Thomas Griffin December 11, 2020 Creating unique, interesting, and engaging social media content is one of the most grueling marketing tasks there is. Not only that, but you also have to post content regularly without which it isn’t possible to gain any traction on social media. These are just some of the reasons why it’s important for some businesses to hire full-time social media managers. Many large businesses have entire teams dedicated to handling social networking content.
Let’s look at some time management tips that will make it easier for small businesses to effectively manage their social media. With these suggestions, you should be able to save time and drive your marketing strategies to meet your goals.
Create an editorial calendar
Different marketing experts suggest different timings and frequencies for posting content on social media. Some say that you need to post multiple times a day to target audience members in different timezones while others say that doing so can irk your followers.
In any case, you’re expected to create regular content. Even uploading a new video every week could be considered slow when there are content farms uploading videos daily. Not only that, but many social media algorithms seem to reward and users who frequently update their feeds with new posts.
To compete with such content creators, you need to create content regularly and manage your time well enough so that you’re trying to get something together at the last minute. This is where an editorial or content calendar becomes crucial to your success.
Here the many ways a calendar will help you manage time and resources:
- You can track what content you’ve made and when they go live.
- It will help you track who is assigned to a piece of content and whether they’re on track with making and sharing it
- A calendar will enable you to account for holidays, promotions, and other events. You can plan your posts so that they build momentum for important marketing events and holidays.
- When you build a content calendar, you’ll have a broader perspective of your content which will enable you to keep the message and tone of your posts cohesive
Building a content calendar can be as simple as setting up an excel sheet with dates and posts for the future. You can also work with sophisticated tools that are developed especially to support special media content creation. We’ll explore the kind of tools you should work with to manage your time more effectively.
Plan your content for at least two weeks in advance. For major events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll want to start earlier and be prepared with a strategy and all the design elements you’ll need for a successful campaign.
Use social media management tools
The biggest time-saving technique you can implement is to use social media management tools. Today, there are several tools available that are free and paid – allowing you to manage your content on multiple social networking sites at once.
When choosing a management tool, you should take the following into consideration:
- Social media integrations: Many social media management platforms connect to only a select number of social networks. You need to check that the platform you pick connects with networks that are important for your business.
- Network-specific features: Some management tools are better for specific platforms. Some tools work better with LinkedIn while others offer only basic functionalities. It’s important to take a trial or reach out to customer support to make sure that you have all the features you need for your social network of choice
- Scheduling: Many management tools will allow you to schedule a fixed number of posts for free, beyond which you’ll need to take on a premium membership. Look at their scheduling features and check whether it works for you.
- Social listening: One way to save time is to use social listening tools so that posts around a specific topic automatically populate into a feed. Look for tools that pick up brand mentions, hashtags, industry topics, and related information that you can leverage.
- Analytics and reporting: Understanding how people respond to your content, who they are, and which posts you should scale up are critical data points for your business. Make a study of how a management tool presents reports across multiple platforms and the kind of insights they provide.
- Pricing: Another important consideration is your budget and whether you can justify taking up a premium subscription management tool. A higher product tier means more functionalities but you need to justify the cost by using the tool regularly and well.
You can use multiple social media management tools so that you get the best features from each one. This does lead to dealing with too many tools but with trial and error, you should find a social media management tool that works well for you.
Track performance with data
Ultimately, you can’t do well on every social media platform unless you have a large team and enough resources to manage this. It’s smarter to identify the best social network where you have the most followers, the most engagement, and the highest conversion rate.
For B2C brands, LinkedIn may not be the best platform for finding customers. So, it makes sense to have a presence there but to focus your content creation efforts and engagement on places like Instagram or Facebook.
Likewise, if you run a B2B company, it is unlikely that Pinterest will serve you in finding industrial clients. You can save a great deal of time and resources if you start to track the performance of your content on each platform. With data in hand, you’ll be in a position to figure out which platform to focus on and to simply maintain a presence on the other networks.
Work with community volunteers
You don’t have to manage your social media on your own or with your employees only. If you have large followership and find it difficult to respond to all of them or simply need more help, consider asking volunteers and customers to help.
This is especially useful for Facebook where you can assign multiple moderators. Look for customers and enthusiasts in your industry or arena and work with them to act as guides and moderators on social media.
You can give them perks such as discounts on products, remuneration, and other ways to appreciate the work they do. In this way, you’ll have people who understand your business helping you manage your social media through part-time work. This can be a powerful way to save your own time and resources
Conclusion
Social media management is a time-consuming but essential marketing activity. However, it is not one that should fully consume your time or you’ll miss out on leveraging other opportunities available to you. With the ideas presented here, you’ll have a better hold of your social media activities and also manage other marketing tasks.
Start taking a step at a time and you should see good results on social media without getting overwhelmed.
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