Social media marketing forms a large part of business marketing efforts and can take up plenty of time. Small businesses, in particular, often battle to keep up with creating content and engaging on social media sites.
Are there ways in which you can devote less time to social media marketing and more to other aspects of your business? Here are some tips to help you gain more time.
- Curate content
If you share content written by someone else, you can save time. As long as you give credit to the author, you don’t have to worry that you’re plagiarizing. It is actually a good way to build up a relationship with others in your industry and to increase the amount of information you’re sharing with your audience.
Best practice suggests that you should be sharing posts on Facebook once or twice a day and tweeting between five and nine times a day.
Keeping to a schedule like this is very difficult, if not impossible, unless you’re curating content. This means you don’t always have to create that content yourself. You can use an app like Feedly for curating content.
- Use management and automation tools
Social media management tools provide a way to save time. There are tools that allow you to engage with all your social media accounts from one central location. You can schedule for all your different social media accounts at one go.
If you’re looking for time-saving Instagram automation tools, Kicksta is one that helps you to build up a real Instagram following. A decent following on Instagram gives you credibility and offers you an effective way to get new eyes on your business.
SproutSocial and MarketMeSuite are just two of these tools. You can just log in and respond quickly to comments, complaints, messages or inquiries instead of logging on to all your different social media accounts.
Tailwind is an app that will save you time when posting to Pinterest and Instagram. You can post at the best times for engagement and get actionable analytics.
When scheduling your social media content and growing your following becomes less time-consuming, you can use the extra time to engage with others when they start interacting with your content.
- Use your mobile phone
You don’t have to be sitting at your computer to create social media content. You can even pull out your phone and schedule content while sitting drinking your early morning coffee in a café.
Use an app like Pocket to store content you find online until you are ready to share it. You could also use your smartphone to take photos of your employees or other interesting business photos throughout the day and upload a collage as a new piece of social content.
- Stockpile content
Trying to find new content and images can be extremely time-consuming. It makes sense to open a file and start stockpiling content. File photographs, newspaper articles, videos and relevant links.
A good site to find free images is Pixabay. You won’t ever run out of ideas if you file content you can use whenever you come across it.
- Set up Google alerts
Save time trawling the internet for relevant updates. Setting Google alerts for topics or people relevant to your industry keeps you on top of what’s happening and provides fodder for new content.
With practice, creating content for social media becomes second nature. The more you curate content, schedule posts and engage with comments, the faster you’ll find yourself getting it done and the more success you will have.