Having a strong presence on social media is a great way for a business to connect with their customer base. But managing one or more social media accounts – and doing it well – can be a time consuming task that some small business owners struggle to schedule in their busy day. That’s why we’ve put together this list of ten time saving tips for managing social media.
1. Create a Content Calendar
Planning out the content you will post for a week or month in advance will not just save you time in the long run, it will help you avoid the perils of impulsive social media posting. Setting aside a day or two to write up future content is a lot like cooking your meals and freezing them. You save time, energy, and eat less fast food (post better content).
2. Use Social Media Management Tools
Using a third party dashboard like Hootsuite lets you take your pre-created content and schedule when it gets posted, in addition to providing a host of other valuable tools and analytics to help you better engage with your audience.
3. Select Social Media Sites for Your Business
You don’t need to be on every platform under the sun, just the ones that will best expose you to your customer base. Managing content across multiple accounts is time consuming, so figure out which sites will work best for your business.
4. Limit Multiple Accounts
Don’t overreach. It’s always better to have an extremely engaging presence on just one network, than to be posting watered down content across five or six. If you can’t do a great job across the board, limit the accounts you are managing until you can.
5. Share Others’ Content
If you aren’t already sharing content from other users, you should be. Sharing creates more exposure for your brand, and lets you engage better with your network. As an added bonus, sharing content saves you time on creating and posting your own original content.
6. Only Share Relevant and Helpful Content
Only about 20% of the content you post on social media should be overtly self-promotional. The rest should be entertaining or educational in nature. Remember, people don’t use social media to be sold to, and an advertisement heavy account is going to feel like spam to most. Focus on the quality of your content over the quantity of it. One great post can be shared again and again, gaining you more exposure than any ad could. 10 bad posts become easily filtered out background noise.
7. Designate Time for Social Media
Set aside time each week to manage your social media account. In addition to planning out the following week’s content, take some time to do things like replying to comments, and “liking” posts, if appropriate. Having a set block to focus on the smaller parts of social media engagement will keep it from being a daily drain on your time.
8. Hire a Social Media Manager
If you don’t think you have the time to properly manage your company’s social media, delegate the task to someone who can. Hiring a social media manager to periodically schedule content and manage your networks means you can focus on more pressing areas of your business.
9. Repost Content
Pay attention to what content performs well, and what doesn’t, and stick with what works. This doesn’t mean you should copy and paste old content verbatim, but you should give your audience more of what they want. Tweak the copy of successful posts, and expand on their ideas in other posts. When you pay attention to what works, you’ll find that creating good content ultimately takes less time and energy than creating bad content.
10. Use Social Media to Respond and Engage
It’s called Social Media after all! Half of the battle is engaging with your fans and creating a conversation. Responding to comments, sharing posts that mention your company, and “liking” your fans’ content can be just as effective as posting your own, and takes much less time and effort.
Get Started Today
Consult this list and pick out a handful of things that you can start doing immediately. If you aren’t sharing others’ content, and responding to comments, these are easy places to start. You can do them right now, in the next ten minutes, and see increased engagement with your brand. Next, based on your problem areas create a plan to incorporate the rest of these time saving tips into your social media strategy.
