According to Statista, 33% of marketers spend one to five hours on social media marketing every week. However, there are 11% who spend 30+ hours weekly on Social Media in hopes of reaping its benefits. While it is true that this form of marketing is bound to consume much of your time, there is no questioning the fact that the time spent on social media marketing is immensely rewarding and worthwhile for businesses. As long as you focus on planning a smart strategy and avoid certain traps, you can easily accomplish more in less time.
To make sure that the time you spend on promoting your brand via social media is never wasted, consider adopting the techniques below and adding them to your marketing strategy.
1) Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
It is ironic how most businesses spend so many hours each week to manage their social media marketing strategy but (more often than not) find themselves too busy to update and improve their social profiles for each network. If you want to get the most from your social media marketing efforts, your social profiles need to be up-to-date and properly optimized.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your social profiles within an hour at most.
- Add Keywords to Your Profile: By simply adding relevant keywords to your account, you can reach a wider audience. Just be strategic when adding keywords and not drop them here and there haphazardly. Work them into your Facebook and Twitter bio, interests, and just about any other category (apart from your name!).
- Fill in Your Profile Completely: Make it a rule of thumb to never ever leave fields blank on your social media profile. It is unprofessional and a sure way to tarnish your company’s image and goodwill. Make the most of your social profiles by filling in all the sections thoroughly. Do not worry; it will take you a few minutes to fill them out.
- Insert a Link to Other Social Media Profiles: Social media has become quite an integrating force today, hence, making it easier to cross promote your business. Google+, like other social networks, allows you to add as many links to social profiles as you want. This is a very quick and easy way to improve your account’s appeal with social media users.
2) Delegate and Automate
To maintain an expanded social presence, you need to dedicate a chunk of your time to social media management alone. Now this point may seem to contradict the topic at hand. However, there are two ways for you to have your cake and eat it too: you can implement social media automation tools as well as outsource some tasks. Both of these will not rob you of full control over your marketing campaign. Instead, you will have some much needed help to connect with your audience while ensuring that your time does not get wasted.
Below are a few ways you can save time through delegating and automating.
- Choose a Social Media Expert: When working out who to delegate your social media responsibilities to, it is best that you choose someone who is a social media enthusiast. None of your time saving tactics will be effective if the person you delegate to is new to social media as it will take them time to understand their way around it. On the other hand, a social media fanatic would not need a long learning curve.
- Outsource to a Professional Agency: Though a bit costly, seeking an outside digital agency’s help is the ultimate way to save your and your employees’ time. However, you should know that it will take some time for you to vet and choose the best agency. Once you have chosen the right agency to outsource to, though, you can (almost) wash your hands off social media management as you will only need to follow the updates and reports.
- Auto-Update All of Your Blog Posts: Auto-updating your blog posts to your social media accounts is another way to save time. Tools like TwitterFeed and IFFT.com help you set up auto-sharing by automatically posting the link to your latest blog post to social channels like Twitter or
- Schedule Your Posts in Advance: Business owners and marketing executives cannot be present on social media 24/7, which is one of the reasons they do not give much thought to social media marketing. Social media management tools, however, make the idea of being present on social media at all times attainable. They allow you to schedule your updates in advance, making your life much easier. You can schedule several days of posts and updates during a single sitting and set them up to publish during peak times. HootSuite and VerticalResponse are two popular platforms that make it easy for you to post ahead of time, saving your time as well as sustaining your output. Now this does not mean that you should put all of your social media posts on auto-pilot. While you can schedule certain things in advance, you still need to take out a few minutes and respond to, and interact with your audience.
3) Set up Social Media Monitoring
While using social media management tools to create and schedule content ahead of time positive affects your overall productivity and time management, they also help businesses by offering timely updates and constant surveillance. Responding to customer queries or engaging with them in real time is immensely crucial when it comes to social media marketing. Failing to do so will push your customers away from you and force you to spend more on customer acquisition and retention.
Two cost-effective and extremely easy methods to monitor your social media presence are:
- Arrange for Brand Alerts: It is virtually impossible for business owners to track their company’s social mentions manually. Even if you try, it will consume substantial amount of your time to search for multiple keywords related to your business across multiple social networks. Therefore, to save time and energy, you should use free tools like Google Alerts service or go for paid service with com in order to keep close tabs on any social media mentions. These platforms tend to shoot you an email whenever your brand (or anything related to it) is mentioned on social media. They also tend to be more thorough than manual monitoring. You can take your monitoring a step further and set social media alerts for both your brand’s name as well as your executives’ names.
