WHICH OF THESE ARE YOU?
- A social media manager handling multiple accounts?
- A business owner DIYing your social media?
It’s all about managing and maintaining social media. It’s a big part of doing business today. It’s where your customers are. Your prospects and clients spend their time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on.
But social media takes time to do. And whether you’re a social media manager or an entrepreneur, you want to save as much time as possible managing those social media accounts.
AS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER:
- You want to hit KPIs with minimal effort.
- You want to impress your stakeholders.
AS A BUSINESS OWNER:
- It helps when more tasks are on autopilot.
- You can spend your time on strategy if you take your hands off repetitive tasks.
Both groups want the same thing! You want more time for other things that your tools can’t automate. Do you not?
With the repetitive tasks covered, you can spend more time with your family, practicing art, or building new things.
Luckily for all of us, we now have social media tools that make lives a lot easier. Just imagine how it’s like back in the day when everything had to be done manually.
4 MAJOR PROCESSES OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND TIME-SAVING TOOLS YOU CAN USE
The 4 major processes of social media a campaign are important. It’s how you can keep your tasks organized to avoid being too hectic.
Understanding this entire system with social media tools can save you a lot of time.
Why? Without mapping all these tasks out, you’re performing ad hoc activities. With a clear view of your entire social media marketing, you’ll be in the position to hire, automate, and optimize.
LISTENING
Your customer publishes on social media. They talk about the things they want. Problems they have. What they need the most. You should listen where they share the most.
Tools you can use for listening: Hootsuite, Buzzsumo, Tweetdeck
Using these tools:
- You can listen to the web and the social space to see what’s being said about your company, competitors and topics of interest.
- You can get more leads by understanding problems that people have.
- You can identify new prospects.
- Identify influencers in your niche.
- Discover where your potential customers hang out.
- Get feedback on services and products.
CONTENT CREATION
Written and visual content is the life of any social media site. This is why you need to have a continuous flow of good and creative content and images.
Tools you can use for content creation: SwiftlySocial, Canva
Using these tools:
- You can produce quality content that drives engagement.
- Convert written posts into infographics, and vise versa.
- Reproduce your most popular content to create engaging new content.
PUBLISHING
After the creative planning and posting is the publishing. With social media tools, publishing can be painless and can be scheduled. One setup and all your content are good to post.
Tools you can use for publishing: Buffer, MeetEdgar
Using these tools:
- Everything that needs to be published can be done in one dashboard.
- You can schedule future posts so you don’t have to do it a day at a time.
- You keep your site alive with regular posts.
- You can be updated about comments and mentions of your brand.
ANALYTICS
This is where you can track how effective your campaign is. Tweaking existing ones, prioritizing what already works and what should be changed.
Tools you can for use for analytics: Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Google Analytics
Using these tools:
- You can monitor which of your campaign drives the most traffic.
- Revise campaigns that aren’t bringing in new leads to your website.
- Keep track of what people are looking for and what they’re clicking on.
Here are additional social media tips and tools you can use to save time on listing, content creation, publishing and analytics:
4 TIME-SAVING TIPS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS
Now, that we’ve established the complete social media workflow, let’s move on to the time-saving tips.
You know that you gotta free up your calendar. With today’s modern technology, you can focus more on your content, rather than the social media chores.
Check out these 4 tips and testimonials from social media experts!
TIP #1: PLAN
You will be wasting a lot of time on social media if you start operating without any plan or focus.
There are lots of ways you can use social media for business, or to run your campaign. But not all of those are likely to work out. Just because it’s working for other people doesn’t mean it will also fit your current strategy. Pick only those strategies that WORK for you.
Pick 1 up to 3 platforms to focus your campaign on. While it’s good to experiment with new social networks, it’s also vital that you build your work systems around your top social platforms. It’s better to focus on your chosen platform and be proficient at them, so you can save valuable time.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, believes in channel plan:
Most likely, your goals are different on each social platform. Since that’s the case, the content you develop for that platform needs to be different as well. Here are the components for your channel plan.
- The Channel (For example, Facebook.)
- The Persona (Who are you specifically targeting? Please choose one.)
