Failing to plan your social media marketing activities efficiently will result in a lot of time wasted. If you are a social media manager, the task of coming up with ideas and then curating and creating posts for your social media marketing plan is already a time consuming activity. But if you have multiple businesses that need help with their social media strategy, these tasks are a huge time drain that could take up the better part of your day.
You can optimise your time and resources by focusing your efforts towards social media activities that will give you the best results. You can do this by following 5 tips for social media marketing from seasoned social media managers. Here are some of the best social media marketing productivity hacks, along with the best social media management tools to use, to take your productivity to the next level.
Social media marketing productivity tips and tools:
1.Utilise scheduling tools
Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Edgar are great resources to help you schedule multiple posts across multiple social platforms. These intuitive scheduler tools can help you map out your posts from one dashboard. Imagine being able to create a schedule of a months worth of posts throughout all your social platforms using just one tool.
Facebook joined the ranks of having content scheduler features with a new feature called Creator Studio. This lets you “post, manage, monetize and measure content across all your Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts.” Twitter also has a similar feature called Scheduled Tweets that lets you directly schedule our posts in twitter.
2. Recycle your content
As long as the content is relevant and on topic, don’t let an otherwise great post go to waste! Repurpose your old content by sharing your post again. If your posts are engaging and always relevant, they can be evergreen. Meaning, you can reuse the content again and again. You can even use the same content but converted into a different format. A blog post can be broken into chunks and turned into captions for image posts or even an infographic. Use Canva or Venngage for creating beautiful posts and infographics.
3. Smart automation tools
Life is made easier with smart automation tools that do the heavy lifting for most of the repetitive and/or time consuming social media tasks. There are automation tools that have always been a favorite of tech savvy entrepreneurs. One of these is the automation tool called IFTTT (If This Then That). This is a free web-based service that automates all your internet-connected things.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell: you can create a workflow by stringing together a set of commands that trigger the next sequence of actions (called applets), thus the title “if this, then that”. For example, IF you get a message on Twitter, THEN your lead will receive a personalised message. Command sequences or applets can be strung together to form a workflow.
4. Tracking content inspiration
Every social media manager’s challenge is to keep producing fresh and engaging content. Tracking down sources can take up a huge chunk of time. You can use curation tools such as Storify and Curata to track down relevant content that can inspire your own social media strategy.
5. Start measuring your efforts
In order for you to create a viable framework for your social media marketing plan, you must be able to measure your key performance indicators (KPI’s) so that you can replicate the activities that are giving you the best value. To do this, you can use analytics tools that can track your performance in key areas and show your growth and areas for improvement. Some tools that you can experiment with are Sprout Social and Google Analytics.
Follow these social media marketing hacks to help you work smarter, not harder and get more work done in less time!