Trying to stay up to date with all of the latest trends and developments on social media is an around the clock job that simply never ends. The world of social media is constantly changing and evolving, what’s trending today will be old news by tomorrow and trying to stay on top of everything is near impossible.
Managing social media accounts is a never-ending job that can quickly eat up your time. It’s easy to put aside half an hour a day to check through your social media accounts and next thing you know the morning is gone. Social media can be a black hole that will consume all of your time if you aren’t careful. To help you regain control of your day here are 5 hacks that will help you save time on your social media marketing.
1. Schedule everything
If you are managing multiple accounts across a number of social media platforms you will soon realise that a huge percentage of your time is spent posting to all of your accounts. Constantly swapping between accounts and platforms is extremely time-consuming, and can quickly become confusing if you manage a lot of accounts.
Planning and scheduling your posts in advance is something that every social media marketer should be doing to help streamline their workflow. There are a number of great tools available, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social, that will allow you to schedule posts to all of your social media accounts from one place meaning you don’t have to keep opening then closing your various accounts. Alternatively, certain platforms allow scheduling from within their own platform. For example, Facebook will allow you to schedule posts from within the platform itself, and TweetDeck is a Twitter-owned product that allows scheduling.
Ultimately, you will find a way that works best for your personal requirements, but by spending an hour or so at the end of the week to schedule all of you posts for the next week makes the whole process easier.
2. Prioritise your social networks
It’s great to show that you have a presence across all social media platforms, but if time constraints are an issue you have to consider if it is really worth it. Prioritising what platforms drive the best results and are the most effective for your business allows you to use your time effectively. If you spend a few hours a week updating your brand’s Instagram page but you get very little engagement and your customers aren’t using Instagram, is it really worth it? This is time that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
While it’s good to be able to have a presence across all social media platforms, if your customers aren’t using a certain network then you might want to reconsider and alter your social media marketing strategy.
3. Work in batches
Batching is the process of spending longer periods of time completing a task less regularly as opposed to working on something for 15-20 minutes a couple of times a day. This is an extremely useful concept for high volume tasks such as scheduling social posts and curating content. If you schedule your posts daily you might find that it takes you half an hour to find, draft, and schedule your posts for that day. Whereas, for example, if you spend a few hours on a Friday afternoon organising your social media posts for the next week you will only have to spend a couple of minutes a day checking your accounts.
Working in batches might not necessarily cut down your overall time spent on social media management, but it helps limit the amount of time you spend managing your accounts. Spending 30 minutes checking social media each day can very quickly turn into an hour. By setting aside a longer period of time to plan for the week ahead you are able to keep track of time better.
4. Utilise Twitter lists
Twitter is potentially the most time consuming of all the social media platforms. It’s really easy to lose track of time when checking DMs, mentions, Moments, all while trying to keep up to date with the latest news and trends. Twitter lists are a great tool to help you manage the constant flow of information that is available through your Twitter newsfeed.
You can create Twitter lists around specific topics, for example, social media or SEO, or alternatively you can create the list around experts from within your chosen industry. Twitter lists allow you to add anyone from Twitter meaning you can customise your list to include all relevant accounts from within the industry. Additionally, if you want to save even more time you can use lists that have been created by others. When looking through someone’s profile you can see what lists they are a member of and what lists they subscribe to, you can either use these as inspiration for your own lists or simply use them for their content.
Twitter lists are a great way to quickly generate curated content and provide a quick way to engage with relevant brands and influencers.
5. Get your customers to help
User-generated content is typically very well received on social media as customers love to see real-life examples of how other customers interact with your brand and your products. Instead of spending time taking the perfect image or finding the perfect way to describe your product it’s often far more beneficial to get your customers to do it for you, and to make things easier you can simply ask them for help. People love the chance to win something for free; run a competition where customers need to share their photos or experiences on social media for the chance to win something.
Alternatively, if you are attending or running an event, set up a specific hashtag where visitors can share their experience with others. It’s highly likely that customers will be taking photos of your products so why not make the most of these and incorporate them into your social media strategy?
Social media marketing is a job that can eat away at your time if not managed properly, however, thankfully there are loads of tools and hacks available to help streamline the process.