- The Goal (Is it a sales goal, cost-savings goal or are you trying to create a better customer experience?)
- Primary Content Type (Textual, video, infographics?)
- Structure (What does a general post look like?)
- Tone (Playful, sarcastic?)
- Channel Integration (How will this channel work with your other channels for maximum impact?)
- Desired Action (What user behavior do you want to achieve?)
- Editorial Plan (Every channel needs its own editorial calendar.)
TIP #2: SCHEDULE
Doing the right things at the right time is the secret.
Schedule your posts when the majority of your followers are on social media. For example, for business people, that will be Monday until Friday. But don’t just take our word for it. Check Google Analytics or similar tools to see when you are getting the most engagement and traffic on social media.
Scheduling ahead of time is also another great practice. This is why you have automated tools that can schedule the posts for you for a later time.Remember to post interesting content that will generate engagement and are likely to be shared by others.
John Lee Dumas, founder and host of EntrepreneurOnFire, is all about scheduling:
You can also schedule repeat posts indefinitely, so your content schedule never runs dry. Plus Edgar allows you to upload custom images for your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts.
As you build your content library, update your schedule with the categories you want to release and when. Then let Edgar take care of the rest.
Leveraging a social media scheduler like Edgar has saved me time, helped me grasp the big picture when it comes to my social media marketing strategy and allowed me to stay on top of my game when it comes to delivering valuable content to Fire Nation.
TIP #3: AUTOMATE
Automation using tools is among the best things that happened to social media. It’s a big time saver for any social media manager or business owner.
The objective for automation is to be efficient, to save time. Not to spam. Be sure that you are not spamming your customers with constant posts that can get you blocked. Don’t abuse automated tools.
Part of automating is to set up alerts. Alert for mentions of your brand. For when someone replies to your post or when your post is shared.
Rich Brooks, president of Flyte New Media, suggests automating your content creation to rock your social media campaign:
If you run a small business, creating or curating content can be relegated to the back burner. The problem is that an erratic publishing schedule can alienate your audience and break trust. There’s a way around this.
Schedule a baseline of curated content. If you want to rock your social media marketing, you still need to create and curate your own posts, as well as engage with your audience. However, this tool lets you stay in front of your audience even when you’re making sales calls, writing proposals and brewing that second pot of coffee.
TIP #4: TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
Advanced tools and techniques not only maximizes your social media reach, it also can save you a lot of time.
- Make use of plugins, like Yoast SEO, to optimize your site for social media shares.
- Get your own link shortener, to create your very own signature.
- Share your posts to online communities like MarketMe to reach a wide audience.
- SwiftlySocial can reproduce your best content to create more social media posts.
- Keep track of your most shared content. Finally, consolidate all your social media activities in one dashboard so you don’t have to visit different dashboards individually.
Lynette Young, AWeber content marketing manager, uses a time-tracking tool to improve daily productivity.
How much time do you spend crafting blog posts? Sending emails? Sitting in meetings?
Even if you have a good idea of where you’re spending the bulk of your time, you may often feel there simply aren’t enough hours in your day. Getting a handle on time management is a huge challenge for business owners.
Try a time-tracking tool like RescueTime to improve your daily productivity and devote more time to the areas that need it most.
For example, let’s say you spend a great deal of time interacting on Facebook and Twitter, but you’re not seeing a lot of results. Meanwhile, your email marketing campaigns are intermittent at best, although you know the results are there for the taking.
Adjust your daily schedule so you spend more time on email marketing and see if it drives more sales. Remember, digital marketing depends on the trifecta of social, blog and email. If you neglect any one of them, your entire strategy could suffer. However, give them each a little love, and you might just see explosive growth.
It’s all about finding a balance that works for you and your business.
OVER TO YOU
Whether you’re a social media manager handling multiple accounts or a business owner DIYing your social media, it helps to automate things that tools can perform. That’s why we have them!
Once you perfect the use of social media tools and the process, you can hit KPIs without breaking a sweat.
The best part of it all is that you get to spend more personal time on things that require your creative judgment.
Actionable tip: Want to save 3 hours a week? Of course, you do! Enter your article URL here to automatically produce social media posts!