As an entrepreneur or small business owner with a million things to worry about, social media might seem intimidating.
“Post consistently,” the experts say. “Respond to every comment. Utilize visual media.”
Sure, you should implement best practices when you can. But the reality is that you are focused on running a business, and social media may not always be your number one priority.
Fortunately, there are ways you can make your social media strategy manageable, and you’ll increase its effectiveness in the process. It’s possible to garner brand awareness online without sacrificing your sanity.
Here are seven actionable tips to get you started.
Focus on One or Two Platforms Where You Can Best Reach Your Target Audience
Unless you are running a big business and have a whole department dedicated to social media, you likely don’t have the time or resources to invest in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, and YouTube all at once.
You need to be strategic about which platforms you spend time on. Instead of spreading yourself too thin, you just need to be where your audience is.
Here Are Some Things to Consider:
- Which platforms bring in the most conversions?
- Which platforms do you have the most followers on?
- Which platforms do you have the highest engagement on?
Once you’ve determined your top one or two networks, focus 80 percent of your strategy on the ones you chose. You will form more meaningful connections with your followers when you stop overextending your efforts across too many platforms.
Check Your Analytics, But Don’t Obsess Over Them
Look at your analytics once per week to see what’s working and what’s not. You don’t need to check them every day. In fact, it might be detrimental to look at your analytics daily, especially if you feel discouraged when you don’t see results.
Understand that most social media strategies take time to yield results. If you’re freaking out because you implemented new tactics yesterday and haven’t seen an increase in followers or engagement, you simply aren’t giving the strategy enough time to work.
So, relax and leave the numbers alone. After a week, you can take a look, analyze your data, and adjust your strategy as needed.
Find Ways to Repurpose Your Existing Content
If you can use the same piece of content multiple times, you will save yourself a whole lot of time. The key is to create evergreen content that can you can repurpose whenever you want. Seasonal content is great because it’s timely, but you can only post it during its intended time of year.
Examples of Ways You Can Re-use Your Content:
- Repost your most popular blogs, and see if there’s anything you can add or improve upon to provide more value.
- Create a round-up or “best of” style post to showcase your best work.
- Create a “Transformation Tuesday” or “Throwback Thursday” post to show how much your business has grown.
- Take memorable quotes from your blogs and put them on images to share on social media.
- Turn your blog posts into podcasts or YouTube videos.
Batch Your Social Media Tasks
Batching is a productivity hack where you group similar tasks together and complete them all at once. It eliminates distractions and tightens your focus. When you multitask, your brain has to switch back and forth between two or more tasks. Batching speeds up your workflow and helps you get more done.
Create Different Categories of Tasks:
- Brainstorming
- Planning
- Image creation
- Video editing
- Writing
- Scheduling
- Engagement
Complete all the tasks within one category before moving to the next one. For example, you could plan all your social media posts for the month at once.
If you really want to improve your productivity, set a timer. By allocating a specific time limit to each category, you’ll feel more motivated to finish the work.
The next time you have social media tasks to complete, try batching them. You’ll be shocked at how quickly you can get them done!
Use Scheduling Tools
If you aren’t scheduling your social media posts, you’re wasting a lot of time.
It’s much easier to post consistently and maintain an effective strategy when you schedule your content in advance. You could schedule all your social media content for the month in a single day, and then you won’t have to worry about it again for weeks.
Especially when the holidays roll around, you don’t want to be stuck worrying about what to post. Just plan ahead and save yourself the stress!
Hootsuite and Buffer are two popular social media scheduling tools, but there are tons out there. The tool you should use depends on your company’s needs and which platforms you are active on.
Consider Outsourcing Some Tasks
If you simply can’t do it all yourself, there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing—but you must do it strategically.
Engagement and customer service are two tasks that you can easily hire someone else to do. If you struggle with being present on social media every day, you’ll take a huge weight off your shoulders by outsourcing your engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
You should be more careful about outsourcing the content creation side of social media. You don’t want to stray too far from your existing brand persona. When you bring someone else in to create images and captions for your social media content, you should make sure they fully understand how you want to appear online.
How to Successfully Hire Someone to Handle Your Social Media Tasks:
- Choose a trustworthy agency or social media specialist with positive customer testimonials.
- Make sure your social media specialist knows the important details about your business, including your overall brand voice.
- Monitor the social media specialist’s work.
- Have weekly or monthly check-ins with your social media specialist to provide guidance.
Before you hand over your passwords, you want to make sure you’re working with someone reputable. After all, your whole online presence is at stake!
Don’t Obsess
At the end of the day, your business isn’t on social media to appear perfect. Social media is meant to humanize your brand and help you connect with your customers on a personal level.
Stop worrying so much about making everything perfect, and simply focus on forming meaningful relationships with your target audience. In the social media game, a little effort can go a long way.
What other strategies have helped you make your social media more manageable? Let us know in the comments below!
smartphone work – DepositPhotos
