By Rick Riddle
Social media seems to be another name for “having a lot on your plate.” There are so many networks to follow, and the number of daily posts is so high that is impossible to keep up with it. But, of course, posting and monitoring your social media isn’t the only task that you have, so it is crucial that you find methods to improve your performance here. Thankfully, there some ways to save time on your social media efforts, such as these that you will see below.
Define Your Priorities
As it was said above, there is just too much going on social media to make possible to any person (or even to an entire team) to follow and interact with everything. So you will have to make some hard decisions and prioritize some things here. You will need to reflect on your goals and your target audience so to decide with which social media networks you will be working.
You will also need to think how often it is ideal to post, which kind of topics you will cover, and which tools you will need. And then you will have to go through a reality check and decide what you are capable of doing considering the resources you have at your disposal and the fact that the day only has 24 hours regardless. It will take a lot of pressure from you when you realize that there is a limit on what you can do.
Plan Your Posts in Advance
Now that you have a general idea of what you should and can do, it is time for you to plan your posts. This is where many people fail, including digital marketers. Many of us think that planning posts is a waste of time – resource that you don’t have much to spare. But the truth is that the hours that you spend planning your posts always pay off. It will be your guide so you won’t spend time thinking about what to write – which can be very hard when you are feeling overwhelmed or not that inspired.
Plus, you will avoid the usual distraction caused by doing online research: you start looking for one piece of information and then you keep clicking on one link after the other for hours. So create a spreadsheet with the posts that you want to publish, the topics that they will cover, and all data and visual resources that you might need.
Use Online Tools to Create and Publish Your Posts
Now you will take advantage of the technology so to save you as much time as possible. You will check the online tools and services available and choose those more capable of creating and publishing your posts.
And here is a selection of the best ones available in the market at the moment:
- Hootsuite: one of the most powerful tools when it comes to social media, HootSuite will help you to create, schedule, and publish your social media posts in no time. It also comes with plenty of courses and tips to help you, plus advanced analytics reports.
- Buffer: The most famous competitor of Hootsuite, Buffer do everything that the other one does, so it is a matter of choice – you will find people fiercely defending each one of them, so you should test both and make your own
- Sprout Social: if you are working with a team, you might find Sprout Social a much better tool for you. It comes with more intuitive and better-organized collaboration and sharing features, plus a more straightforward display of relevant data.
Use Monitoring Tools
Your posts are out there, but now you got the problem of how to monitor them. You will want to know how they are performing if people are liking, sharing, and commenting on it. But you might not have the time or the manpower to make it happen. Here again, technology comes to save the day. There are several online tools that will help you to keep track of what is being said what your product or company with very little effort, such as these below:
- Google Alerts: which can send you a daily or weekly list of links where your chosen keyword has been mentioned.
- Social Mention: which gives you real-time updates about the mentions of your chosen topic on social media.
- Topsy: another real-time search engine that will provide you with the top conversations about anything you want, plus analytics.
It is OK to feel overwhelmed when you have to deal with social media marketing. There is a lot to do and not time enough, and it doesn’t have anything to do with your level of expertise or skill set. But if you chose the correct tools, do a bit of planning, and think before doing anything, you will see that you will be able to get things nicely done and save time while doing it.
