Sabrina Turman
As a small business owner, you’re making many decisions and judgment calls every day: budget, inventory, personnel, marketing…the list goes on. Business owners often have the best intentions for staying active on social media, but the time they would devote to it eventually gets overwhelmed.
Given its relatively inexpensive operation, enormous opportunity for return, and a potential reach of 1.82 billion social users, the small business owner can no longer let social media activities fall off the edge of their calendars. If you’re worried about your lack of time and resources, we’ve laid out a few simple tasks that can go a long way. Here’s how to do your social with just 30 minutes per day:
Focus on growing one platform.
If you’re on numerous social media platforms, yet don’t have the time to actively update them, you’re doing more harm than good. Instead, actively maintain one social channel. Each social platform has its pros and cons, but the easiest way to decide which platform is right for you is by looking at your target demographic. For example, if your customer base consists of middle-class, 18-49 year old moms you should focus on Pinterest. If you’d like to market to a younger audience, then consider tapping into Instagram. If you’re having a hard time narrowing down a specific demographic, Facebook is a good general choice.
Now that you’ve eliminated the extra work of tending multiple platforms, take just 10 minutes out of your day to post at least once. Don’t forget to switch up the type of messaging – whether it’s industry news, business updates, new product announcements, sales/promotional material, lifestyle, etc. – you don’t want your audience to get bored!
Listen to what your customers are saying about your business.
We cannot stress enough the importance of listening to your audience. Whether the chatter is good or bad, you want to know about it and you want to respond to it. If it’s negative, you’ll want to reach out to those customers and make an attempt to resolve the situation. If it’s positive, you’ll want to thank your customers and continue to welcome feedback.
Social listening can be a somewhat overwhelming task, but you can save time with a listening tool. There are plenty of free options like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Social Mention, and many, many more. You should also set up google alerts for your business, if you have not already done so. Spending a mere 10 minutes per day sifting through your brand’s social conversation is vital to managing your brand’s online reputation.
Add value to your visuals.
If you’re not posting high-quality content on social, there’s no point in posting at all. You don’t need an expensive DSLR camera, but you should take the remainder of your social crunch time to make sure your photos and videos have an eye-catching element. The better your visuals are, the more likely they are to be shared, and the more likely your brand will be to reach and excite new customers. This is especially important for small business owners who don’t have the time to be posting multiple times each day – so make your visuals count! Use tools like PicMonkey or Canva to edit, crop, add text, etc. and you’ll definitely see a better response from your community.
There you have it – 30 minutes of speedy social! If you’re going to be taking time away from your business operations to focus on your social, these tips will put you on the right path. However, nothing beats a full-fledged social campaign.
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