- Activate Weekly Reports from Google Analytics: Examining and analyzing data is crucial to any and all marketing strategies. This is even more true for social media marketing. However, as mentioned above, it takes a lot of time to constantly check the numbers and run reports. Instead of checking your statistics every ten minutes, you should set up Google Analytics to perform analysis and send you a periodical report on a regular basis.
4) Eliminate Distractions
It is very easy to get distracted while marketing on social media. In addition to the fun posts you will come across, there are other work-related distractions that can extend the time you spend on social media. So, eliminate distractions through the following methods.
- Cut Back on Social Networks: In an effort to be over-efficient, businesses tend to create company profiles on plenty of social networking platforms. This, unfortunately, makes them lose their focus. Social media sites today are already too complex with lots of intricate features to handle. Creating accounts on more than a few networks ensures that there is a steeper learning curve. Instead of dabbling on every social media, you should focus on and limit your marketing efforts to a few social networks. Ideally, you should not have more than three social networking profiles. Consider the platforms which drive most of the traffic to your site and those where the majority of your audience is and drop networks that are not producing the required results. Keep in mind that you do not have to maintain a social presence on every social media to ensure success and growth. You are also not obligated to spend an equal time on all of your social networks. It is okay to prioritize one network over the other if the former is more productive in terms of generating user engagement and driving traffic to your site.
- Terminate Minor Email Notifications: Not devaluing the importance of email notification, but receiving too many email alerts every time you get a new follower on Twitter or a new comment on your Facebook post is not a great idea. In fact, the emails will overwhelm you and bury the most important and pressing emails in the stockpile. Therefore, you need to review the default settings of your social account and uncheck the boxes for unnecessary alerts. This will allow you to better monitor your social media activity.
- Narrow Down Your Social Analytics: There is entirely too much data to analyze and assess on social media. However, you might have noticed that often the ‘too much data’ is not nearly enough to get insights. This is because most of the data does not mean much to the overall marketing success and is simply useless. By cutting back on metrics and focusing on a few core ones, you can get the information you need to make your social media marketing a success.
5) Curate and Republish Content
Already social media is time consuming enough of your time without having to factor in the time required to craft and create quality content from scratch. Seeking the help of third party content curation service is one of the many ways you can share quality content with your audience.
- Set Up Topic Alerts: You can save a lot of time by setting up topic alerts. By setting up Google Alerts for specific topics, you get to choose content materials from a wide range of blogs and news related to your business without having to put extra time and effort.
- Create Visual Content with The Help of Tools: Infographics, videos, memes are the latest trend on social media. However, it is no easy task to create visual content for your social media, especially when you are not a professionally qualified graphic designer. What to do in such a case? Simply install visual content creation applications! There are lots of genius apps which let you create infographics, memes and all sorts of visual content in little to no time. Therefore, you get to empower your social media marketing strategy in a matter of seconds.
- Republish Content: You should know that it is completely okay to republish your content. Chances are that most of the content you shared earlier was not viewed by all of your audience. Therefore, you should repost the best of your content multiple times a day in order to ensure that you reached all of your audience. This is the simplest and easiest way to engage your followers without having to put in extra time to create fresh content.
6) Cross Promote Your Brand
Cross promoting your brand across multiple social networks is a brilliant way to make the most of your social media marketing in a limited time. The idea is to strengthen your audience base and increase the number of potential leads by targeting them on multiple social sites while not having to commit time to each of your social accounts individually.
One of the most effective methods to cross promote your brand is to integrate your social accounts. Social media management tools like Buffer, HootSuite and TweetDeck allow you to integrate your social media accounts and manage them through a single dashboard. Instead of visiting each of your social media account separately, these applications automatically share/post your updates across all networks from a single login location.
Social media promises to be an important online marketing tool for businesses for a long time to come. However, depending on what choice you make, social media can be a time waster, a lead generator or even a sales funnel. If you wish to utilize social media for the latter two purposes, you need to get rid of time wasting social media habits immediately and start employing the tactics mentioned in this blog post to save plenty of time and still reap maximum benefits.
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