shares. Another metric you need to pay attention to is customer lifetime value.
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Set up weekly reports
How often do you check the performance of your social media efforts? If you are checking it daily using analytics, you may be losing time that could be spent on more productive tasks. With Google Analytics and other similar tools you can set up weekly email reports that tell you about the traffic that social media is bringing you and more.
By turning reporting from a daily chore to a weekly round-up and assigning a day and a time for it, you can not only save time, but obsess less on the facts and focus more on the performance.
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Delegate social media management to an expert
The tips above will save you time, but you will still have to devote at least a few hours to managing your social media profiles effectively every week. What’s more, if the growing complexity of social media marketing makes you uneasy, that time is increased by the amount of reading and research you have to do constantly to use social tools effectively.
Delegating your social media management to an expert isn’t as costly as you may think, especially when you consider the exposure, traffic, and engagement you will gain when your social marketing is managed by a professional. Find out more about how social media management can help your small business grow.
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