Managing social media is essential to the successful running of your business, but sometimes it takes forever to manage all those accounts! You have to create a great post for Facebook and then share it on Twitter. Once you do that, you have to log onto Pinterest to share it and make sure your Instagram is up to date. Don’t forget Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube…you get the idea. It’s a monumental list and it can be extremely overwhelming.
That, on top of running the business and you have no time for anything else, let alone sleep. You have to find a way to make the most use out of your time because if you let it, social media will take over your life.
That’s not a good life for anyone, so here are a few tips to help you get a little bit of your life back while still building your business.
Get an Automation Tool
There are plenty of automation tools on the market and the base version is usually free. The most recognized of them is Buffer, which will allow you to schedule and manage your social media posts all in one place. That means you can update Facebook and push it out on Twitter and Pinterest all in one post. A paid for version of Buffer will allow you to have multiple users, so it’s not just you working on the social media accounts, but your whole team. Buffer also has apps for the iOS and Android, which makes it that much easier to post on the go.
Other multi-post tools include SproutSocial, HootSuite, and BuzzSumo.
Know the Rules for Posting
Every social media site has its own unspoken rules for when and how you post. Knowing these rules will make scheduling posts easier and it will make sure you’re not wasting your time with posts that don’t hit home. Or even worse, posts that annoy your followers.
For example, HubSpot will tell you that you should post on Facebook no more than once a day if you have less than 10,000 followers. After that, the clicks start to fall off. If you have more than 10,000 followers, you can post more often than once a day. Meanwhile, Social Bakers will tell you that tweeting out to your customers should happen 3–5 times per day.
By knowing those unspoken posting rules, you’re going to make sure that all of your posts are beneficial to your brand. More than that, it’s also going to prevent you from doing more work than you need to.
Repurpose
One of the hardest things about managing a social media account is coming up with new and unique posts all of the time. Sometimes, that can be the most time consuming problem with social media.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that your content needs to be original on each platform. The way that you deliver that content may need to be altered to meet the specific viewership on a platform, but the actual message can still be the same. For example, a Facebook post teaching your followers about how unclog a sink may be inlaid with video. That won’t work on Pinterest, but a really cool infographic would. Snap a photo of you holding up a particularly ugly hairball after you unclog the sink and you have yourself a quality, albeit disgusting, Instagram post.
The point is, come up with one concept and then shape that concept to fit each platform. You do the work of creating one concept, but have the ability of using it in multiple posts. Those posts don’t have to happen on the same day; they can happen months apart and still be quality social media content.
Be SMART
This idea is courtesy of Sprout Social which suggests that you set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals. SMART.
Specific in that your goal is catered to a specific media channel (i.e. Instagram) and you have a metric that you want to meet.
Measurable in that you’re able to track that metric. In other words, you can’t say I want people to remember my name because there’s no way to track something like that. You can say I want 20 unique views of a particular post because it’s possible to track a statistic like that.
Achievable in that you can accomplish the goal. You cannot say you want to be a global brand by the end of the year when you’re just starting out. Start small and work your way up.
Relevant in that the goal is catered to your particular need. If you set a goal that does nothing to help your business, what’s the point?
Time-bound in that there’s a deadline. If you say that you want to double your page likes but you don’t put a time limit on that goal, then there’s no real urgency to meet that goal.
I hope that at least one of these ideas helps you alleviate some of the pressure you feel to compete on social media. Good luck!
Written by Erika Towne